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6 In the third passage the writer of the 24th Odyssey becomes a little more explicit:

In Homer the word for herald's staff is, not , and Homer, while representing Hermes as a messenger of the gods, nowhere calls him.

Hesiod on the other hand describes Hermes as (Theog. 939) and as  (Op. 80); and later it seems to have been universally held that Hermes was a herald and the patron of heralds. See, for example, Aeschylus (Ag. 498):

It is obvious that, in these circumstances, the staff of Hermes must have come to be regarded as a herald's staff, and that in fact it was so regarded is proved by a fragment (Sophocles, Fr. 701) of Sophocles' Philoctetes Trojae preserved in the recently discovered beginning of Photius' Lexicon :

Yet, although the Latin caduceum and caduceus (which are distortions, effected before Rome became literary, of the Tarentine Doric ) are applied indifferently to a Greek herald's staff (the Romans did not use this implement) and to the staff borne by Mercury, in Greek proper I am unable to find the word, in any of its forms, used of the staff of Hermes, except once in Hesychius, who writes (Sophocles, Fr. 700), referring to the play just mentioned, , and once in an epigram by Nicarchus (Anth. Pal. XI. 124), who compares the staff of a certain physician, Zopyrus, to the staff of Hermes: