Having the last laugh

Hard to define Lewis Hyde. Antiquarian, classicist, story-teller, mythographer, connoisseur, philologist, teacher and scholar, he is as multifarious as the trickster archetype which forms the subject of his new book. In Greece trickster appears as Hermes, and Hyde begins with the Homeric Hymn written around 420 BC which deals with Hermes’s birth and career. Zeus runs off with Maia and together they produce a cunning, wily boy, full of flattery and schemes. Hermes stumbles across a turtle and turns it into the first lyre. Longing for meat, he steals cattle from Apollo and evades discovery by driving them backwards across sandy ground so that their hoofprints point away from their destination. Rubbing sticks together, he makes a fire and burns a sacrificial offering. He’s tempted to eat the cooking meat — ‘The sweet smell weakened him, god though he was’ — but resists and stores the flesh in an ample barn.