A sampling of comments on Pindar Olympian 4: highlighting Thalia as one of the three ‘Graces’

Abstract

The three ‘Graces’ or Khárites, personifications of kháris, a noun often translated in a generalizing way as ‘grace’, are reverently addressed in a victory ode of Pindar, Olympian 14, as presiding goddesses of the city of Orkhomenos in Boeotia, named Erkhomenós (feminine gender) in the local dialect (Ἐρχομενοῦ, line 3). A young man named Asōpikhos (line 17), a native son of this city, is the victorious athlete whose Olympian victory is celebrated in Pindar’s ode, and he is figured in the song as a special protégé of the three goddesses presiding over Orkhomenos, who are literally the basíleiai or ‘queens’ of this city (line 3). The supreme status of the three Khárites or ‘Graces’ (line 4) of Orkhomenos is affirmed by their genealogy: these goddesses are children of Zeus himself (lines 12, 14–15). Also, the city over which they preside is their own ‘seat-of-honor’ (hédrā, line 2), and, as ‘presiders’, they are entitled to pre-eminent seating (I note the word thronoi at line 11) right next to another pre-eminent child of Zeus, the god Apollo himself (lines 10–11). These three queenly goddesses are named, and I transliterate their names here as we find them articulated in the blended Doric-Aeolic dialect of Pindaric diction: Aglaíā (Ἀγλαΐα), Euphrosúnā (Εὐφροϲύνα), and Thalíā (Θαλία) at lines 13, 14, and 15 of Pindar’s song. The name of one of these ‘Graces’, Thalia, is also attested as the name of one of the nine Muses as we find them listed in the Hesiodic Theogony, lines 77–79. The name of that other Thalia, listed at line 77 as the third of the nine Muses, is articulated as Tháleia (Θάλεια) in the Ionian poetic dialect of Hesiodic diction. In what follows, I will argue that the convergence of identities for this goddess Thalia, as both ‘Grace’ and ‘Muse’, reveals an old pattern of poetic celebration that goes back to an era when ‘Graces’ and ‘Muses’ were as yet undifferentiated. Or, to put it another way, the three Graces were once upon a time just as ‘musical’ as the Muses themselves.