The Treatment Of Strangers In Homer's The Odyssey

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Recommended: Critical Essays on the Odyssey

The end of the book The Odyssey gets very complex there are many parts in motion at this point. There are many relationships you have to consider every choice that is made effects most of the characters in The Odyssey. In the start, mainly books 17-20 but this theme continues well into book 24 the main human experience to consider is the treatment of strangers. Odysseus is disguised as a wonderer, he is so close to Penelope but the suitors will not let the wanderer how is Odysseus she her to give her new of the whereabouts and news of her husband. In books 21-24 the human experience changes, more towards Succeeding at all costs. Odysseus is just trying to get things back to the way they were. He is dead set on killing the suitors and knows it is a seemingly impossible task to try to trick them …show more content…

Only Odysseus’s close and loyal friends threat him well and with respect. When Odysseus first arrives this is what his wife says when she had no idea who this person was “But come, handmaidens, give him a wash and spread a couch for him here, with bedding and coverlets and with shining blankets, so that he can keep warm as he waits for dawn of the golden throne, and early tomorrow you shall give him a bath, anoint him, so that he can sit in the hall beside Telemachos and expect to dine there; and it will be the worse for any of those men who inflicts heart-wasting annoyance on him; he will accomplish nothing here for all his terrible spite […].” This probably how they would treat Odysseus himself if he were to arrive, that just goes to show what kind of people Odysseus keeps around him. This shows that hospitality and the treatment of strangers is the prominent human experience, because there are the seemingly good people treating very well but then the seemingly bad people being very hostile and

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