Odysseus Guest-Host Contract

Odysseus, the supposedly great hero of Homer’s epic The Odyssey, embarks on a fantastical journey to return home after years spent fighting in Troy. Athena’s favored, a ‘wise and courageous king of Ithaca,’ binds himself to a strict moral code throughout the poem, and attempts to hold others to that same ethical standard. His believed rigid forms of behavior, however, do not extend to being a courteous guest when he visits Polyphemus’s island. Odysseus allows his men to attempt to concoct a plot to carry off Polyphemus’s possessions and repeatedly taunts him after he blinds the Cyclops, deciding that the guidelines of Zeus’s social contract only apply to him occasionally. Odysseus’s purposeful ignorance and abuse of the guest-host relationship

Polyphemus is indeed so injured that when he wrenches the spike out of his eye, “out with it [comes] a red geyser of blood” (224). Odysseus has gravely hurt Odysseus by tricking him into drinking the strong wine and preventing him from receiving medical aid from his brethren through the Nobody ruse. Thus, while Polyphemus does not obey the guest-host contract, Odysseus too openly flouts it by attacking his host. A man often described as clever and wily could surely devise an alternate method to take out Polyphemus without making him “mad with pain” (224). But in Odysseus’s mind, this pain equals the pain Polyphemus caused his men as he devoured them. As a hero, however, Homer considers Odysseus to be above such vengeful actions, and Odysseus should not debase himself to physically wound his enemy. Odysseus also quite literally adds insult to injury when he riles up Polyphemus as he escapes, proclaiming himself to be the hero to “[blind and shame him so]” (227). Polyphemus, distressed and understandably upset, has no choice but to send a desperate plea to his absentee father Poseidon—who casts the curse on Odysseus as a direct result of his unkind taunts to Polyphemus. Odysseus’s tactics are a prime example of how he abuses Zeus’s social contract though he expects others to consistently uphold