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Examples Of Xenia In The Odyssey

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Hospitality not only is a major theme in ancient literature, but it also is significant in our world today. Hospitality is bringing someone into your home and providing him or her with shelter, food and water. How you develop a relationship with a guest and take care of a guest are key points in hospitality that are known as xenia. Xenia specifically is the guest/host relationship. Xenia is shown throughout many ancient literature stories in both good ways and bad ways. The hospitality shown throughout the Odyssey is different in many ways than hospitality today. People today do not tend to show the same amount of hospitality as the people did in Homer’s time. The Odyssey contains examples of both bad and good guest/host relationships. …show more content…

Other reasons why hospitality might differ today is that in Homer’s time people wanted to please the gods. People in Homer’s time did many things to get the gods on their side and because they believed in fate, so hospitality could have been an effort to obtain a better fate and be viewed favorably by the gods. Little things also have changed about hospitality since Homer’s time. For example, if a friend needs or wants to stay with you and your family, you would take the friend in for a little bit and help them out, but after a while you would get tired of him or her. You would want to stop supplying everything to the friend and spending your money on the friend instead of for the benefit of you and your family. It seems as though modern people do show hospitality towards others, but in a different way than those in Homeric times. Now it is not assumed that people have to provide food, protection, and shelter to a stranger who randomly arrives at a person’s front door. Because the world today is a lot more advanced than in Homer’s time, food, water, and shelter are a lot more accessible, and people do not feel like they need to take advantage of strangers, like they did when Homer was

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