Leonard Muellner
Last updated at
July 6, 2020, 3:42 p.m.
{"blocks":[{"key":"arp8o","text":"The traditional epithet used here for the apoina 'payment of goods offered in exchange for someone' is the word apereisi' 'limitless', an adjective that occurs eleven times in Homeric epic at exactly this point in the line to qualify the neuter plural noun apoina. It also occurs twice, again in the same place in the line, in the form apereisia (without the last syllable elided) as the epithet of the noun eedna 'wedding gift' (Iliad 16.178, Odyssey 19.529; also Hesiod Frag. 198.10 [M-W], with the same line-placement as all other attestations). Like the word apoina, eedna also designates goods given as part of a transaction, but the transaction in question is always and only a wedding, and the goods go with a woman. The fact that apereisia 'limitless' is an otherwise unattested traditional epithet shared only between these two kinds of exchange means that there are analogies between them. The difference between the two is that in a wedding, the gift-goods go with the woman, the third person whose ownership is being transferred from her father's household to her husband's father's household, whereas in a 'payment' like the one being proposed to Agamemnon here, the goods are in exchange for the third person, male or female, whose ownership is being transferred between two others — in this particular case, from Agamemnon to her father. In effect, what Chryses is proposing to Agamemnon and Menelaus and all the Achaeans is the reverse of a wedding gift: the father seeks to retrieve his daughter from a kind of spouse (in rejecting the offer, Agamemnon soon says that he actually prefers her to his own wife, Iliad 1.111-115) by the offer of gift-goods in exchange for her.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":42,"length":6,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":112,"length":9,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":257,"length":6,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":336,"length":9,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":408,"length":5,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":563,"length":6,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":571,"length":5,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":738,"length":10,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":971,"length":4,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":1190,"length":15,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":1491,"length":8,"style":"ITALIC"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"5i95a","text":"Now we can understand why the goods offered in payment in both cases are qualified as 'without end/limit'. Such exchanges resemble an extreme form of exchange analyzed in detail by Marcel Mauss (see the note on Iliad 1.13-15) called potlatch. Among the Amerindians of the Pacific Northwest, positively ruinous amounts of prestige goods are offered in exchanges between groups, and the exchanges even include the flagrant casting of precious valuables into the sea, the ultimate form of conspicuous consumption. The idea behind potlatch and the epithet apereisia for a payment in this instance or in the case of a wedding seem to me the same: in theory at least, they are offers of exchange that cannot be refused, and they are designed to display the ultimate wealth, prestige, and power of the party that offers them, though like other gifts they appear on the surface to be generous. Their extreme nature is also designed to be absolute in its effectiveness: the 'limitless' wedding gift cements the marriage because the husband's father's household will never give up such wealth (if the bride leaves the marriage, the wealth goes with her!), and Chryses' 'limitless' payment perfects the disjunction between the two parties because the wealth offered in exchange for the woman is beyond adequate as compensation for her. The key is, as Mauss showed, that gifts are both obligatory to give, obligatory to receive, and they generate obligations in return among those who receive them. The bigger the gifts the more stringent the obligations. So what happens if the gifts are 'infinite', as here? It would seem that the obligations are then absolute.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":233,"length":9,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":527,"length":8,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":552,"length":9,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":1192,"length":11,"style":"ITALIC"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}}],"entityMap":{}}