Hermes, Close Reader

There has been a lively and quite urgently felt debate in the literary humanities about the status of reading, opening up for scrutiny the structures and unexamined norms of criticism, close reading, and hermeneutics. This paper will attempt to put the figure of Hermes back into some of the thinking about hermeneutics, and explore what this discussion looks like from the point of view of Classics. I will discuss what, if anything, Hermes can tell us about ways of knowing and interpreting, drawing on some of his manifestations in Lucian, early Greek hexameter poetry, and Callimachus.