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Hospitality in the Iliad

 

            The Iliad portrays the laws of hospitality in the plot and in its background. These rules govern the relationship and behavior of hosts and guests in ancient Greece. The nucleus of these laws was the treatment towards another whether a guest or a host. If you were hosting someone or a certain someone calls on you to talk, you are to treat that person with kindness and a certain extent of respect. In the plot of the Iliad Achilles receives Agamemnon's" "gift bearers" or negotiators to his tent and hears them out, even though he is still raging with anger. Also in the books background, Zeus believes that this hospitality is very important and watches over these happenings very carefully throughout time. Next we have the behavior of the guest. They are to respect their host at all times, as did Odysseus, Nestor, and Ajax when they went to Achilles tent. No man demanded or tries to argue Achilles, but simply did what they came to do and left. To show how much this meant to the Greeks, Diomedes would not fight Hippolochus on the battlefield on account of Hippolochus" grandfather was once a guest of Doimedes grandfather (b.6, ls.257-58). Zuess even sided with the Greeks in the Trojan War on account of Paris violating the rules of hospitality when he took Helen from Menelaus" house when he was not there. You could go so far as to say that the Trojan War and the Iliad came about because of the violation of the rules of hospitality by Paris. For the Greeks to go to war with 1,372 ships filled with men ready to die, in order to right this wrong, shows how passionate these men believed in the laws of hospitality.
            


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