Hermes and the Interpretive Framework of Euripides’s Ion

Emily C. Jusino (University of Chicago)

Hermes appears in Euripides’s Ion to deliver the prologue.  The choice of Hermes is an unusual one for two primary reasons.  First, this is one of the few prologues spoken by a divinity.  Second, unlike most prologues of Greek tragedy, this one has no direct influence on the action of the play (to the point that some discussions of the play disregard it entirely).  Hermes does not appear again for the rest of the play, and initially there seems to only a tenuous connection between him and the events of the play. 

The prologue is the only place where the author can provide the audience with “direct, explicit instruction about how to interpret” the events of the play (Segal, YCS, 1992, 85).  I argue that by using Hermes as prologue speaker Euripides lays the foundations of a unique interpretative framework of the play for the audience, preparing them to question the surety of the events to come. To do so, he takes advantage of two contradictory aspects of the character of Hermes: his authoritative voice as messenger of the gods and his association with lies, deception, and trickery.  For any audience familiar with the Hermes of earlier Greek poetry, the presence of Hermes here foreshadows that all will not be as straight-forward as his words indicate.

Euripides makes use of Hermes’s authoritative voice to provide a surety for the background events Hermes describes leading up to the action of the play.  He then draws upon the more deceptive aspects of Hermes’s character to undermine his prophecy of the events to come, both within the play and beyond.  While Hermes does provide an accurate recounting of past events, the future events of the play fail to fulfill the predictions he makes in the prologue.  One could place blame for this failure on Apollo, as the god of prophecy and father of Ion.  In this view Hermes appears strictly in his capacity as messenger of the gods, as he does in his other appearances in extant Greek theater (Prometheus Bound 945-1079, Aristophanes’s Peace 362-728).  Although Hermes does possess authority as the divine messenger, other epic and dramatic sources emphasize his trickery and deception.  In particular, in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Apollo makes him patron of the unreliable and at times deceptive “Bee Maidens” oracle near Delphi (550-568).  As a consequence Hermes’s pronouncements about the future are inherently suspect.

Thus, although Hermes identifies himself as “servant of the gods” (“daimonon latrin”, Ion 4), there is more to his character in the Ion than that.   A comparison with earlier portrayals of Hermes, especially the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, and his connection to satyr drama will provide a fuller understanding of Hermes’s unusual appearance in the prologue of the Ion.  Hermes is present to influence the audience’s perception and understanding of the events to come, specifically to prepare them for the unexpected twists of plot and frustrated recognition scenes that happen throughout the Ion.