hospitality and the odyssey

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In the Odyssey, the reader is presented to many rituals from the ancient Greek world and the hospitality ritual is one of the most important and complex. This ritual is composed by many element that vary throughout the narrative, creating events that engage the characters in different ways. The distortion of the hospitality rituals and the variation of its elements is what prevents Odysseus and Telemachus from going home.
Hospitality in the Ancient Greek world was not only a tradition, but a sacred ritual. Being hospitable was a way of honoring the gods and respecting the patron of strangers, the god of gods itself, Zeus. Besides, it was believed that the gods would sometimes come to earth to test people’s hospitality and they would often leave without being recognized. The reader is presented to this possibility right in the first book, when Athena, disguised as Mentes, goes to Ithaca and advises Telemachus on learning about his father’s fate. The prince receives the goddess with great hospitality, even though she looks like a stranger:
Pausing beside her there, he clasped her right hand and relieving her at once of her long bronze spear, met her with winged words: ‘Greeting, stranger! here in our house you’ll find a royal welcome.
Have supper first, then tell us what you need. (1.142-146)
The hospitality scenes also set a tone to characters and to the episode being described. Here, Telemachus is immediately recognized as a generous man, worthy of his status as prince of Ithaca and victim of the suitors, that doubt of the stranger’s credibility, an attitude that contrasts to that of the royal prince. Hospitality is also an essential part of what the greeks understood as civilization, receiving a guest properly showed that gue...

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...raged departure prayer. Unlike the traditional prayer, however, Polyphemus asks for Ithaca’s king journey to be even longer and full of pain. Poseidon, then, hearing his son’s prayer, prevents Odysseus from going home for many more years after that, being the main reason for his journey home to last 20 years.
These long travels that the heroic characters in the Odyssey are submitted are, therefore, direct consequences of the their interaction to the unknown world that they come to meet. The hospitality episodes are an essential part of the narrative as it is through them that their journey is lengthen. They are also an indicator of the characters’s integrity and through their analysis, they initiate an important reflexion on greek culture and values in social interactions, one of the aspects that are most distinct between the ancient world and the contemporaneity.

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