Battus

Battus was an old man, a shepherd and vineyard keeper who lived near Pylos in the western Peloponnese, a region of green hills and rocky soil where grapes clung to trellises and cattle grazed on sweet grass. He was not a hero, not a king, not a warrior, just a mortal man whose long years had taught him to watch the roads and know the comings and goings of every herd. On the day that changed his fate, he was digging about his vines with bowed shoulders when he saw a strange sight. A newborn child, barely hours from his mother's womb, was driving a herd of cattle across the plain. The child was Hermes, the son of Zeus, the king of the gods, and the nymph Maia, who lived in a deep cave on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia, and he had already proved himself a thief. On the very day of his birth, Hermes had invented the lyre from a tortoise shell, and in the evening he had stolen fifty loud-lowing cattle from his half-brother Apollo, the god of music and prophecy, who pastured his sacred herd in Pieria in northern Thessaly. To hide his crime, Hermes had fitted the cattle with brushwood boots and driven them backwards so their tracks would confuse any pursuer.

Hermes saw the old man watching and knew that silence must be bought. He approached Battus with a proposition: the shepherd must swear to keep what he had seen to himself, and in exchange he would receive one of the stolen heifers. Battus agreed readily, pointing to a stone beside him and saying that the stone would betray Hermes quicker than he would. The god accepted this promise and drove his cattle on, hiding them in a cave near the River Alpheios where he sacrificed two of them and burnt the evidence. He then hurried home to Mount Cyllene, wrapped himself in his swaddling clothes, and lay in his cradle feigning innocence.

But Hermes did not trust the old man's oath. He returned to Pylos in disguise, altering his voice and appearance so that Battus would not recognise him as the same child-thief. He offered a new bargain: if Battus would tell him where the cattle had been driven, he would receive not merely one heifer but a bull and its heifer together, a doubled reward for the same information. Battus, whose greed overcame his honour, broke his vow without hesitation. He pointed the way to the hidden cave and revealed everything he had promised to keep secret. Hermes saw that the old man's word was worth nothing, and his punishment was swift. He touched Battus with his staff, the caduceus that would become the symbol of his divine authority, and the shepherd's flesh turned to stone in an instant. Battus became a flint, a herm, a lifeless rock that stood forever as a monument to broken trust and the folly of mortal greed.

The story of Battus did not end with his transformation. In the mountains of Maenalus in Arcadia, the rocky outcrops where shepherds stood watch were known as the watch-posts of Battos, named for the old man whose eyes had seen too much and whose tongue had cost him everything. Later tales told how his name marked those high places where no secret was safe from the wind, and how he became one of the many mortals who learned that the gods punish betrayal with eternal transformation. In the oldest telling of the tale, the old man remains nameless, simply an old man tilling his flowering vineyard, a reminder that the story of Battus might have belonged to any mortal foolish enough to think a god could be cheated twice.