Feed the stranger before you ask his name

In the first book of the Odyssey a stranger stands at the door of Odysseus's house, and Telemachus is annoyed that nobody has let the guest in (1.119-120). He takes the stranger's right hand and bronze spear and says two lines (1.123-124): χαῖρε, ξεῖνε, παρʼ ἄμμι φιλήσεαι· αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα / δείπνου πασσάμενος μυθήσεαι ὅττεό σε χρή. "Welcome, stranger. You will be treated kindly among us. Then, when you have had your dinner, you will tell us what you need." The stranger is Athena, disguised as Mentes, a chief of the Taphians (1.105). Telemachus doesn't know that, and he doesn't ask until 1.170.

The Odyssey has one rule of hospitality, and four hosts state it in nearly the same words: feed the stranger, then ask who he is. The poem marks the moment the guest eats with a fixed line, "they put their hands to the good things lying ready before them." I counted it in the Greek. It's on 12 lines of the Odyssey and 3 lines of the longer Iliad, once every 1,009 lines against once every 5,229. The word for a shared meal, dais, is on 75 Odyssey lines and 35 Iliad lines. Two places break it, the Cyclops's cave and Odysseus's own house. In the house 108 men have been eating his stores for three years, with a fourth coming on (2.89), and in book 22 they are killed at their tables.

The text is A. T. Murray's Loeb edition from the Perseus Digital Library, 12,107 lines of the Odyssey and 15,687 of the Iliad, cited by the edition's own line numbers. I folded every verse (Unicode NFD, accents and breathings stripped, lowercase) and matched plain substrings, so every count here is a count of lines and can be re-run. The translations are mine.

The Rule, Four Times

Telemachus is the first host. The servants bring water for the hands, bread and wine. The eating line comes at 1.149, and the next line, 1.150, is the poem's other meal formula: "when they had put away desire for drink and food." Twenty lines later he asks τίς πόθεν εἰς ἀνδρῶν, who are you and where from (1.170), and she answers as Mentes, son of Anchialus (1.180).

Nestor is the second. Telemachus reaches Pylos while Nestor's people are feasting on the beach, and he and his companion are given their portions. The sated line is 3.67. Then Nestor says (3.69-70): "now it is better to ask the strangers who they are, since they have had their fill of food." He asks at 3.71: "Strangers, who are you? Where do you sail from over the wet ways?"

Menelaus is the third, at Sparta (4.60-62): "take the food and be glad; after you have dined we will ask who you are; your parents' line is not lost in you." In the next two lines he says that bad men couldn't father sons like these (4.63-64), so he has already read their breeding off their looks. He waits anyway. The eating line is 4.67 and the sated line 4.68.

Eumaeus is the fourth, and he's a slave who keeps his absent master's pigs. The beggar at his gate is that master in disguise. Eumaeus says (14.45-47): "come to the hut, old man, so that when you have had your fill of bread and wine you can say where you are from and what you have suffered." Ten lines later he gives his reason: strangers and beggars all come from Zeus (14.57-58).

Phaeacia is the long form. Odysseus reaches Alcinous's hall in book 7, is seated in the chair of the king's son, and eats (7.169-177). Queen Arete asks "who and whence are you, and who gave you those clothes" (7.237-238) only after the maids have cleared away the dishes (7.232). Her τίς πόθεν εἰς ἀνδρῶν is the same four words Telemachus used at 1.170. Odysseus tells her about Calypso and the wreck and leaves out his name. The next day is a games day and a bard. Alcinous asks for the name at the end of book 8 (8.550), and "I am Odysseus, son of Laertes" comes at 9.19, two books after the first meal.

The Count

A formula is a line the singer, composing aloud, keeps whole because the scene needs it every time. The eating line is a stage direction: when the audience hears it, the guest has been served and the scene can turn from need to talk. Each line it turns up on is a guest who has just been served. In the Odyssey the hands-to-the-food line is at 1.149, 4.67, 4.218, 5.200, 8.71, 8.484, 10.376, 14.453, 15.142, 16.54, 17.98 and 20.256. In the Iliad it is at 9.91, 9.221 and 24.627. The sated line is on 14 Odyssey lines and 7 Iliad lines.

The count folds the text, matches the two formulas and the dais stem, and prints each count, its per-line rate and the three books with the most dais lines.

import unicodedatafrom collections import Counterdef fold(s):    return ''.join(c for c in unicodedata.normalize('NFD', s) if not unicodedata.combining(c)).lower()FORMULAS = {'hands': ['χειρας ιαλλον'], 'sated': ['ποσιος και εδητυος εξ ερον εντο'], 'dais': ['δαιτ', 'δαις', 'δαιθ']}for poem in ['odyssey', 'iliad']:    lines = [l.split('\t', 1) for l in open(f'content/homer/{poem}-grc.txt', encoding='utf-8').read().splitlines()]    for name, stems in FORMULAS.items():        hits = [ref for ref, text in lines if any(s in fold(text) for s in stems)]        print(f'{poem:8} {name:6} {len(hits):3}  one line in {len(lines) / len(hits):,.0f}')    books = Counter(ref.split('.')[0] for ref, text in lines if any(s in fold(text) for s in FORMULAS['dais']))    print(f'{poem:8} dais by book, top three: {books.most_common(3)}')

odyssey  hands   12  one line in 1,009odyssey  sated   14  one line in 865odyssey  dais    75  one line in 161odyssey  dais by book, top three: [('17', 12), ('8', 9), ('3', 7)]iliad    hands    3  one line in 5,229iliad    sated    7  one line in 2,241iliad    dais    35  one line in 448iliad    dais by book, top three: [('1', 6), ('4', 5), ('9', 5)]

Per line, the eating formula is 5.2 times as common in the Odyssey (5,229 divided by 1,009). The sated line is 2.6 times as common (2,241 against 865) and dais 2.8 times (448 against 161). Figure 2.3.1 lays both poems out at one scale, one tick for every line that carries a formula, with the four rule lines marked on the Odyssey.

The obvious objection is that the Iliad is a war poem set on a beach and a battlefield, so of course it has fewer dinners, and the rate only measures the setting. The Iliad has the eating line three times, and each time a guest is sitting under a roof. At 9.91 Agamemnon feeds the elders in his hut, and the embassy to Achilles is chosen after the meal. At 9.221 Achilles feeds that embassy in his own hut. At 24.627 he feeds Priam, who has come by night to ransom Hector's body. The sated line follows on the next line in all three.

The Odyssey's dais lines bunch in three books. Book 17 has 12, book 8 has 9 and book 3 has 7. They're three kinds of table: Nestor's pious feast on the beach in book 3, the Phaeacian court in book 8, and in book 17 the suitors' hall, with Odysseus begging at it.

Who Eats at Whose Table

The suitors break every clause of the rule. They aren't strangers fed by a host. They're neighbours eating a host's stores while the host is away. Telemachus's complaint to the assembly in book 2 is an accounting complaint. They slaughter his oxen, sheep and fat goats and drink his wine, and most of it is wasted (2.55-58). He'd rather the townspeople ate his goods themselves, because then he could go round the town asking for repayment until it was all given back (2.74-78).

Telemachus gives the number in book 16 (16.247-251): 52 young men from Dulichium, 24 from Same, 20 from Zacynthus and 12 from Ithaca, which is 108. With them are a herald, a bard and two servants who carve (16.252-253).

Books 17 to 20 run the beggar test. Odysseus goes round the hall in rags asking for scraps, and the poem records each answer. Telemachus sends him a whole loaf and as much meat as his hands can hold (17.343-345). Amphinomus gives two loaves and drinks his health from a gold cup (18.120-121). Antinous throws a footstool and hits him on the right shoulder (17.462). Ctesippus throws an ox-hoof from a basket (20.299-300), and three lines before it he calls the throw a guest-gift, ξείνιον (20.296).

The reckoning in book 22 happens at the meal. Antinous is lifting a gold two-handled cup when the arrow goes through his throat. His kick shoves the table away and spills the bread and roast meat onto the floor (22.9-21). Eurymachus falls across a table and spills the food and his cup (22.82-86). Figure 1.1.5 counts that killing.

The Cyclops gets the reversed order. Polyphemus asks first, and his question at 9.252 is word for word Nestor's question at 3.71: "Strangers, who are you? Where do you sail from over the wet ways?" Then he seizes two of the men and eats them (9.288-293). At 9.288 the host puts his hands on his guests with ἐπὶ χεῖρας ἴαλλε, the phrase the meal formula uses for guests reaching for the food.

The American Feast Has Two Sources

Two accounts of 1621 survive, and they run almost the same length. Edward Winslow's letter, printed in Mourt's Relation in 1622, is 151 words from "Our harvest being gotten in" to "partakers of our plenty." William Bradford's entry for the same year in Of Plymouth Plantation is 149 words from "They began now to gather in the small harvest they had" to "not feigned but true reports." The counting rule is whitespace-delimited words on each saved paragraph, with footnote markers stripped.

Only Winslow has a meal with guests. The governor sent four men fowling, and in one day they killed enough to serve the company almost a week. Then came "their greatest king, Massasoyt, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted; and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation, and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others."

Bradford's passage never mentions Massasoit, a feast or a guest. It's a provisioning report: the harvest gathered, houses readied for winter, cod and bass, wild fowl and wild turkeys, and about a peck of meal a week for each person.

Neither writer calls it thanksgiving. The word attaches to the event 220 years later, in an editor's footnote. Alexander Young, reprinting Winslow's letter in 1841, wrote "This was the first Thanksgiving, the harvest festival of New England" (Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, p. 231, footnote 3). Henry Martyn Dexter's 1865 reprint carries a similar note.

Measured against Homer's rule, Winslow's gathering runs the other way. The guests are ninety men arriving with their king, not one stranger at a door, and the guests bring the deer. The passage records no order of feeding and asking at all.

Limits

Substring matching on folded text counts lines, not scenes, and one scene can carry both formulas (in 8 of the 12 Odyssey eating lines, 1.149 among them, the sated line follows directly). The dais stem matches the noun and the words formed from it, such as the words for diner and carver. It misses meals named with other words, such as deipnon and dorpon. The Iliad is longer, so every rate here is per line. All of it is one edition's text.

Why Feed First

We usually do it the other way round, with the intake form before the meal and the badge before the door. The Odyssey states the reverse order four times, through a prince, two kings and a slave, and the queen of Phaeacia keeps it without stating it. In a world with no police and no inns, the stranger at the door may be a god, a killer, or a man who will host you one day. Asking first is the order the poem gives to Polyphemus. The 108 men who ate without being asked are killed in book 22, at the tables where they were eating.