Mercury: The Swift Messenger of the Roman Gods

Mercury was the Roman messenger of the gods. He was also the patron of merchants and travellers, the protector of thieves and tricksters, and the guide who led the souls of the dead down to the underworld. The planet nearest the Sun carries his name, and so does Wednesday in French, Spanish and Italian.

Who Was Mercury?

Mercury was a god of movement and exchange. Messages from the gods to mortals, goods passing from seller to buyer, travellers on the road and souls crossing from the living to the dead all came under his care.

He served as messenger to his father, Jupiter, king of the gods. When Jupiter needed something said or delivered in a hurry, he sent Mercury.

The Romans also knew him as a magician and a trickster: clever, persuasive and not always honest. He protected honest merchants and crafty thieves alike, since both trades depend on quick thinking and a good eye for an opportunity.

Where Does the Name Come From?

The name Mercurius is usually linked to the Latin words merx, “merchandise”, and mercari, “to trade”. Some scholars think the Romans borrowed the name from the Etruscans, their powerful neighbours to the north, and that these Latin words shaped it later. English keeps the same roots in “merchant”, “commerce” and “market”.

Either way, the Romans heard trade in his name, and trade was his first job. Rome did business along roads and sea routes that crossed the Mediterranean, and Mercury was the god who looked after that commerce.

Mercury’s Family and Birth

Mercury was the son of Jupiter and Maia. In the Greek tradition that the Romans borrowed, Maia was one of the Pleiades, the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas, who later became a cluster of stars in the night sky. You can see the Pleiades on a clear winter evening, a small, misty group sometimes called the Seven Sisters.

Through his father, Mercury descended from the king of the gods. Through his mother he descended from the Titans, the older generation of divine beings who ruled before Jupiter came to power. The Romans also had an older goddess of their own called Maia, linked with the earth and growth, and over time the two figures blended together. Many people connect the month of May with her, although the Roman poet Ovid admitted there were several competing explanations for the month’s name.

Mercury and Hermes

Mercury is the Roman counterpart of the Greek god Hermes. As the Romans came into contact with Greek culture, particularly through the Greek colonies of southern Italy, they began to match their own gods with Greek ones. They paired Jupiter with Zeus, Juno with Hera, Minerva with Athena, and Mercury with Hermes. Historians call this kind of matching interpretatio romana, “the Roman interpretation”. The phrase comes from the historian Tacitus, who used it for the way Romans identified the gods of foreign peoples with their own.

Over time, many of the stories first told about Hermes became attached to Mercury, so most of Mercury’s myths come from Greek sources.

Mercury still had a Roman character of his own. He had his own temple in Rome, his own festival and close ties to the city’s merchants.

The Trickster and His Rivalry with Apollo

The best-known story about Mercury comes from a Greek poem, the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, and the Romans knew it well.

On the day he was born, the infant god climbed out of his cradle, slipped away from his mother’s cave and wandered to the meadows where his half-brother Apollo kept a herd of sacred cattle. He stole fifty of them.

To hide his tracks, he drove the cattle backwards so their hoof prints pointed the wrong way, and he made himself shoes out of twigs and leaves to disguise his own footprints. Then he crept home, climbed back into his cradle and pretended to be asleep.

Apollo tracked the thief down and dragged him before Jupiter. The newborn denied everything with such charm that Jupiter burst out laughing.

Earlier that day, Mercury had found a tortoise and made the first lyre from its shell and some strings. He played it for Apollo, and the music enchanted the older god. Mercury gave him the lyre as a peace offering, and Apollo forgave the theft. In some versions, Apollo gave Mercury a golden wand in return, the forerunner of his famous staff. The two gods quarrelled again in later stories, but they ended as friends.

The Conductor of Souls

Mercury was also known as the “Conductor of Souls”. He guided the spirits of the dead from the land of the living down into the underworld. The Greek word for this role is psychopompos, “guide of souls”, and historians still use it.

The task suited a god of crossings and boundaries. Mercury was one of the few gods who could travel between the upper world, the earth and the underworld and return again. The Romans imagined him taking each soul by the hand and showing it the way.

Mercury in Roman Literature

Mercury appears in several of the major works of Latin literature.

In Virgil’s Aeneid: In Book Four, the hero Aeneas, destined to found the Roman people, has lingered in Carthage with Queen Dido, the two of them in love. Jupiter sends Mercury down to remind Aeneas of his duty. Mercury straps on his winged sandals, takes up his wand and flies down with a stern message: leave Carthage and sail for Italy. Aeneas obeys, with tragic consequences for Dido.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Argus, a giant with a hundred eyes, guarded the maiden Io on Juno’s orders. Jupiter sent Mercury to free her. Disguised as a shepherd, Mercury played his pipes and told long stories until all hundred eyes had closed in sleep, then killed him. Juno placed Argus’s eyes in the tail of her favourite bird, the peacock.

Ovid also tells of Baucis and Philemon, a poor, elderly couple who welcomed two disguised travellers into their home. The travellers were Jupiter and Mercury, testing the hospitality of mortals. The couple shared everything they had, and the gods rewarded them.

In Ovid’s Fasti: Ovid’s poem about the Roman calendar tells a darker story. A talkative nymph named Lara told Juno about Jupiter’s pursuit of another nymph, Juturna. Jupiter cut out Lara’s tongue in fury and ordered Mercury to escort her down to the underworld. On the way Mercury forced himself on her, and she later bore twin sons. They became the Lares Compitales, the guardian spirits of the crossroads who watched over the neighbourhoods of Rome.

How Was Mercury Depicted?

Artists gave Mercury a set of attributes that make him easy to recognise in a museum.

The winged hat (petasus): Mercury wears a broad-brimmed traveller’s hat, the kind people on the road used to keep off sun and rain. His usually has a pair of small wings.

The winged sandals (talaria): His traveller’s sandals also have wings, which let him fly at great speed between heaven and earth.

The caduceus: His wand or staff has two snakes coiled around it and a pair of wings at the top. It marked him as a herald and peacemaker. Heralds in the ancient world carried staffs as a sign that nobody should harm them, much like a flag of truce.

The purse: As god of trade and profit, Mercury often holds a money bag, an attribute especially popular in Roman art.

Some artists also showed him with a rooster (heralding the new day), a ram or goat (for his role as a protector of herds), or a tortoise (for the lyre he invented). He is almost always a youthful, athletic figure and not an older, bearded god.

The caduceus appears on the badges of some medical organisations, particularly in the United States, where it spread after the US Army Medical Corps adopted it in 1902. The ancient symbol of medicine is the Rod of Asclepius, a staff with a single snake. The caduceus, with its two snakes and wings, belongs to Mercury.

Worshipping Mercury in Rome

Mercury’s main temple in Rome stood in the valley of the Circus Maximus, between the Aventine and Palatine hills. According to tradition the Romans dedicated it in 495 BC, which makes it one of the older temples in the city. The area was a busy centre of trade, close to the river and the markets.

His festival was the Mercuralia, held each year on 15 May. Merchants and traders visited a sacred spring near the Porta Capena, one of Rome’s gates, dipped a laurel branch into the water and sprinkled it over their heads and their goods. According to Ovid, some merchants also asked Mercury to wash away the lies they had told customers over the past year, and to bless the profits they hoped to make from the next ones.

Mercury Beyond Rome

As the Roman Empire expanded, the worship of Mercury spread with it.

In his account of his campaigns in Gaul (roughly modern France), Julius Caesar claimed that Mercury was the god the Gauls worshipped above all others. Caesar was almost certainly describing a native Celtic god under the closest Roman name he could think of. Across Gaul and Britain, archaeologists have found many statues and inscriptions to Mercury, often paired with Rosmerta, a local goddess of abundance.

The Roman historian Tacitus said something similar about the Germanic peoples, who he claimed honoured Mercury most of all. Here the Romans seem to have matched Mercury with the Germanic god Woden (or Odin). Both were wanderers known for wisdom and cunning, and both guided the souls of the dead.

Mercury’s Name Today

The planet Mercury: The smallest planet in our solar system, and the closest to the Sun, carries his name. It is also the fastest, circling the Sun in 88 days. Ancient astronomers watched it move quickly across the sky and named it after the swiftest of the gods.

The days of the week: In French, Wednesday is mercredi. In Spanish it’s miércoles, and in Italian mercoledì. All three come from the Latin dies Mercurii, “Mercury’s day”. The English word Wednesday comes from “Woden’s day”: the Romans had matched Mercury with Woden, so the Germanic peoples swapped in their own god’s name.

The element mercury: Medieval alchemists paired each of the known metals with a planet, and they matched the liquid metal quicksilver with the planet Mercury.

The word “mercurial”: A mercurial person is lively, quick and changeable. The word first described people believed to be born under the influence of the planet Mercury.

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Sources

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