Graces: Charming goddesses of paganism, called ξαριθσ by the Greeks and Gratioe by the Latins.

Among the great number of divinities, with which the poets have enhances the world, never have they imagined any more lovely than the Graces , daughters of Bacchus and Venus, that is to say of a god who dispenses joy to men and of a goddess who has always been regarded as the soul of the universe. If not all the poets agree that the Graces are daughters of Venus, at least they all recognize that they were her inseparable companions and that they composed the most brilliant part of her court.

Anacreon, qui knew so well the divinities of whom we are speaking and who had made a joke of them as it were, almost never failed to reunite the Graces to the Loves. Speaking of the son of Cytherea, he crowns him with roses when he dances with the Graces . Pressing an excellent artist to engrave for him a cup of silver, he recommends him to depict thereon, in the shade of a vineyard, the Loves disarmed and the Graces laughing.

The Latin poets kept to the same such language. Horace, in this delightful stanza from his ode to Venus, where he has the art of enclosing in three verses all the divinities of the cortege of the goddess of Paphos, places the Graces immediately after Cupid. Let the foolish Love, he says to the goddess, be beside you; let the Graces appear there with their carefree air; let the Nymphs and Mercury hasten to follow them; finally let the youth accompany you there with this cheer that you alone are able to inspire.

Fervidus tecum puer, et solutis Gratiae zonis properentque Nymphae, Et parum comis sine te juventas, Mercuriusque.

Most of the mythologists fix at three the number of the Graces , whom they call Aglaea, Thalia and Euphrosyne by name. But as for their symbols and attributes, one readily understands that the imagination must vary them infinitely, depending on the time and place.

At first, these goddesses were represented in the guise of human figures, dressed in fine, light gauze, without hooks, without belt, and letting their veils flutter negligently at the whim of the winds. Soon after, they were depicted completely nude, and this custom had already prevailed down to the time of Pausanias, who confessed not to be able to fix the date when the removal of the gauze occurred. One finds them today in the one and the other manner in the monuments to these goddesses that remain extant for us; but one finds them most often represented in the nude; they hold each other in an embrace, and are totally naked in the portraits of them that Spanheim gave us fashioned after the medals which themselves conform to the images that were created by the poets. Horace says, in Ode VII line iv,

Gratia cum Nymphis, geminisque sororibus audet Ducere nuda choros .

The epithet, lovely-crowned , is assigned to them in the hymn attributed to Homer, who adds that they hold each other by the hand and dance together with the Hours, Harmony, Hebe and Venus, goddesses of joy and pleasure, and it is for this reason that they are called laughing , the laughing goddesses .

It was generally said that the Graces were maidens and virgins; this is perhaps because it was thought difficult for their attractions to subsist amid the trouble of a passion or among the cares of a family. However, contrary to popular opinion, Homer marries two Graces ; and what is really surprising, he matches them very poorly with husbands; for he gives to the one a god who sleeps all the time, the god of sleep, and the other, the charming Charis, her he makes marry this god whom Jupiter tossed down from the sacred square of Lemnos and who remains still lame from this terrible fall.

We read in Pausanias that statues of the three Graces were seen at Elis, where they were represented in such a way that the one held a rose in hand, the other a myrtle branch and the third a gaming die, symbols for which the author himself provides the following explanation. The myrtle and the rose are particularly consecrated to Venus and the Graces , and the die signifies the natural penchant that youth, the age of pleasures, has for laughter, fun and games.

They held each other inseparably by the hand, Horace tells us, without every parting:

Why? Because their kind qualities are one of the strongest bonds of society.

They would let their veils flutter at the zephyrs' will, in this way expressing a sort of negligence worth more than all adornment; or, to put it another way, in the fine arts and the works of spirit there is a becoming type of negligence preferable to the precision of craft.

It was not possible that divinities of this order should lack altars and temples. It is claimed that it was Eteocles who built the first ones to them and who regulated the concerns of their cult. He was the king of Orchomene, the prettiest city in Boetia. There one sees a fountain whose pure and salutary water has made it famous throughout the world. Nearby flows the river Cephysus, which, owing to the beauty of its channel and it banks, contributed not a little to the attraction of this very charming locale. We are assured that the graces took their delight there more than in any other place on earth. From this it comes to pass that the ancient poets called them goddesses of Cephysus and goddesses of Orchomene .

But not all of Greece agreed that Eteocles was the first to give them divine honors. The Lacedaemonians attributed the glory of this deed to Lacedaimon, their fourth king. They claimed that he had built a temple to the graces in the territory of Sparta, on the banks of the river Tiasa, and that this temple was the most ancient of all those where they received offerings. Whatever the case may be, they already had temples at Elis, Delphi, Pergamum, Perinthea, Byzantium.

Not only did they have temples specific to them, they also had some in common with other divinities. Usually those that were consecrated to love were also to the graces . It was also the custom to award them a place in the temples of Mercury, because people were persuaded that the god of eloquence could not get by without their help. But above all, the muses and the graces were ordinarily placed in one and the same temple. Hesiod, after having said that the muses established their abode on Helicon, adds that the graces live near to them. Pindar confounds their jurisdictions, and in one of those bold expressions peculiar to him he calls poetry the delicious garden of the graces .

Many festivals were celebrated in their honor over the course of the year. But the springtime principally was consecrated to them. This was properly the season of the graces . You see, says Anacreon, along with the return of the zephyrs, the graces are adorned with roses.

Horace never paints nature as renewing itself without making the graces enter into the picture. After having said, at the beginning one of his odes, that by a kindly revolution the frosts had given way to pleasant days, he adds right away that one also already sees Venus, the graces and the nymphs recommence their dances.

Well-mannered people would not forget to toast the muses and the graces at their fine meals. They honored both these and those with glass in hand, with the difference that one would drink nine sips in order to attract the favor of the muses, while those wishing to gain the sympathy of the graces would only drink three.

In a word, the ancients loved to mark their zeal for their gods through varied monuments raised in their glory, through paintings, statues, inscriptions and medallions. And all of Greece was full of similar monuments to the graces . One saw their figures in most of their cities worked by the greatest artists. In Pergamum, there was a picture of these goddesses painted by Pythagoras of Paros, and another at Smyrnaby the hand of Appelles; Socrates had engraved their statue in marble, and Bupalus in gold. Pausanias cites many works of this type, equally commendable for the beauty of the work and of the materials.

They were also represented on a great number of medals of which some have come down to us. Such is a Greek medallion of Antoninus the debonair, minted by the Perinthians; one of Septimius Severus, by the inhabitants of Perga in Pamphilia; an other of Alexander Severus, by the Flavinian colony in Thrace; and lastly, one of Valerian, father of Gallienus, by the Byzantines.

It is after these ancient models that was minted in the 14th century the ingenious medallion of Jeanne de Navarre, on one side of which was represented this princess and on the reverse the three graces with the caption: either four, or one —a thought that has a lot in common with what is found in this pretty epigram of the anthology, (line 7 [?]) concerning a young person named Dercyleus , who gathered together all the beauties of figure, of manners and of wit:

Τεσσαρεζ αι Ξαριτεζ, παφιτι δυο, ξαι δεκα μωυται, δερξυλιζ εν πασαιζ μουσα, ξαρισ, παφιη.

Perhaps the principal reason that spurred the ancients to court the graces was that they were beneficent deities, whose power extended to all the sweet things of life. They dispensed gaiety, a balanced mood, the sociable qualities, liberality, eloquence and that singular charm that sometimes takes the place of merit.

But the most beautiful of all the prerogatives of the graces was that they presided over benefits and gratitude.

The Athenians having aided the inhabitants of Chersonese with a pressing need, the latter, in order to immortalize the memory of such a service, raised an altar with this inscription: "altar consecrated to she among the graces who presides over gratitude.

In a word, it was from the graces that the other divinities borrowed their charm. They were the source of all that there is of jollity in the world; they gave to places, to persons, to works, to each in its own kind, that final polish that enhances the other perfections and that is as it were their flower.

From them alone can one get this gift, without which all the others are useless: I mean the gift of pleasing. Moreover, among so many goddesses of paganism, there were no others who drew a greater crowd of admirers. All the conditions of the one and the other sex, all the professions, all the ages addressed to them their vows and presented to them some incense. Every science and every art in particular had its own tutelary divinity; but all the arts and all the sciences recognized the empire of the graces . The orators, the historians, the painters, sculptors, musicians, and generally all those who sought to deserve public acclaim, could only promise themselves a happy success insofar as they could acquire the favor of the graces .

The greatest poets sang hymns in their honor: Anacreon and Sappho, Bion and Moschus, so tender and so florid, invoked them always; and Pindar devoted the last of his Olympics to their glory. This ode offers such beautiful praise to the graces , that one can say that they themselves worked on it.

One of the lovable poets of our days, who has relinquished the lyre for the cardinal's cap, and who in seems in all truth will never again take it up, now that he is today the archbishop, paid court to the graces in the happy days of his independence and addressed to them a delicate letter that Anacreon himself would not forswear. I am going to cite from it some morsels which must surely please everyone: