Pointy Greeks

Seneca found Chrysippus’s treatment of the Three Graces too subtle: He was a great man but “a Greek, whose intellect, too sharply pointed, is often bent and turned back upon itself; even when it seems to be in earnest it only pricks, but does not pierce.”

Seneca himself found in the dance of the Three Graces a dance of gift and return: “What is the meaning of this dance of sisters in a circle, hand in hand? It means that the course of a benefit is from hand to hand, back to the giver; that the beauty of the whole chain is lost if a single link fails, and that it is fairest when it proceeds in unbroken regular order.”

Perhaps this is a pagan anticipation of the patristic claim that the Persons of God are given to an eternal “dance” of love – using perichoreuein instead of the more direct biblical concept of perichorein .