In the starkest terms, a person’s goodness in ancient Greek texts is in part defined by their willingness to play host: Telemachus is noble because he takes in strangers and beggars and feeds them; the suitors are not because they kick and mock those they deem beneath them. The Trojan War, according to Greek myth, begins because of a violation of xenia: the Trojan prince Paris, while staying as a guest in the Greek king Menelaus’ house, steals away his host’s wife, Helen. The Greeks’ invasion of Troy is a reaction to that violation. (Though, as Damon’s Odysseus points out in the film, Helen’s abduction is largely used as an excuse for Menelaus’ power-hungry brother, Agamemnon, to raid the rich city of Troy.) And characters throughout the story talk warily about the “Sea People,” pirates who do not obey “Zeus’ Law.” Historians theorize that, among several other factors, these sea peoples plundering the Mediterranean helped usher in a Dark Age where the ability to read and write was lost in Ancient Greece.
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