In Greek mythology, Hermes packs in fairly a punch. He’s the god of thieves, merchants and travellers, of language and sleep. In his function because the herald and messenger of the Olympians, he’s additionally the bridge between gods and males. It’s unknown if the 38-year-old burglar, apprehended in Rome’s upscale artwork nouveau Prati district after a botched try, knew of Hermes, or of his Roman counterpart, Mercury. There may be equally little details about his data of Greek mythology or its Roman equal. However what might be inferred is that he wasn’t averse to experiencing for himself the dichotomous pulls of his patron saint. In any case, it isn’t day-after-day {that a} man breaking into a house resists the temptation of larceny and settles down with a e-book as a substitute.
The tome in query that the aged home-owner discovered the intruder immersed in was Giovanni Nucci’s The Gods at Six O’Clock, a retelling of the Iliad from the angle of the gods. Maybe, it was the Olympians’ repeated emphasis that gods and males are equal elements good and evil that appealed to the burglar. Maybe, it was curiosity over a world that circumstances had saved out of his attain. No matter it could have been, his interception after an alarm was raised meant that the e-book remained unfinished. Nucci has provided to ship a duplicate to the person in custody as a becoming finale to a “surreal story… filled with humanity”.
For all these lamenting the dying of the written phrase in a world overtaken by the display screen, there’s, maybe, a glimmer of a silver lining within the Roman burglar’s story. In a world riven with sharp inequalities, it speaks of literature’s potential to supply respite and an mental interlude that transcends one’s materials precarity. It additionally speaks for a type of insouciance that the mischief-making Greek gods would have permitted of. In any case, a second of quiet, a plan gone unsuitable and chaos — isn’t that the setting they most thrived in?
