Hermes

Hermes's first day of life already included the cattle theft from Apollo and the invention of the lyre. A later episode, told most fully in Ovid's Metamorphoses, shows the grown god sent on a harder errand by his father Zeus. Zeus has transformed his lover Io into a heifer to hide her from jealous Hera, who is not fooled and sets the giant Argus Panoptes, covered in a hundred eyes of which only some ever sleep at once, to guard her. Zeus sends Hermes to free her, and Hermes approaches disguised as a wandering shepherd, playing a set of reed pipes and telling a long, deliberately tedious story about the nymph Syrinx until Argus's eyes close one by one. Once every eye has finally shut, Hermes kills the sleeping giant and leads Io away, though Hera then sends a gadfly to torment the still-transformed Io on a long wandering exile across the earth before she is finally restored to human form. Hera, discovering her watchman dead, takes his hundred eyes and sets them into the tail of the peacock, her own sacred bird, as a permanent memorial. Homer and later poets remember the killing directly in one of Hermes's own standing epithets, Argeiphontes, Argus-slayer, attached to his name across the Iliad and the Odyssey long before Ovid ever wrote the story out in full, evidence that the episode was old and well known rather than a Roman-era invention.

The atlas records Hermes's veneration status as historically attested with no continuous cult, and the clearest evidence of how ordinary that veneration once was lies in a single night of vandalism. Herms, square pillars topped with a bust of Hermes and carved with an erect phallus, stood at doorways, crossroads and boundary markers across Athens under his protection as god of travelers, transitions and thresholds, a form of everyday religious presence woven into the city's streets rather than confined to a temple. In 415 BCE, on the eve of the Athenian fleet's departure for the disastrous Sicilian Expedition, the city woke to find nearly all of its herms defaced overnight, an act of sacrilege on a scale that shocked the population and was read as a terrible omen for the coming campaign. The scandal triggered a political crisis: the general Alcibiades, already suspected of related religious offenses, was accused, and the resulting investigation and recall order changed the course of the war itself. Thucydides, writing as a contemporary, records the affair in his own History of the Peloponnesian War, treating the herms not as decoration but as objects whose damage the whole city felt as a genuine religious violation.