By THOMAS W. HODGKINSON, NewStatesman
 
Greeks bearing gifts? Go into a Corfiot restaurant today and your meal will invariably be rounded off with a pudding or a liqueur, on the house.

Let’s sing the praises of the Greeks. Not the ancient Greeks. That’s an open-door argument: look what they did for democracy, philosophy, literature, and so on. No, I mean modern Greeks, the ones who live in Greece today.

I’ve been out here since February with my wife and baby son, Nika. Even in this year of severe economic and political crises – the latter eased slightly by the victory of the ruling party, Syriza, in a snap election on 20 September – the warmth and generosity of the welcome we have had, particularly Nika, has been extraordinary.

Forget the idea that Italians love bambini. They may say they do but, in comparison, they’re not all that interested. The Greeks genuinely love children, infants above all. Everywhere we go, I feel as if I’m the minder of a miniature celebrity. They want to touch him, talk to him, give him gifts. It is possible that some magical power throbs through my one-year-old’s fontanelle. But the more likely explanation is that the Greeks are just really into babies.

It goes deeper. They believe in the principle of philoxenia, which means “the love of strangers”. Its ancient equivalent was called simply xenia and it was particularly embraced by the inhabitants of Corfu, which is where we have been mooching about.

According to Homer, Corfu was where Odysseus received the warmest welcome on his journey home from Troy, a masterclass in how to treat strangers: first, you give them food, drink, a bath and fresh clothes. Only later do you ask who they are and where they are heading. Then you speed them on, weighed down with gifts.

This giving and receiving of gifts was central to xenia. In an essay in 1925, the French socio-anthropologist Marcel Mauss argued that, wherever you are, whatever the situation, there is no such thing as a free gift. The recipient is agreeing to a “gift debt”, which must be repaid at some point in the future. Mauss may have had a point when he wrote that, in ancient Greece, gift-giving wove a complex network of social dependencies. At the same time, surely, a gift could also just be a gift. And it still can be.

Go into a Corfiot restaurant today and your meal will invariably be rounded off with a pudding or a liqueur, on the house. Often, you’re sent away with a bottle of wine, or some local speciality. “Presumably this is in the hope that you’ll return to the restaurant?” I asked my Greek friend Yorgos. “No,” he corrected me. “It’s only for the pleasure of giving.”