Ransom and Revenge: Poetics and Politics of Compensation

Abstract

If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. Exodus 21.23–25 Compensation in the Iliad involves exchanges that may be subsumed under the principle of reciprocity, a mental model for interpreting social relations and movements of goods. Reciprocity has been defined in a narrow sense as prestation and more generally as “exchange conceptualized as the performance and requital of actions perceived as gratuitous ,” whether effecting benefit or harm. Response to harm is typically cast as negative reciprocity, “where the emphasis is placed not on the return of benefits, but on the return of injuries.” On this view, the recipient of benefit or harm reciprocates by paying back benefit or harm, ideally in equal measure. But the Iliad complicates this mirror-image opposition of negative and positive reciprocity, for the person who is said to pay back harm is not the one who sustained it but the one who inflicted it in the first place. That the outcome – warrior B is killed for killing warrior A – may be the same by either conception of negative reciprocity matters less than that the exchange is consistently viewed in a particular way. Harm is viewed as taking away something that by rights belongs to another and compensation as a way or ways of getting it back. The ideology of compensation is thus resolution, not circulation, of debt.