HERMES 269
THE MUTILATION OF THE HERMS
Some ancient Greeks did believe in their gods. A historical incident concerning herms
warns us to be wary of facile generalizations about Greek religious attitudes. In
415 B.C., on the eve of the great Athenian expedition against Sicily, the herms in the
city of Athens were mutilated during the night. The religious scandal that ensued be-
came a political football; the general Alcibiades was charged and the consequences
were serious—quite a fuss over phallic statues of a god in a period fraught with so-
phistic skepticism, agnosticism, and atheism. Alcibiades was also charged with the
parody and desecration of the Eleusinian mysteries of Demeter in a private home; he
called himself Hierophant and wore a robe like that of the high priest when he shows
the holy secrets to the initiates (Plutarch, Alcibiades 22. 3; see also Thucydides 6.27-29).different worlds. His herms served to mark the boundaries between one's prop-
erty and that of another and what has to be bridged. As a messenger of the gods,
Hermes joins the human with the divine realm of the Olympians; as psychopompos
he brings mortals across the barriers of the Underworld. As a god of young men,
Hermes stands as an exemplar of the critical rite of passage between youth and
Hermes. Attic red-figure cup by the Euaion painter, ca. 460 B.c. Hermes stands with his
attributes of petasus, caduceus, and winged boots. He wears the traveler's cloak and is
bearded. Compare Giambologna's bronze, page 268. (Paris, Louvre.)