Greek friendliness and Odysseus

February 26, 2009:

I wonder if the following doesn't shed light on the mystery of the hospitality ethic of the ancients in the Odyssey and the relationship between Odysseus and his crews and fellow-warriors. It is written by the great British travel writer, Patrick Leigh-Fermor, who wrote "Mani." It is from his book, "Roumeli - Travels in Northern Greece," John Murray, about 1966, page 53. Since the Michos family hails from southern Roumeli, in the mountains just above the Gulf of Corinth, this book was obligatory reading for me. The author has spent several days with nomadic shepherds of the Sarakatsan "tribe," a lot of it in cold and smoky tents and shacks, some time in the late '30's and some time in the mid-'50's, when a lot of this was already in the past. Certainly the attitudes of overseas British, just coming out of Empire, have changed, as has the culture of Western Europe alluded to below, which would have thought these nomads to be quaint and marginal at best. The Englishman has lost his reserve (it's a tragedy), and nary a Greek can be found today who is so open (it's a pity), although they are still ahead of whoever is in second place.

Fermor writes:

"I had begun to grasp, in the past few weeks, one of the great and uncovenanted delights of Greece; a pre-coming -of-age present in my case: a direct and immediate link, friendly and equal on either side, between human beings, something which melts the barriers of hierarchy and background and money and, except for a few tribal and historic feuds, politics and nationality as well. It is not a thing which functions in the teeth of convention, but in an almost prelapsarian unawareness of its existence. Self-consciousness, awe and condescension (and their baleful remedy of forced egalitarianism), and the feudal hangover and the post-Fall-of-the-Bastille flicker - all the gloomy factors which limit the range of life and deoxygenize the air of Western Europe, are absent. Existence, these glances say, is a torment, an enemy, an adventure and a joke which we are in league to undergo, outwit, exploit, enjoy on equal terms as accomplices, fellow-hedonists and fellow-victims. A stranger begins to realize that the armour which has been irking him and the arsenal he has been lugging about for half a lifetime are no longer needed. Miraculous lightness takes their place."