17 Proem and Maia (1-19)
Adam Rappold
Our subject– Hermes.
Muse, come to us —
sing, through my voice,
an epic tale of that
heir of Zeus and
son of Maia![1]
His domains– Cyllene, his birthplace, and
Arcadia, with-wide-flocks-to-herd
His roles– To the gods:
he is known as ‘Swift-messenger’
But to all:
he is the Luck-bringer,
the Friend-with-benefits.[2]
His birth– born from
Maia –
The Birth of Hermes
[Picture her back then, before:]
A little-known nymph of the woods,
her-beautiful-hair mussed
as she and Zeus passionately came together.
Cheeks blushing modestly —
she had long stood outside the
formal assemblies and
court politics
of the immortal gods.[5]
She chose instead to dwell [far from Olympus]
in a natural grotto
her tight hole, veiled in seductive shadow;
a perfect fit for the son of crooked-minded Kronos
to sneak in.
A secret place where he and the wood-Nymph could,
come together again and again,
her-beautiful-hair twined in his hands,
concealed under blanket of night’s darkest hours,
For as long as
sleep –always a blessing– hid them from his wife
with-the-white-arms-of-the-dutiful-wife-inside-the-home
Hera
they could remain there, together,
in the peaceful dark,
overlooked and ignored
by all the changeless, immortal gods,
and
by those of inevitable change: men.
This was how Zeus fulfilled his desires
[And this was also the beginning and cause of a greater plan.]
–Time passed. [10]
Ten pregnant moons cycled across the heavens
before it all came to light:
those deeds
done by him
[done in darkness] —
well-known,
impossible-to-overlook-now
which transformed everything.
It all started happening,
the cause of everything began
when Maia
gave birth to a son…
His titles, earned by his deeds:
Quick-improvising-Intellect,
Crooked-minded Trickster,
Spellbinding-Speaker,
Thief and Cattle-Rustler Herder
Conductor-and-Leader-of-Phantom-Dreams,
Lookout (during “nighttime activities”),
Threshold-Watcher [15]
His deeds:
[None. At first.]
But he was determined
–even though he was a baby–
to bring to light deeds
so well known,
so glorious
that he could not be overlooked,
even by the gods who are changeless.
And he accomplished this. Here is how:
By dawn — his miraculous, remarkable birth
By mid-day – composing the first songs for the kithara-lyre
By evening — daring to steal cattle even from the
one-who-kills-from-far-away[3]:
Apollo.
More amazing still, all of these amazing things were done
on a single day!
the same day [which we now call Hermes’ day,]:
the sacred fourth day of the month of
his birth: born from
Maia –
The Birth of Hermes
[Picture her now. After. Transformed:]
a queen among the gods,
revered and powerful.
[1] Vergados 217 suggests that originally hymnos must have been a constituent or a characteristic of aeidow and that only at a later stage was hymnos restricted to songs in praise of gods; cf. Diehl (1940, 95, 105) and Vamvouri-Ruffy (2004, 19–23)
[2] The epithet is: ‘one-who-brings-profit/benefit’, sometimes translated as ‘very lucky’. This appears as a verb or adjective separately a number of times throughout the hymn — I have tried to keep the translation for each of them ‘luck’, ‘benefit’ or more rarely ‘profit’.
[3] In the hymn to Apollo this epithet is translated as “the one whose arrows travel far”. In other hymns ‘far-shooting’. The Hymn to Hermes often plays with the meaning and form of these epithets (as we will see later), so here the important stress is on how dangerous it would be to steal cattle from Apollo — who, in most literature, has no problem shooting you down (and from far away at that).