Was hermes originally mortal?

[Alejandro]

The story of the birth of Hermes makes it sound like he was originally mortal and that he somehow managed to bribe his way into becoming the last of the Twelve Olympians, after appeasing his half-brother Apollon (Apollo) with a musical instrument, and taking some of the stolen cattle to use in a sacrifice to their owner Apollon, to the other ten Olympians, and to himself(!).

Hermes' mother Maia was a daughter of the Titan Atlas. By some of this Titan's other daughters, Zeus and Poseidon also had other sons, who all seem to have been born mortal. So there must have been something special about Maia herself, or Hermes was at birth a mortal just like his half-brothers and cousins, and his father granted him immortality after he performed his amazing feats of theft on his first birthday.

In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Apollon threatens to cast the baby Hermes into Tartaros "to rule over the little folk there," a threat which no other god but Zeus ever seems to make to any other person in Greek myth. Is this an indication of Hermes' mortality at this point?

 

[Caburus]

I'd never considered that.
The immortality thing almost seems pot luck. Dionysus and Heracles mothers were mortal, yet they were Gods. Achilles and Aeneas mothers were immortal, yet they died.
With the Pleides, maybe there was prescendence with age. Maia was the eldest Pleides, so her child inherited a stronger immortality. The three eldest were lovers of Zeus, the next two of Poseidon, the next one of Ares, and the last and youngest, Merope, married a mortal, and became mortal herself, fading away in the sky.

 

[Alejandro]

Yeah, I've thought about the primogeniture factor, and how it seems as though the gods self-consciously selected the Pleiades with a direct relation of the god's political status to the age of the Pleiad. The cases of the other characters you've cited are, however, a lot more explicable than the cases of the Atlantides.

Dionysos straddles the line between mortality and immortality. Like Herakles, he seems to have somehow grown into his immortality rather than having been born with it full-fledged. This idea is belied by the fact he spent quite some time living pretty much like a mortal on Earth until he, like Herakles, performed certain feats (such as defeating a vast army of Indians who had many gods fighting on their side) and was only then admitted onto Mt Olympos. Dionysos' specialness in that he didn't have to die, like Herakles, in order to become a god, most likely stems from the manner in which he was born. Herakles' mortal parts had to be burnt away in order for him to gain admittance into the pantheon. Dionysos was born dead and burnt, as it were, as he passed through the lightning[-fire] of his father into Zeus' own "womb," represented by the god's thigh, the best gestation chamber in a male body that its owner Zeus could achieve. Dionysos' later being given his birth by Zeus reassured his eventual immortality. Also, he was the reincarnation of a dead god, Zagreus, who was himself most enigmatic.

Achilles was the only survivor of his mother's attempts to make her children immortal, although we do have the version in which her wish is finally fulfilled in him: after his demise at Troy, Thetis settles her son on Leuke, one of the Blessed Islands, and marries him to Medeia, who is herself immortal. Aeneas is said, in a less painful manner than Herakles, but the same in principle, to have been granted immortality by Zeus, and over the centuries he himself came to be worshipped as Juppiter Indiges at Rome. With the sons of the Atlantides, however, it does indeed seem more pot-luck. Iasion and Emathion, two of Zeus' sons by the Pleiad Elektra, as well as their sister Harmonia, have some rather sketchy immortality, where sometimes they're immortal and sometimes they're said to have died.