There is one other point connected with him, which, tending to mark that he had somewhat recently become known to the Greeks, agrees with other indications of his introduction from beyond sea. He figures, indeed, in legends as old as Hercules and Pelops[451]; and we do not receive any account of his infancy, as we do of the infancy of Dionysus and of Vulcan. But we may observe that, whenever he assumes human form, it is the form of one scarcely emerging from boyhood. In the last Iliad, he is a πρῶτον ὑπηνήτης, in the fairest flower of youth[452]. And in the Tenth Odyssey, where he makes his second and only other appearance to a mortal, the same line is repeated in order to describe his appearance, as if it were an established formula for himself, and not merely adapted to a particular occasion. Indeed it may reasonably be questioned, whether such adaptation exists at all. A very young person was not the most appropriate conductor for Priam, on such an errand as that which he had undertaken: nor the best instructor in the mode of coping with the formidable Circe. Therefore, without laying too much stress upon the point, the meaning of the youthful appearance seems to be, that he was young in the Greek Olympus.
There is yet another sign by which I think we may identify Mercury as, in the estimation of Homer, a deity known to be of foreign introduction. The list given by Jupiter in the Fourteenth Iliad of his intrigues, includes no reference to Maias, the mother of Mercury, or to Diana the mother of Venus. Yet it is a large and elaborately constructed list, ending with Juno herself: and the question arises, on what principle was it constructed? I think the answer must be that, as it was addressed to Juno, the most Hellenic of all the Olympian deities, with whom he wished to be on good terms at the moment, so also it was intended, if not to give a full account of his Greek intrigues, yet at any rate that no tradition should appear in it, except such as Homer considered to be either native, or fully naturalized. It contains no reference, for example, to the mother of Sarpedon, the mother of Dardanus, the mother of Amphion and Zethus, the mother of Tantalus, (whom we have however only presumptions for reckoning as by Homeric tradition a son of Jupiter,) or even the mother of Æolus; whom it is possible that Homer may have regarded as Hellic, rather than properly Greek, though the father of illustrious Greek houses. If this be the rule, under which the Poet has framed the list, then the exclusion of Maias and her son remarkably coincides with the other evidence that tends to define his position as a deity of known and remembered foreign origin.
His Olympian office and that of Iris.
It may be convenient to notice in this place the statement which is commonly made, that Iris is the messenger of the gods in the Iliad, but that Mercury, except only in the Twenty-fourth Book of that Poem, is confined in this capacity to the Odyssey: a statement, on which has been founded a standing popular argument against the unity of authorship in the two poems, and also against the genuineness of the Twenty-fourth Iliad itself.
The statement, however, appears to rest upon a pure misapprehension; for it assumes the identity of the character of Iris and Mercury respectively as messengers. Whereas there is really a difference, corresponding with the difference in dignity between the two deities: and Homer is in regard to them perfectly consistent with himself.
Mercury is sometimes a messenger in the proper sense, and sometimes an agent, or an agent and messenger combined. It is not true that, so far as the Iliad is concerned, he only appears in the last Book in one of these capacities. For in the Second Book[453] we find, that he carried the Pelopid sceptre from Jupiter to Pelops: which may mean either simply, that he was the bearer of it, or that by a commission he assisted Pelops in acquiring, or rather in founding, the Achæan throne in the Peloponnesus. In the Twenty-fourth Iliad, Mercury is not really a messenger at all[454]; but he is an agent, intrusted by Jupiter on the ground of special fitness with the despatch of a delicate and important business, the bringing Priam in safety to the presence of Achilles, and afterwards the withdrawing him securely from a position of the utmost danger. This is an office like that undertaken by Minerva in the Fourth Book, when, as she was commissioned to bring about a breach of the Pact by the Trojans, she repaired to Pandarus for the purpose. But the function of Iris is simply to carry messages, and chiefly from one deity to another; she is not only ἄγγελος, but μετάγγελος[455]; she is not intrusted in any case with the conduct of transactions among men, or responsible for their issue, although in the Fifteenth Book she spontaneously advises the god Neptune in the sense of the message she has brought. It is not for Jupiter only that she acts: she also conveys a message, and a clandestine one, for Juno[456]. Nay, on one occasion, without any divine charge, hearing the prayer of Achilles to two of the Winds, she spontaneously carries it to the palace, where they were all feasting together[457].
Only in the Odyssey do we find Mercury unquestionably and simply discharging the duty of a messenger; and this on two occasions: the first, when he brought to Ægisthus the warning that his crimes, if committed, would be followed by retribution from the hand of Orestes; the second, when he communicated to Calypso the command to release Ulysses.
But there is in reality no discrepancy whatever between the two poems: inasmuch as Mercury and Iris, though both messengers, act in different characters. Iris is in one case the spontaneous messenger, who carries a hero’s wish to subordinate deities; but she uniformly has this mark, that she never rises higher than to be the personal messenger of Jupiter. On the other hand, Mercury in the Odyssey is the official messenger, not of Jupiter individually, but in both cases of the Assembly of the gods: and the care, with which the distinction seems to be drawn, is very remarkable. It is true, the message to Calypso is called Ζηνὸς ἀγγελίη: but it became the message of Jupiter, because it was a proposal made by Minerva in the Olympian Assembly, and made on the part of all in the plural number, which was then duly adopted by Jupiter as the executive head of the body[458]:
Ἑρμείαν μὲν ἔπειτα, διάκτορον Ἀργειφόντην,
νῆσον ἐς Ὠγυγίην ὀτρύνομεν.