Food, Drink and Hospitality: The Homeric Shift Within Homer’s famous epic entitled The Odyssey, there is heavy reliance on the motifs of food, drink and universal hospitality. Throughout the book, Homer uses food and drink to exemplify negative qualities such as over indulgence and gluttony. By means of characters such as the Phaeacian royalty, The Suitors, and Polyphemus, Homer creates the notion of consequence in relation to hospitality. However, when regarding the relationship between food, drink and hospitality in the fourteenth book, the dynamic is shifted from a centrally negative aspect to a particularly heart warming and symbolic reunion between the withered protagonist and his trusted servant. To understand why the fourteenth …show more content…
After showering Odysseus with food, wine and gifts, and aiding him with his departure (Homer, 189), the innocent people are punished severely by Poseidon for aiding the hero home. Shortly after the team of Phaeacians return to their island, Poseidon crushes their ship with the flat of his hand to the bottom of the ocean. While this does exemplify the currency of hospitality, as Odysseus is impressed by their processions, it epitomizes the atmosphere surrounding hospitality, present in this epic work. It must also be realized that the protagonist not only bears the brutality of these events, but guiltily mourns for those he has lost due to the ramifications of a given people’s generosity. In other words, Homer stresses the social importance of exhibiting hospitality, but also demonstrates the toxicity it produces and the consequences that follow. Similarly in the case of Polyphemus, the use of food is poignant. He eats members of Odysseus’ crew whole, and burps up flesh when he becomes too drunk to stay awake. This shows the particularly dark side of this motif. This can be seen through the passage: “he bolted them down like a mountain lion- left no scrap, devoured entrails, flesh and bones, marrow and all!”(Homer, 221). Once again, Homer concocts an undercurrent of fatalistic stigma towards eating, drink and