Hospitality In The Odyssey

In our modern day, there are plenty of different ways that a person can show hospitality towards a guest whether it be a stranger or friend. Having only lived in the United States, I have found myself to be treated most graciously by my friends, but every so often, I do find myself to be lost in a friends house. Every person was taught certain morals as a child that they now use in their adult lives, but for some people, hospitality has been thought to be just letting them come into the house. In the Odyssey, so far, we as the readers have come to see how hospitality can be very well done. Whether it be Telemachus or Odysseus traveling and staying at places, they were served at the finest level even though they were complete strangers.
Therefore, the representation of hospitality in the Odyssey reflects both a beneficial and contradictory side that many characters are treated too. In the life of Odysseus or Telemachus, the traveling that they did was brutal and with many of the different civilizations being so far apart, the hospitality helped make the traveling not so bad. “Dear guest, will this offend you, if I speak”(Book 1, 195)? Telemachus has such respect for guests that he even asked Athena if he could speak. The poem is started off by Telemachus noticing Athena arriving at the doors of his house where he greets her with food and gifts even though Athena is just a stranger to him. What makes this so fascinating is that Telemachus is just a young man who probably did not get his hospitality from Odysseus. Telemachus either inherited politeness or learned from Penelope before she started to feel all melancholy of Odysseus being gone. Athena loves what Telemachus has done for her and this hospitality gives Athena more pride in wanting to help Telemachus and his journey to find Odysseus. Now in the land of Sparta, where Menelaus resides, Telemachus and Pisistratus are greeted to a feast. “Could we have made it home again-and Zeus give us no more hard roving!- if other men had never fed us, given us lodging? Bring these men to be our guests: unhitch their team”(Book 4 35-39)! Helen tells Menelaus that because of their past with receiving food from Zeus, she feels like
The negative scenes of hospitality can be seen in the suitors in Odysseus' house. Telemachus and Penelope are struggling still with the loss of Odysseus and are not too sure what they need to do. The suitors now think they are the men of the house and so they barge in every day and take what they want. “Now they laid hands upon the ready feast and thought of nothing more”(Book 1 185-186). That becomes very frustrating when strangers feel like they can just come over and eat food with no respect for who's house it is. Hospitality is suppose to be thoughtful and with great sincerity, but the suitors have no respect for Telemachus. Another negative instance of hospitality was Circe turning Odysseus' men into pigs. Odysseus would have never thought that his men would be turned into pigs, but luckily he was not transformed and Athena helped him in this terrible situation. Now that Odysseus has experienced poor hospitality, he can move forward in his journey and figure out when to use others for either food or even getting a ship. We are seeing in the Odyssey how hospitality can help a person or group and then also negatively hurt the family of Penelope and Telemachus or Odysseus and his men. Looking back at what I found in each of the different hospitality