Professor Edith Hall
speaker
337 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 13 Jul
Professor Edith Hall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So this was an absolute obsession and how the Greeks dealt with it was that they created what they called an unwritten law, absolute imperative, religious imperative, that it was sacrilege to harm either a vulnerable person who came into your community or
Or somebody who was looking after you in another community when you got there.
If you did, you would be blasted by Zeus's thunderbolt just like that.
And this was so strongly felt.
We also know there were thousands of violations of this.
Right.
But the Greeks told stories about how people who had violated it, they might not get punished.
But look, seven generations after, all their children died of the plague.
So they created stories to support the terror of harming an alien.
The word hospitality ludicrously misrepresents this life or death situation.
The Odyssey, more than any other text in ancient Greece, repeatedly stages scenes of people arriving in an alien community with examples of how to do it well and examples of how to do it very badly.
Now, Odysseus has absolutely no right to go into that Cyclops cave.
People don't say this often enough.
He had not been invited.
He's already broken the protocols.
Okay, the cyclops overreacts by actually eating.
some of the invaders.
But that is an example of how to do it badly, both as host and as guest.
Whereas when you get to Phaeacia, the utopian island, there's an example of how to do it very well indeed.
Both host and guest behave extremely well, give presence to each other, and part on wonderful terms.
Showing 141–160 of 337 · page 8 of 17
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