The Winged Sandals were born on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia, in the deep cave where the nymph Maia had just given birth to Hermes, the son of Zeus and the Pleiad nymph. The infant god crawled from his cradle at midday, and as he stepped into the sunlight he saw a tortoise grazing at the cave mouth. He killed the creature, scooped out its flesh, and from its shell invented the lyre, the first musical instrument, stretching seven strings of sheep gut across the hollow shell. But music was not enough for a god born of cunning. That same evening, the newborn Hermes set out to test his speed. He needed to cross the earth faster than any mortal or god had ever travelled, and so he crafted for himself a pair of sandals from willow branches and ox-hide, and fixed to them wings of living gold that beat of their own accord. The moment he tied them to his feet, he felt the wind rise beneath him. He sprang into the air and flew, the wings on his ankles carrying him over mountains and rivers, across the sea and back again before his mother Maia could miss him.

The sandals made Hermes the messenger of the gods, the one being who could carry word from Olympus to the Underworld and back before a shadow moved. When Zeus needed to send a command to a mortal king, it was Hermes who strapped on the sandals and flew. When a hero died and his soul needed guidance across the River Styx, the black river of the Underworld whose cold water is the most sacred substance in the cosmos, it was Hermes who descended in his winged shoes to lead the shade to Charon, the sullen ferryman of the dead. The sandals were not merely fast; they were the bridge between realms, the footwear that let one being move freely through the world of the living, the world of the gods, and the world of the dead. No other artifact in Greek myth crossed so many boundaries.

The sandals' most famous loan came when the hero Perseus was sent by the king Polydectes to fetch the head of the Gorgon Medusa, one of three monstrous sisters whose faces were so terrible that one look turned living things to stone. Perseus could not reach the Gorgons by ship or by foot, for they lived at the western edge of the world, beyond the known lands, in a place where the sun set into the ocean. The gods came to his aid. Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, gave him a polished bronze shield to use as a mirror. Hermes himself gave him a sickle of adamant to sever the Gorgon's neck. And from the nymphs who guarded the treasures of the gods, or from Hermes directly, Perseus received the winged sandals. He tied them to his feet and felt the golden wings beat against his ankles, lifting him into the sky. He flew west over Libya, over the deserts where the Gorgons dwelt, and descended unseen among the sleeping serpents that coiled at their feet. Without the sandals, the quest would have taken months or years; with them, Perseus crossed the world in hours and returned with the Gorgon's head before Polydectes knew what had struck him.

The sandals appear again in Homer's Odyssey, the epic of the hero Odysseus and his ten-year voyage home from the Trojan War. Odysseus had been shipwrecked on the island of Ogygia, where the nymph Calypso, a daughter of the Titan Atlas, had kept him as her lover for seven years, promising him immortality if he would stay forever. Odysseus wept on the shore each day, longing for his wife Penelope and his home on the island of Ithaca. The goddess Athena, who favoured Odysseus above all mortals, pleaded with Zeus to free him, and Zeus agreed. He sent Hermes to Calypso's island with the command that she must release her prisoner. Hermes strapped on his winged sandals, took up his herald's staff, the caduceus, and flew across the sea like a sea-bird skimming the waves. The sandals carried him over the wine-dark water to Ogygia, where he found Calypso in her cave of fragrant woods and delivered Zeus's message. Without the sandals, the journey would have been impossible; with them, a god could cross from Olympus to the edge of the world and back before the sun moved a hand's breadth across the sky.

In the Iliad, Homer's epic of the Trojan War, Hermes uses the sandals to move unseen and swiftly among both armies. When the Trojan prince Paris is asked to judge which goddess is the most beautiful, Hera, Athena, or Aphrodite, Hermes guides him to the contest. When the dead hero Patroclus needs to be guided to the Underworld, it is Hermes in his winged sandals who leads the way. The sandals are so closely identified with the god that in art he is rarely shown without them. Vase painters from the sixth century BCE onward depict Hermes with small wings sprouting from his ankles, and the image became one of the most recognisable in the Greek world. When the Romans adopted the god as Mercury, they kept the sandals, and Roman merchants placed the winged foot on their signboards as a promise of swift and safe delivery.

In later ages, the winged foot became the universal symbol of speed and communication. The Roman poet Ovid described Mercury's sandals in his Metamorphoses, and medieval artists copied the image in illuminated manuscripts. When the modern postal services of Europe and America chose their emblems in the nineteenth century, they turned again to the winged foot of Hermes. The French luxury house Hermes, founded in 1837, took the god's name and the winged carriage as its logo. In the twentieth century, the winged shoe became the emblem of athletic footwear companies promising speed to runners, and in film and comics the image of a hero with wings on his feet has never lost its power. From the cave on Mount Cyllene to the running tracks of the modern world, the Winged Sandals of Hermes remain the oldest and most enduring symbol of what it means to move faster than the wind.