Laudator Temporis Acti

After posting Honoring the God yesterday, I came across W.K.C. Guthrie (1906-1981), The Greeks and Their Gods (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950; rpt. 1956), p. 88 (on Hermes):

[W]e shall align ourselves firmly with Professor Nilsson when he declares, "The name is one of the few that are etymologically transparent and means 'he of the stone-heap'."¹ Hermes then is an ancient god of the countryside, named by the Greeks from the ἕρμα, also called ἑρμαῖον which was a cairn or heap of stones. These cairns served as landmarks, and can already be seen as such in Homer, where Eumaios, describing to Telemachos how he has seen a ship, indicates his position by saying, "I had reached that point above the city where there is a ἑρμαῖος λόφος² "A hill of Hermes"? Yes, but also "a mound in the form of a cairn". The Etymologicum Magnum defines ἑρμαῖον as "heap of stones, and in general stones by the wayside", and the scholiast on the passage in the Odyssey explains the ἑρμαῖος λόφος in the same way, and adds that the same name was given to Roman milestones.³ To explain the connexion of Hermes with the cairns, the Greeks characteristically invented an aetiological myth. When Hermes killed Argos, he was brought to trial by the gods. They acquitted him, and in doing so each threw his voting-pebble (ψῆφος) at his feet. Thus a heap of stones grew up around him.³ In fact he must simply have been the daemon or spirit of the stone-heaps themselves, about which there were several more or less superstitious beliefs.

¹ Rose, Hbk. Gr. Myth. 146, Boisacq, Dict. Etym. de la Langue Grecque, 282, n. 3, Nilsson, Hist. Gr. Rel. 109. See also J. Chittenden in Hesperia, xvi (1947), 94, 95, to whom further reference will be made.

¹ Od. xvi, 471.

³ Text in Farnell, Cults, v, 67.

⁴ Etym. Magn. s.v. ἑρμαῖον.

Id., p. 94:

What then of Hermes' Greek name? I have never been able to see any difficulty in the supposition that the Greeks, finding and paying homage to a friendly and helpful spirit of the country to which they had come, gave him their own title or nickname, which in this case Mrs. Chittenden translates as "Old Heapy".

Mrs. Chittenden = Jacqueline Chittenden, "The Master of Animals," Hesperia 16.2 (1947) 89-114 (at 113).