Complicating the Xenia Contrast in Odyssey 9 and 14
A candidate is writing a 45-minute commentary on Homer, Odyssey 9 and 14. The question asks: 'To what extent does Homer use the contrast between Polyphemus and Eumaeus to define civilised behaviour?' The candidate's plan lists: Polyphemus eats guests; Eumaeus welcomes Odysseus; therefore Homer approves of xenia. The teacher warns that this is a checklist, not an argument, and points to three details: Polyphemus' speech in Book 9 where he asks who the strangers are; the fact that Odysseus is himself a guest who lies; and Eumaeus' own status as a slave. The candidate must decide whether the contrast is simple or whether Homer complicates it. She has 700 words and must use at least two passages. Her teacher has annotated the plan with the words 'Where is the argument?'
1. Construct a thesis that answers 'to what extent' without reducing the poem to a simple moral opposition. Use at least two specific details from Books 9 and 14.
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A strong thesis is: Homer uses the Polyphemus–Eumaeus contrast to establish a norm of xenia, but he complicates it by making the returning guest a deceptive narrator and the ideal host a slave. The contrast is evaluative rather than a simple morality tale. In Book 9 Polyphemus asks who the strangers are and whether they are traders or wanderers, but then rejects Zeus's protection of suppliants and eats his guests; his question parodies the host's duty to inquire. In Book 14 Eumaeus welcomes Odysseus despite his own poverty, gives him food and a cloak, and prays to the nymphs; his hospitality is genuine but constrained by servile status. Meanwhile Odysseus repays him with a false Cretan tale. The reader measures civilisation by treatment of strangers, but also sees that the civilised side includes deception and hierarchy. That double vision is the answer to 'to what extent'.
2. A classmate argues that because Polyphemus is a monster, his violation of xenia tells us nothing about human ethics. Evaluate this objection.
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The objection has force but overstates it. Polyphemus is a monster, yet Homer makes him recognisably human in speech and social organisation: he lives in a cave, herds flocks, and refers to the laws of the Cyclopes. His violation of xenia is not merely zoological; it dramatises what happens when the guest-host relation is replaced by raw power. The poem also shows human characters failing the same norm, since the suitors in Ithaca devour another man's household. The Cyclops is therefore a limit case of a human problem, not an irrelevant alien. A good answer should concede that the contrast is heightened by monstrosity, but argue that the heightening clarifies the norm rather than removing it from human ethics.