He is the giver of increase, δῶτορ ἐάων. Od. viii. 335. Il. xiv. 490.
He is the most sociable of deities, Il. xxiv. 334. σοὶ γάρ τε μάλιστά γε φίλτατόν ἐστιν ἀνδρὶ ἑταίρισσαι.
The extraction of Mercury stands somewhat obscurely in Homer: his mother Maias is but once mentioned, and then without any clue. But, in the ancient hymn to Mercury, she is declared to be the daughter of Atlas: and if this be so, we shall be justified in considering him as the child of a Phœnician tradition[440]. This is also clear on Homeric grounds. Although Homer does not expressly connect him with Atlas, he makes Calypso, the daughter of that personage, address him as αἰδοῖός τε φίλος τε. These expressions are usually applied by him where there is some special relation of consanguinity, affinity, or guestship: as between Jupiter and his adopted child[441] and particular friend Thetis. It is therefore probable that Homer took Mercury’s mother Maias to be, as the after-tradition made her, the sister of Calypso, and the daughter of Atlas. All the other Homeric signs of him are in complete harmony with this hypothesis of a Phœnician origin for Mercury.
We thus understand how he becomes the general agent for the gods: because the Phœnicians supplied the first and principal means of communication between the several nations in the heroic age: they were the men-of-business for the world[442].
It thus becomes plain, again, how he can with propriety be called the giver of comforts or blessings; because the basis of commerce is this, that each person engaged in it parts with something which he does not want, and receives what he does want in return.
The apparent anomaly, which makes the god of increase also the god of thievery, is thus explained: because, from its nature, commerce is ever apt to degenerate partially into fraud; and because, in days of the strong hand, force as well as intelligence would often make it easy for the maritime merchants to change their vocation, for the occasion, into that of plunder[443].
His proper office in regard to the ἔργα of men seems not to be industry, nor skill in production or manufacture; but handiness and tidiness in the performance of services. He, says Ulysses, gives to the ἔργα, which may mean both the deeds and the industrial productions of men, their χάρις and κῦδος, their grace and credit or popularity[444].
Mercury the god of increase.
This idea of increase forms the common or central element of the various attributes assigned to Mercury. It takes two principal forms, one that of increase in material goods, the other that of the propagation of the race. This latter, which was elsewhere grossly exhibited, is veiled by Homer with his almost unfailing sense of delicacy, and may not, indeed, have been fully developed in his time. It is perhaps however traceable in two passages of the poems: first, that of the Sixteenth Iliad, where we are told that he corrupted the virgin Polymele[445], though she belonged to the train of Diana. The other is in the episode of Venus and Mars, where Apollo selects him as the deity to whom to put the question, whether he would like to take the place of the adulterer, and he replies in the affirmative[446]. Each of these incidents seems to appertain to something distinctive in his character.
That character, again, imports the extended intercourse with mankind, and the knowledge of the world, which causes him to be chosen, in the Twenty-Fourth Iliad, for the difficult office of conducting Priam to the abode of Ulysses. Moreover, the great balance of material benefit which commerce brings gives him, its patron, as a general rule, a genial and philanthropic aspect. In Homer we have nowhere any sign of his vengeance, anger, or severity. He neither punishes, hates, nor is incensed with any one. A passionless and prudent deity, he not only declines actual fighting with Latona, as she is a wife of Jupiter, but spontaneously gives her leave to boast among the gods that she has engaged and worsted him.