People often say—certainly my old classics professors did—that the entire Homeric world, the entirety of classical antiquity, really, is founded upon this idea of hospitality, this practice of xenia. But that’s not quite it. The Homeric world is founded not on hospitality but on the absolute limits of hospitality: who expects hospitality and never gives it, who deserves hospitality and never gets it. The idea of hospitality here is really an idea of civilization. Xenia is the way to describe what it meant, for the people within that civilization, to be a guest; what it meant to ask for favor
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