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The Age of Grace
Charis in Early Greek Poetry
By Bonnie MacLachlan PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1993 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06974-6
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
THE WORD grace has a perplexing variety of meanings. Religious people speak of the grace of God, and they may say grace before and after meals, hoping by this and other means to remain in a state of grace. And in secular speech dancers and antelopes are graceful; hostesses are gracious, and so, in the language of real estate, are their homes. The three Graces are familiar ancient divinities whose purpose and purview has remained puzzling; they are decorative, at the least, as are grace notes in a melody. Dukes and archbishops (whether decorative or not) are addressed as "Your Grace," and we seek to remain in our employers' or superiors' good graces, or, if we have fallen from grace, to ingratiate ourselves anew. Then there are also gratuitous cruelty, instant gratification, and hearty congratulations. What, we might legitimately ask, links these very diverse meanings and uses of grace and its cognates?
The Greek word which we regularly translate as "grace" is charis. Like grace, charis is found in an impressive array of contexts in Greek literature. However, it enjoys a prominence, especially in the archaic poetry, that far outstrips that of grace, particularly since the emergence of our secular culture. No serious reader of early Greek poetry can avoid the fact that charis dominates the literary portrayal of life during the archaic age. It was "the age of grace." Charis flickered when beautiful women sparkled; soldiers brought charis to their commanders on the battlefield or expected to win it when they fought well; charis graced appropriate behavior and speech and was a distinguishing mark of nobility; it was at the center of the feast; in the verses of the love poets it sat upon the hair or the eyes of the beloved. For the epinician poets it crowned that moment of supreme glory when the athlete won and was celebrated in song. Indeed, it would seem that for the early Greeks charis was present at all the high moments of life. And at death one faced the dreary prospect of the disappearance of charis. Just what was the charis experience, the sensation that clearly brought the greatest enjoyment to the early Greeks? This book is an attempt to reconstruct this experience. The evidence for the reconstruction is literature, and the literature will itself be illuminated by the reconstruction.
If we were to begin by looking at the linguistic history of the word charis, it would immediately be apparent that the idea of pleasure is deeply embedded in the word. The Indo-European root *gher- ("pleasure") is parent of charis and its cognates chairein, chara, etc. But the etymology of a word must always be tested against current usage, and, judging from the semantic field represented by the use of charis above, "pleasure" is necessary to, but insufficient as, a definition of the word. Although pleasure is involved in all of these instances, it is pleasure of a specific kind: Clearly other Greek words that denoted pleasure, like hêdonê or chara, cannot readily be substituted for charis.
In a dissertation for the University of Marburg in 1908 entitled [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Charis), Otto Löw attempted to identify the special feature of that pleasure which is charis. Charis for the early Greeks, he argued, was something that brought joy, a factum laetificans. This is distinct from a pleasurable state of mind, which would have been described as chara. Charis is not passive but a uis laetificatrix (a pleasure-bearing power).
There were, of course, divine dispensers of this pleasure-bearing power, the Charites. These Löw referred to as deae laetificatrices (pleasure-bestowing divinities). The pleasure they conferred was always of a social nature, and this allows us to make a further refinement upon Löw's definition. In distributing beauty, the Charites fostered human or divine interaction through physical allurement. In cult they were worshiped first as fertility goddesses, then venerated for the blessings they brought to the social order as it developed, becoming patrons of youth, of marriage, of healing, and later of the benefits conferred by the city-state. In praise poetry they awarded the charis of undying fame to a successful athlete, reciprocating the glory he had brought to the community. Their social importance was familiar to Aristotle, who advised the erection of a temple to the Charites in a prominent place in the city, to ensure reciprocal giving, for this, he says, is the distinguishing feature of charis (NE 5.1133a). From the Charites, then, we learn that charis-pleasure was not private: It entailed enjoyment that was mutual, reciprocal.
This reciprocal return was of course present in the phrase charin oida, lit. "I know the favor," words commonly used to express gratitude or thanks (the acknowledgment of the favor) as early as Homer. But even in this expression charis retained its active force: It was not merely a passive state of mind, a grateful feeling, but a gesture of response and thus essentially social in its setting. In Iliad 14, to advance her designs following her seduction of Zeus, Hera asks the sleep-god Hypnos if he will lull Zeus to sleep after their lovemaking. If he agrees, she will "acknowledge the favor for all time:"
[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].
Hypnos, lord of all gods and all men,
As you once listened to me, so even now
Be persuaded. I then will acknowledge the favor for all time.
Il. 14.233–35
Further, she will present him with tempting gifts (238). The favor will be requited not only with her recollection of the favor, but with a concrete expression of this. When Hypnos still expresses a reluctance to deceive the king of the gods, Hera offers him the gift he cannot refuse, one of the Charites, Pasithea, "whom he has desired for a long time" (276). The repetition of "for all time" in both passages links the long duration of Hypnos' desire with the enduring pleasure he will award her by his favor. In turn, her gift of gratitude will fulfil his desire, with one of the Charites. The lasting nature of the pleasure experienced by both underscores the charis-sequence. Her abiding charis will deliver to him his long-desired Charis.
The active force in Hera's promise is still alive in the phrase charin eidenai when it occurs in the Theognidean collection. "If you experience some great good thing from me and don't acknowledge the charis," says the poet, "may you come to my house next time and find yourself empty-handed" (958). To neglect to return a favor is to ensure that you will be cut off from social interchange, left alone and without a return gift.
Charis bound people together in the archaic Greek world, through the experience of pleasure. Before the Greeks became citizens of a polis, when new and more complex levels of loyalty and obligation became operative, the distribution of favors and good behavior—such things as went by the name of charis—was enforced with a vigor that is unknown to us. We are familiar with charity that is voluntary and giving that is selfless. For the early Greeks, charis was never self-denying but, by the same token, was never confined to the self. The exchange of charis-favors was founded upon a very general psychological phenomenon, the disposition to return pleasure to someone who has given it. This pleasure exchange was accepted as a serious social convention, and like xenia (the requital of gifts and hospitality which protected travelers in the early Greek world) the charis-convention amounted to a lex talionis, but of a positive sort. A benefaction called for a suitable return, and reprisals might be taken when the anticipated reciprocity did not occur. The Greeks nearly lost the Trojan War because Achilles withdrew from the fighting, charging that he had not received the charis that was his due (Il. 9.316).
This reciprocity in which charis participated has received a flurry of attention in recent years, by scholars who approach the subject from various disciplines—social anthropology, sociology, economics, and archaeology. With the turn of this century came an intellectual break with a belief in the consummate superiority of the Greeks. Concurrent with the arrival in Western Europe of data provided by the new field of comparative anthropology came a willingness to recognize in archaic and even classical Greece social practices parallel to those in cultures that were commonly designated as primitive.
One of the most universally entrenched practices was the reciprocal gift-exchange, a pattern that became well-known to classical scholars through Marcel Mauss' "Essai sur le don" (1923–24). Moses Finley documented the cardinal role played by gift-giving in the Odyssey (1978). Mauss' work received the avid attention of the French structuralists, who were busily applying a new method of analysis to Greek literature, myth, ritual, and social practices. Louis Gernet (1948) pointed to the emotional charge that items received when they became part of a reciprocal exchange. He demonstrated the collective origins of the exchange, tribal communal feasts at which marriages were arranged, where honor and status were preserved through the gift exchange. As Gernet noted, the same honor-bound reciprocal exchange that operated between people and gods can be found in Greek literature from Homer to Euripides and is described as the "bearing," "mingling," etc. of charis (1928, 313–59).
In the United States, Karl Polanyi's studies of patterns of economic exchange in primitive societies (1957) encouraged a new examination of the early Greek world by economic as well as social anthropologists. M. D. Sahlins (1972) isolated three categories for the economic exchange and distribution systems of pre-market civilizations which have received considerable attention: (i) generalized reciprocity (close to our altruism), (ii) balanced reciprocity (an equivalent exchange), and (iii) negative reciprocity (stealing, plundering, etc.). These categories have been applied to the Homeric world by W. Donlan (1989, 1982a, 1982b, 1981), to Solon's Attica by T. W. Gallant (1982), and to Pindar by R. Compagner (1988). Only balanced reciprocity interests us in a study of charis, for it is the only one that is strictly reciprocal.
Archaeology continues to confirm the consistency with which symmetrical exchange pervaded Greece, particularly during the archaic period. J. N. Coldstream (1983) examined large Attic clay kraters, skyphoi and other items with prestige value, which were found as far away from Athens as Tartessos in the eighth century B.C.E., and concluded that these were gifts presented in exchange for access to valuable metal routes. Ian Morris (1986b) examines the evidence for the extent to which gift exchange pervaded the Greek world at the time of Homer and argues that its purpose was to establish friendly relations between individuals and households or to normalize social relations that had been disrupted, and to maintain the status gradations in society. Morris contends that the nature of the exchange, which produced an alternating disequilibrium between its participants, preserved the bond between them through a state of alternating indebtedness. Archaeological evidence indicates that this pattern survived the commodity trade that came with tyrants in c. 700 B.C.E., and the subsequent introduction of coinage. Indeed, as Morris points out (1986a), the fundamental imprint that this exchange pattern made on Greek society can account for the general reluctance on the part of Greeks (even at a much later date) to engage in large-scale trading, for this style of commerce ignored the social balance to which the Greeks remained sensitive.
Aristotle cites as the mark of a noble man (megaloprepês) not only generosity in using his wealth for the public good, but also the participation in the exchange of gifts (NE 4.1123a 4–5). In post-classical Greece the horizontal pattern of reciprocal exchange co-existed with the vertical pattern of euergesia, the conferring of benefactions by wealthy individuals or by the now-developed city-state. The mutuality of the horizontal system persisted in the language of the new pattern, even when an equivalent response was impossible. The response of the poor to receiving a gift from a donor (philanthrôpia), however modest, was called philanthrôpon: The vocabulary preserves an equivalence that is, however, no longer there (Hands 1968, 36). But the obligation among individuals to reciprocate kindness was slow to disappear. Private bonds established by reciprocity persisted along with the public demand to become a benefactor of an entire group—the poor or the state as a whole. Conflicts and misunderstandings arose as two incompatible systems co-existed, and the earlier network of private bonds between reciprocal donors resisted dissolution. A study of this conflict has been made by G. Herman (1987). M. W. Blundell (1989) discusses the ways in which the earlier pattern of reciprocal exchange operated in friendship (philia) during the post-classical period, particularly in rhetoric. The language of the orators insisted on the obligation to requite the pleasure-bearing component in friendship, i.e., charis. The basis for this persistence is, as she points out, that a relationship between friends is founded on trust, something that makes the individuals vulnerable to treachery and dependent on this protection (34).
L. Kurke has produced a study of Pindar grounded in an appreciation of the cardinal role played by social reciprocity in epinician poetry (1991). Calling it a study in "sociological poetics," she calls upon the pattern of gift-exchange which secured guest-friendship (xenia) in the archaic Greek world, to explain much of the imagery in Pindar's verse. Building on M. Mauss' demonstration of the totality of the pattern of reciprocity in societies dominated by the gift-exchange system, Kurke argues that Pindar incorporates this into his poetry, in every step of the epinician process. The victory of the athlete and the celebration of the event with the performance of the praise poem inspire a poetic nexus of reciprocal gifts, cementing bonds between the victor and his community, between the victor and the poet, and between mortals and the gods.
But the reciprocal exchange of goods and favors, although necessary for an understanding of charis in archaic Greece, is not sufficient. The poets also described an encounter with beauty, whether in men, women, or in poetry itself, as charis. A beloved, a radiant victor in epinician verse or even the poet's words of praise, are experienced as charis. As beautiful objects, these all confer pleasure, and this pleasure provokes a response, like the unsettling pleasure produced by a gift or a favor. The language reflects the similarity of these experiences and the form that these experiences took. As in the exchange between Hypnos and Hera, charis designates the process and is applied both to the beautiful object that arouses a response, and to the response itself.
This bifocal application of the word was not peculiar to charis. The distinction that we are careful to make between the subjective and the objective participants in an event with psychological overtones was not a line drawn by the early Greeks. The word aidôs, for example, meant in the first instance "reverence," "awe," but it could be applied as readily to the awe-inspiring source of this feeling as to the feeling itself. Our application of the compound good-looking is a vestige of this practice: The looking subject has merged with its object.
If charis was grounded in a psychological phenomenon—the disposition to react when confronted with pleasure of a personal, social nature—and if it belonged to a social process, it necessarily entailed a feeling that was prolonged, that was retained over time. It did not denote instant gratification that would be forgotten. Hera will keep her charis-pleasure alive in her memory. But the converse was true also. If the charis-convention was ignored, the memory would register and retain the full effects of the offense. The aggrieved party would burn with anger until the situation was corrected, until reparation for the omission was made.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Age of Grace by Bonnie MacLachlan. Copyright © 1993 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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