The tome in question that the aged homeowner found the intruder immersed in was Giovanni Nucci’s The Gods at Six O’Clock, a retelling of the Iliad from the perspective of the gods.
In Greek mythology, Hermes packs in quite a punch. He’s the god of thieves, traders and travellers, of language and sleep. In his role as the herald and messenger of the Olympians, he is also the bridge between gods and men. It is unknown if the 38-year-old burglar, apprehended in Rome’s upscale art nouveau Prati district after a botched attempt, knew of Hermes, or of his Roman counterpart, Mercury. There is equally little information about his knowledge of Greek mythology or its Roman equivalent. But what can be inferred is that he wasn’t averse to experiencing for himself the dichotomous pulls of his patron saint. After all, it isn’t every day that a man breaking into a home resists the temptation of larceny and settles down with a book instead.
The tome in question that the aged homeowner found the intruder immersed in was Giovanni Nucci’s The Gods at Six O’Clock, a retelling of the Iliad from the perspective of the gods. Perhaps, it was the Olympians’ repeated emphasis that gods and men are equal parts good and evil that appealed to the burglar. Perhaps, it was curiosity over a world that circumstances had kept out of his reach. Whatever it may have been, his interception after an alarm was raised meant that the book remained unfinished. Nucci has offered to send a copy to the man in custody as a fitting finale to a “surreal story… full of humanity”.
For all those lamenting the death of the written word in a world overtaken by the screen, there is, perhaps, a glimmer of a silver lining in the Roman burglar’s story. In a world riven with sharp inequalities, it speaks of literature’s potential to offer respite and an intellectual interlude that transcends one’s material precarity. It also speaks for a kind of insouciance that the mischief-making Greek gods would have approved of. After all, a moment of quiet, a plan gone wrong and chaos — isn’t that the setting they most thrived in?
