The poem’s episodes can be seen as a sequence of case studies in the concept of xenia. In the first four books—known as the Telemachy, the story of Telemachus—Odysseus’ young son grapples with the suitors, who are presented as bad guests: they have taken over Odysseus’ household without his permission and are abusing its resources and inhabitants. By contrast, Telemachus shows that he himself is capable of being a good, polite guest who is more or less able to overcome his crippling shyness with the magical help of Athena. He thanks his hosts appropriately, and does not overstay his welcome. He manages to be a good host also, when he welcomes a stranger in need, Theoclymenus, on board his ship. He even manages to circumvent a tricky dilemma of etiquette—how to avoid having to make a second visit with touchy, long-winded Nestor, without being rude to the old man—although only at the cost of putting his friend, Nestor’s son, in a difficult position.
Telemachus’ visits to the homes of Nestor and Menelaus provide contrasting examples of elite hospitality. The first is old-fashioned, pious, rich in horses and sons, presided over by moralizing old Nestor. The second is piled high with newly acquired treasure, brought by blustering, self-pitying Menelaus, and the dominant figure is beautiful, magical Helen, who has frightening drugs that can take away all pain and grief. But in both Pylos and Sparta, the visit follows a set pattern. The guest is welcomed, washed by slave women, given an honorable and comfortable place to sit, and offered food and wine. Only after he has eaten and had some wine is he asked to tell his story. The visitor is then given lodging for the night, and when it is time to leave, the host provides gifts and some practical help with the onward journey. As Menelaus pompously declares, “To force a visitor to stay / is just as bad as pushing him to go.” Providing help with the next leg of the trip—pompe in Greek, “sending,” a common word and essential concept in the Odyssey—is thus an important component in hospitality. Nestor, for example, gives Telemachus a horse-drawn chariot to get to Sparta, and sends along his youngest son, Pisistratus, as a companion.
Odysseus is not so lucky in some of his hosts. We first see him suffering the burdens of a hospitality even more insistently lavish than that of Nestor. Calypso gives her human guest more than enough of everything a visitor could ask for, except the final crucial ingredient: pompe—the ability to get away. When, thanks to divine intervention, Calypso finally lets Odysseus build a raft and be on his way—an unorthodox “sending” in which the guest has to construct his own means of transportation—his next hosts are challenging in different ways. The shipwrecked, naked stranger finds himself rescued by a young princess of marriageable age, among a nation of sailors, and has to muster all his powers of flattery and politeness. Nausicaa, the Phaeacian princess, warns Odysseus that her people are not welcoming to strangers; yet the court of Arete and Alcinous seems in many ways ideally hospitable. Odysseus is bathed, wined and dined, entertained with poetic song, and given the chance to tell his own story at great length. He watches and then is put to the test in the Phaeacian contests, performing far better than expected—an episode that anticipates the later challenges and contests back home in Ithaca. The Phaeacians then give him the most lavish possible pompe—a magical boat that sails itself—at a high personal cost to themselves; Poseidon punishes them by crushing their boat with a mountain hurled into the sea, thus blocking their island from the outside world forever after and curtailing any future Phaeacian generosity.
The limits and antonyms of xenia are explored in Odysseus’ account to the Phaeacian king of his wanderings to other fantastical, monstrous places he has visited. Each of these hosts seems to offer a perversion or a frightening exaggeration of the ordinary modes of hospitality. Aeolus, the god of the winds, provides Odysseus with a means of transportation or “sending” that is more powerful than he or his men can handle: the bag of winds, once opened, blasts the ship back in entirely the wrong direction. A normal host may provide his guests with poetic and musical entertainment before he goes to sleep; the Sirens entice their visitors with a song so fascinating that they want to stay forever, and never go home again. Many of these hosts pervert the ordinary way that guests are given food and drink. The Lotus-Eaters share a plant that makes those who eat it forget all thoughts of going home. In order to meet the dead, Odysseus himself has to act like a peculiar kind of host, welcoming them into the world of the living—by allowing them to drink blood from a ditch. The witchlike goddess Circe provides her guests with a magical drink that turns them into pigs.
Several of those whom Odysseus visits—the giant Polyphemus, the gigantic Laestrygonians, the thirsty whirlpool Charybdis, and the six-headed Scylla—are defined as monstrous because they do not feed their guests: instead, they eat them (or, in the case of Charybdis, gulp them down like drink). The majority of Odysseus’ men are devoured alive. Some are eaten by the Cyclops; many more are skewered in the water by the Laestrygonians and devoured, like fish. Later, Odysseus watches Scylla eating six of his men and hears them “still screaming, / still reaching out to me in their death throes.”
After this climactic moment, the ship—the last left from Odysseus’ fleet—sails directly on to Thrinacia, the island of the Sun God (Helius), and is becalmed there. Supplies dwindle and the men grow hungry. While Odysseus is absent, taking a nap in a cave, the men kill and eat the Cattle of the Sun, although they know that it is forbidden. This momentous choice is made for understandable reasons: the men are hungry and desperate, and they choose to risk the anger of the gods rather than endure the pain and slow humiliation of death by starvation. The ringleader of the insurrection, Eurylochus, speaks bravely, urging the others not to worry about the Sun God’s response:
“If he is so angry
about these cows that he decides to wreck
our ship, and if the other gods agree—
I would prefer to drink the sea and die
at once, than perish slowly, shriveled up
here on this desert island.” (12.347–52)
The language is inspiring, as if from a rousing battle speech. We may well wonder what exactly is wrong with Eurylochus’ suggestion. The episode hints at an important idea in the poem: that the willingness to die for honor, which is valued so highly on the battlefield, is not always useful in these strange new worlds. Military valor, in the world of The Odyssey, risks looking too much like impatience. The poem shows us the rewards that come to the “much-enduring” or “long-suffering” protagonist through his willingness to wait for the right moment to act, without ever giving up the goal. Moreover, the determination of this crew member to eat even forbidden foods, and to drink even “the sea,” represents a kind of self-assertion that is out of keeping with his place both in society and in the narrative. He is usurping the leadership role of Odysseus.
This act of forbidden consumption is a terrible mistake, which condemns the men to death and deprives them of their chance of getting home. Helius, the Sun God, responds to the eating of his cattle as if the men had taken a bite out of the god himself, and Zeus backs him up by drowning them all. Eating is important in The Odyssey, and eating the wrong things or eating in the wrong way results in violence or death.