. He
is the special patron of the Athenian knights. Thus his prominence in
Homer is very natural.

What of Hermes? His history deserves a long monograph to itself; it is
so exceptionally instructive. Originally, outside Homer, Hermes was
simply an old upright stone, a pillar furnished with the regular
Pelasgian sex-symbol of procreation. Set up over a tomb he is the power
that generates new lives, or, in the ancient conception, brings the
souls back to be born again. He is the Guide of the Dead, the
Psychopompos, the divine Herald between the two worlds. If you have a
message for the dead, you speak it to the Herm at the grave. This notion
of Hermes as herald may have been helped by his use as a
boundary-stone--the Latin _Terminus_. Your boundary-stone is your
representative, the deliverer of your message, to the hostile neighbour
or alien. If you wish to parley with him, you advance up to your
boundary-stone. If you go, as a Herald, peacefully, into his territory,
you place yourself under the protection of the same sacred stone, the
last sign that remains of your own safe country. If you are killed or
wronged, it is he, the immovable Watcher, who will avenge you.

Now this phallic stone post was quite unsuitable to Homer. It was not
decent; it was not quite human; and every personage in Homer has to be
both. In the _Iliad_ Hermes is simply removed, and a beautiful creation
or tradition, Iris, the rainbow-goddess, takes his place as the
messenger from heaven to earth. In the _Odyssey_ he is admitted, but so
changed and castigated that no one would recognize the old Herm in the
beautiful and gracious youth who performs the gods' messages. I can only
detect in his language one possible trace of his old Pelasgian
character.[56:1]

Pausanias knew who worked the transformation. In speaking of Hermes
among the other 'Workers', who were 'pillars in square form', he says,
'As to Hermes, the poems of Homer have given currency to the report that
he is a servant of Zeus and leads down the spirits of the departed to
Hades'.[56:2] In the magic papyri Hermes returns to something of his old
functions; he is scarcely to be distinguished from the Agathos Daimon.
But thanks to Homer he is purified of his old phallicism.

Hera, too, the wife of Zeus, seems to have a curious past behind her.
She has certainly ousted the original wife, Dione, whose worship
continued unchallenged in far Dodona, from times before Zeus descended
upon Gree