Like Dionysus, Hermes appears in the Linear B tablets of Mycenaean Greece, his name recorded in a form read as e-ma-a2 at both Pylos and Knossos, evidence that the boundary-god and his cult objects are as old as any Greek deity attested in writing, long before the herald myths of Homer took their familiar shape.
Those cult objects, the squared herm pillars set at doorways and crossroads across the Greek world, were themselves once the centre of a genuine political scandal. On a single night in 415 BCE, on the eve of the great Athenian expedition against Sicily, unknown vandals mutilated the herms standing throughout Athens, smashing their carved faces and phalluses. Thucydides records the panic that followed, the fear that the act signalled a conspiracy against the democracy, and the accusations that fell on the general Alcibiades, who was recalled from the fleet to stand trial and fled into exile rather than face it, a defection that historians count among the causes of Athens's eventual defeat. A single act of vandalism against Hermes's most ordinary public image thus became entangled with one of the pivotal political crises of the Peloponnesian War. No culprit was ever conclusively identified, and the mystery itself became a recurring subject of ancient historical speculation, discussed by Thucydides and other writers without final resolution.