Mercury

There was a spring near the Porta Capena, on the road out of Rome, and on the fifteenth of May the merchants came to it. A trader would arrive in a belted tunic, purified with incense, and draw the water in a jug. He dipped a laurel branch in it and sprinkled everything he intended to sell, and then his own hair. Then he prayed, and Ovid wrote the prayer down. Wash away the perjuries of the time gone by, wash away my lying words on days past. Whether I called on you or on the great power of Jupiter, expecting no god to hear, ignore it. Just give me profit, give me the joy of profit made, and see to it that I enjoy cheating the buyer. Ovid ends the scene with Mercury laughing at all this from up above, remembering that he stole Apollo’s cattle himself.

No other Roman god is asked for anything like that. It is a request for retrospective absolution of commercial fraud and prospective assistance with more of it, said out loud, annually, in a public rite, and the poet reports it without visible embarrassment. Whatever else Roman Mercury is, that is the centre of him.

He is also the youngest god on the Capitol’s guest list, and the evidence for it is a set of absences. He has no flamen, and the ten priests of that rank whose names survive belong to Ceres, Flora, Pomona, Portunus, Vulcan, Volturnus, Falacer, Furrina, Palatua and Carmenta. He has no place in the Salian hymn. He is not among the invocation-gods of the ploughing. His festival day is not written in large letters in the oldest calendars as the archaic ones are, and Ovid explains without fuss why: the senators put up his temple facing the Circus on the Ides of May, and from that day this has been his holiday. The feast is an anniversary of a building. Nothing older is hiding underneath it.

The building went up in 495 BC, and how it was dedicated is the best story in Roman Mercury’s file. Both consuls wanted the honour. The Senate, unwilling to choose, handed the decision to the people, ruling that whichever man the people picked should also take charge of the grain supply, found the merchants’ guild and perform the rites in place of the pontiff. The people gave the job to Marcus Laetorius, a senior centurion. Livy sees exactly what happened and says so: this was done not so much to honour a man given a duty far above his station as to humiliate the consuls. Rome’s plebs, in the middle of a debt crisis, handed the god of trade to a soldier to spite two patricians. The bundle of powers that came with it tells you what the temple was for. Grain, guild, ritual. Mercury’s cult and the *annona* were the same institution from the first day.

The god that resulted is a functionary rather than a character. Plautus, putting him on stage around 190 BC to speak a prologue, has him introduce himself by saying that the other gods have given him charge of messages and profit, and offer the audience good returns on their buying and selling. There is a street in Rome called the Sober Quarter, and Festus says it got the name because Mercury was supplicated there with milk and not with wine. A moneychanger and a tenement manager both left inscriptions naming themselves as men of Sober Mercury. In 217 BC, when the Sibylline Books rearranged the Roman gods into six Greek couples after Trasimene, Mercury came last, on the sixth couch, paired with Ceres. Grain and the trade in grain, laid out on a dining couch. The scheme was Greek; the logic was the one written into his temple charter two and a half centuries earlier.

The largest body of material that belongs to Mercury and not to Hermes is not Italian at all. Caesar, describing the religion of Gaul, wrote that of the gods they worship Mercury most, that he has the most images, that they hold him the inventor of all arts, the guide of roads and journeys, and the greatest power over money-getting and trade, and that after him come Apollo, Mars, Jupiter and Minerva. Caesar is not naming Gaulish gods. He is naming Roman gods for Gaulish functions, which is a habit of mind more revealing than a list of theonyms would have been. Whether the god underneath was Lugus is still argued and should not be stated as fact. What is solid is the archaeology. Mercury acquired dozens of local surnames across Gaul and the Rhineland, Visucius most often, Cissonius next, and a sanctuary on the Puy de Dôme where a bronze plaque names him Mercury of the Dome. Pliny records that the sculptor Zenodorus spent ten years making a colossal Mercury for the Arverni, at a fee that was one of the largest ever paid for a statue. And in the northern provinces he is repeatedly shown with a consort, Rosmerta, the Great Provider, holding a cornucopia and a purse of her own, in nearly thirty inscriptions from Gaul to Dacia. She has no Greek counterpart whatever.

His powers are narrow, useful and slightly disreputable. He moves things: words, goods, messages, prices. He answers a prayer that is functionally a contract. He crosses boundaries, which in Roman terms means the road, the port and the market rather than the underworld, since the psychopomp Mercury is a literary import and there is very little Roman cult behind it. His weaknesses are the other side of the same coin. He is a specialist with no myth of his own in Latin that is not translated from Greek; the Roman state gave him no ancient priest, no place in the oldest calendar, and no ancestral role at all. When Rome wanted a god of its own beginnings it went to Mars and Venus. Mercury got the grain office, the guild, a spring by the gate, and the frank admission that everybody using him was on the make.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Mercury in Roman mythology?

Mercury was the Roman god of trade, profit and messages, whose name comes from *merx*, merchandise. His temple on the Aventine was dedicated in 495 BC, and with it came charge of Rome’s grain supply and the founding of the merchants’ guild. He was worshipped above all by traders, and in the Gallic provinces he became the most widely honoured god of all.

What is the difference between Mercury and Hermes?

Mercury is the most thoroughly Hellenised of the Roman twelve, and nearly all his myths are Greek stories about Hermes. What is genuinely Roman is the commercial machinery: the 495 BC temple charter tying him to the grain supply and the merchants’ guild, the merchants’ water rite at the Porta Capena, the milk offering at the Sober Quarter, and the money bag that Roman art puts in his hand and Greek art does not. The enormous Gallo-Roman cult, including his consort Rosmerta, has no Greek counterpart at all.

What was the Mercuralia?

The Mercuralia fell on 15 May, the anniversary of his temple’s dedication. Merchants went to a spring near the Porta Capena, drew its water in a jug, and used a laurel branch to sprinkle their goods and their own heads. Ovid records the prayer that went with it, in which the trader asks Mercury to wipe out his past commercial perjuries and to let him profit by cheating his next buyer.

Why did the Gauls worship Mercury most of all?

Caesar wrote that the Gauls honoured Mercury above every other god, credited him with inventing all the arts, and looked to him for success in travel and in making money. He was using Roman names for Gaulish functions rather than reporting Gaulish theonyms, so the identity of the god underneath, often argued to be Lugus, remains disputed. The provincial cult was real and enormous, with local surnames such as Visucius and Cissonius and a consort, Rosmerta, unknown to Greek religion.

Was Mercury an ancient Roman god?

No. Mercury has no flamen, no place in the archaic Salian hymn or the old invocation lists, and no festival in the oldest calendars independent of his temple’s dedication day. His cult begins with a building put up in 495 BC and dedicated by a centurion at the people’s vote. Romans classed him among the newer gods rather than the inherited ones.

Related Entries

Hermes, Rosmerta, Lares, Genius loci, Teutates, Taranis, Sucellus, Nodens, Nehalennia, Apollo, Janus, Saturn, Quirinus, Ceres, Neptune