I just returned [in late July 2004] from a reading of a new translation 1 of Homer's Odyssey. The translator, Edward McCrorie, organized his reading around the notion of the host-guest-stranger relationship. Guests were strangers who came and were supposed both to act well and to be well treated.
Odysseus was a good guest, the lord of Phaiakia, a good host. The suiters were poor guests, Polyphemus, the Cyclops, a bad host. In the Greek of the time, the same word was used for the three concepts we now distinguish, host, guest, and stranger.
All this reminded me of Roy Rappaport, who argued in Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity 2 that humans came to use rituals as a way to establish conventions. These conventions applied when governmentally enforced law did not exist or could not be enforced — as with a stranger in a strange land in a time before rapid world-wide communications and governmental reach. (McCrorie did not suggest any of this; this is what I wondered.)
If Den Beste is right, as I think he is in many circumstances, single strangers should be welcome. A single man is not likely to steal a community's resources, kill the men, and enslave the women and children.
(Den Beste's argument is that, in any ecology, a period of non-competitive growth comes first. This period lasts so long as unfilled space remains unfilled. For plants and animals, `space' means niches, for businesses, it means markets. For humans it means empty land suitable for colonization.)
At the time Homer was singing (or his works were being pulled together, or maybe even written down), governmentally enforced law did not extend far beyond a city in Greece. (At that time, it did in China, although one law did not yet extend over all of what we now consider Eastern China.) Consequently, in ancient Greece, the conventions for treating strangers or guests were unenforceable by governments, but important for everyday life..
Nowadays, private people are not supposed to kill anyone, except in justified self-defense. Government-employed people are supposed to kill only if ordered as soldiers, or in certain circumstances as prison guards, judges, and the like. In our society, the primary legitimate killers are soldiers, and only in a war.
This restriction on people's freedom — you may smash a fly but not me — is new and not fully accepted. But it is an advance in civilization, since people most of all want security.
But Homer (who may have been a single person or a multitude, a `Bourbaki', whom we now call `Homer') lived in a period of transition. For a society, it was important that guests and hosts both behave well, even if one or the other could readily gain a short term advantage by being bad.
In an earlier book 2, Rappaport said that ritual requires and implies public acceptance. Although private belief is not required, it helps.
The question is how deeply embedded into everyday life in ancient Greece was this convention concerning guests and hosts? Was it a standard upheld by ritual (perhaps in a disguised or secondary form) or was it simply a form of behavior about which people talked? I do not know. McCrorie's analysis suggests to me the latter, but with the relevant rituals vanishing.
Rappaport also said that
Sacred postulates are unfalsifiable and numinous experiences are undeniable. 'In ritual, the unfalsifiable message of the liturgy partakes of the undeniable quality of the numinous: the most abstract and distant of conceptions are bound to the most immediate and substantial of experiences. The unfalsifiable supported by the undeniable yields the unquestionable. This transforms the dubious, the arbitrary, and the conventional into the correct, the necessary, and the natural.' (p 217)
Perhaps enough is known of the past that rituals, if they exist, can be discovered, even if the overt substance disguises the anthropological implications.
In any event, if McCrorie's analysis is correct, the Odyssey is wonderful example of a story about a social convention. In classical Greek, the convention became so powerful, that, as McCrorie said, Homer used the same word for both guest and stranger, `xenos'.
The Odyssey,
by Homer, translated by Edward McCrorie,
2004, The Johns Hopkins University Press,
ISBN 0-8018-6854-8
Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity,
by Roy Rappaport, 1999,
Cambridge University Press,
ISBN 0521296900 paperback
Ecology, Meaning and Religion,
by Roy Rappaport, 1979,
North Atlantic Books,
ISBN 0-913028-54-1 paperback
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