Hermes started as a guide of the dead and ended as god of commerce
Hermes is remembered as the winged messenger of Olympus, patron of travellers, merchants and thieves. His oldest job was darker: leading souls along the road to the underworld. From that single road his portfolio spread to all roads, then boundaries, trade and storytelling, which is why the Roman version, Mercury, lent his name to merchandise.
Greek myth usually makes Hermes the son of Zeus and Maia, one of the Pleiades, and casts him as the herald of the gods and a divine trickster, best known from the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. Winged sandals let him cross freely between mortal and divine worlds. His symbols range from the rooster and tortoise to the number four, but the chief one is the caduceus, a winged staff twined with two snakes.
Where he came from is contested. His name appears in Mycenaean Greek, written in Linear B, and was long linked to herma, a heap of stones or cairn, though that derivation is disputed and R. S. P. Beekes proposed a Pre-Greek origin instead. A theory with considerable support ties him to Pan and to a proposed Indo-European pastoral god of boundary markers; on this view 'Hermes' began as an epithet that outgrew the original name, and later myths made Pan his son. Others have looked to Egypt, where Herodotus first equated him with Thoth, though Plato thought the two gods unlike.
His appearance changed with Greek art. Archaic images show a mature, bearded traveller or shepherd, a look preserved on the Hermai, the stone pillars used as boundary, roadside and grave markers. By the Classical and Hellenistic eras he had become a beardless young athlete; Praxiteles carved him cradling the infant Dionysus.
The caduceus has a long afterlife. Two snakes coiled round a staff also marked the Mesopotamian god Ningishzida, another go-between for humans and gods, and the design is documented among the Babylonians from about 3500 BC. It is often confused today with the Rod of Asclepius, which carries a single snake and serves most Western doctors as their emblem. The caduceus, fittingly for Hermes, now stands for commerce.
Source: Hermes
