Unfortunately, we all know what “xenophobia” means. Derived from the ancient Greek words for “stranger” and “fear,” it’s defined as the fear or hate of the foreign or alien person or people. It may have racial, ethnic, or regional/nationalist characteristics, and, in its most extreme, it can lead to murderous violence against “the Other”—the immigrant, the Indigenous, the out-group to the dominant in-group. Movements, parties, and tyrants thrive on xenophobia—the word might be specifically Hellenic, but the sentiment is universal.
Yet, as classical scholar Steven Shankman reminds us, there’s something that is perhaps equally as old in human nature: xenophilia. This is the love of the stranger, or, more simply put, hospitality.
Shankman explores how xenophilia is fundamental to some of our oldest stories, including those from the Hebrew Bible and the Homeric epics. He begins by quoting Emmanuel Levinas, the “great and radical” French “philosopher on the nature of ethical obligation.” Wrote Levinas in 1959, “Monotheism [Judaism, Christianity, Islam] is not an arithmetic of the divine…. It is, rather, a school of xenophilia and anti-racism.”
Taking the case of Abraham’s rushing to meet three strangers even though he is in great pain, the rabbis of the Talmud wrote that “Hospitality to wayfarers is greater than receiving the Divine Presence.” Shankman writes that another way of interpreting this is that communion with the divine takes second place to communion with the stranger.
As it happens, one of those three wayfarers come to visit Abraham was God. The point is: you never know. For the Greeks, the stranger could be Zeus in disguise. Or someone else.
When Odysseus returns home after all his wanderings, he disguises himself as a beggar. If the mark of character is how you treat the stranger, a beggar presents the toughest case. Homer wasn’t fooling around: those who aid the beggar are rewarded, those who mistreat him—the loutish suitors who have long besieged Penelope—are killed.
Earlier, Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, is well received as he travels searching for word of his father. When he shows up incognito with a friend at the gates of Menelaus and Helen’s place in Sparta, the guard won’t let him in. In Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of the Odyssey, quoted by Shankman, Menelaus calls the guard an idiot “talking like a child of ten” and asks him, “Could we have made it home again—and Zeus/give us no more hard roving!—if other men/had never fed us, given us lodging? Bring/these men to be our guests; unhitch their team!”
Telemachus will, in turn, offer sanctuary to a man on the run—and not just any man, but an admitted murderer fleeing those searching for vengeance. Telemachus gives him refuge anyway.
But before all this, still in the heat of the Trojan War, the mighty Greek warrior Achilles gets an unexpected visit from Priam, King of Troy. The king has come for the body of his son, Hector, killed by Achilles in revenge for the killing of Achilles’s bestie, Patroclus. “Home” here is a tent on the battlefield. The visitor, the stranger, the enemy, comes as a supplicant to the killer. An old man now, Priam asks Achilles to think of his own aged father. How can Achilles, whose rage has powered the whole poem, not relent?
Of course, the entire Homeric craziness begins because of a violation of the rules of hospitality. As a xeinos, or guest-friend, of Menelaus, Paris broke the rules by running off with Menelaus’s wife, Helen. That’s no way to treat a host; a decade of war and then a decade of Odysseus’s wanderings begin with that one break of the reciprocal stranger/host relationship.
Shankman ends his exploration of the importance of xenophilia with a quote from Emily Wilson’s introduction to her 2018 translation of the Odyssey. There’s a stranger outside your home, writes Wilson, “old, ragged, and dirty. He is tired. He has been wandering, homeless, for a long time, perhaps many years. Invite him inside. You do not know his name. He may be a thief. He may be a murderer. He may be a god.”
Treat the stranger as you hope to be treated. The Wikipedia entry on the Golden Rule cites variations of this basic ethic from Egyptian, Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Roman, and Yoruba texts, from the three Abrahamic religions, as well as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, and so on.
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