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Migration and Society: Advances in Research 1 (2018): 7–21 © Berghahn Books
doi:10.3167/arms.2018.010103
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Hospitality
A Timeless Measure of Who We Are?
El ena Isayev
䡲 ABSTRACT: is article provides a historical perspective to understand better whether
hospitality persists as a measure of society across contexts. Focusing on Homer and
later Tragedians, it charts ancient literature’s deep interest in the tensions of balancing
obligations to provide hospitality and asylum, and the responsibilities of well-being
owed to host-citizens by their leaders. Such discourse appears central at key transfor-
mative moments, such as the Greek polis democracy of the h century BCE, hospi-
tality becoming the marker between civic society and the international community,
confronting the space between civil and human rights. At its center was the question
of: Who is the host? e article goes on to question whether the seventeenth-century
advent of the nation state was such a moment, and whether in the twenty- rst century
we observe a shi towards states’ treatment of their own subjects as primary in measur-
ing society, with hospitality becoming the exception to be explained.
䡲 KEYWORDS: asylum, borders, citizenship, hospitality, human-rights, refugeehood,
statelessness, UN
Xenia—hospitality—is at the core of Homer’s seemingly timeless epic, recounting Odysseus’s
return from a battle-worn Troy to his home in Ithaca during the distant mythical Bronze Age of
the twel h century.1 Driving this Odyssey, one of the oldest narratives to survive from the ancient
Mediterranean, is the encounter between the host and guest—o en an unknown stranger. e
actions and decisions taken over the threshold, whether in welcome or repulsion, serve to posi-
tion society within a moral framework, and simultaneously re/de ne the framework itself. One
of the underlying concerns of this article is to understand better the extent to which hospitality
persists as a measure of society across di erent contexts. Ancient literature reveals a forensic
interest in the tensions of balancing the obligation to provide hospitality and asylum, under-
written by the gods (as it is perhaps today by the UN), and the responsibilities of security and
well-being owed to the citizens of the host community by their leaders. As such, it is also an
expression of the ambivalent role of those in power as representatives of the common will. is
8 䡲 Elena Isayev
article provides a snapshot of instances when the discourse of hospitality becomes central to the
articulation of community and autonomy, especially during transformative moments such as
the emergence of the Greek polis and its city-state citizenship in the h century BCE. It traces a
shi from the society of Homeric epic—based around elite networks—when asylum was sought
at household thresholds, to that of the city-state when giving refuge became the prerogative of
the community as a whole. In this later period, the challenges and opportunities of encounter
transform hospitality into a marker between civic society and the international community.
ey expose the space between citizen rights and universal rights. How this is played out in
more contemporary periods will be addressed in the nal section of the article. It will re ect
on the potency of hospitality as a measure of society at the advent of the nation state in the
seventeenth century, and in the period of severe displacement and extreme border controls of
the twenty- rst century. e aim here is not to o er a comparison between ancient and modern
practices, or to suggest a progressive or degenerative trajectory. Rather, the longue durée per-
spective is to position present concerns within a broader discourse, exposing the transience of
current conventions, and in so doing contribute to new understandings and imaginaries.2
Ancient Contexts
In the surviving writings of the ancient inhabitants who lived around the Mediterranean, there
is little interest in human mobility as a topic in itself. Migration as a general phenomenon does
not appear as a matter of concern, either in terms of security or for the purposes of management
and control (Isayev 2017a). Perhaps this is not surprising, considering the novelty of our mod-
ern conception of immigration—understood as a move across a national border for the purpose
of permanent residence—which only took hold in the early 1800s (Shumsky 2008; ompson
2003: 195). It brought with it a fear of displacement, overcrowding, and a negative perception
of the incoming migrant. e institution of the passport soon followed, which became a mech-
anism for criminalizing unauthorized movement, and allowed for the creation of an increas-
ingly elaborate border control industry (Torpey 2000). ere is nothing of this scale from the
ancient Mediterranean. Anything resembling immigration statistics is conspicuously absent in
the surviving record and there is little evidence for any state boundary checkpoints where such
data could have been collected. is is despite a sophisticated system of commercial treaties,
taxation, and trade duties, which required monitoring and reporting. Such activities were con-
ducted in a world with no national borders, and no regional maps-to-scale on which they could
be drawn. at is not to say that there was not a persistent fear of conquest, colonial enterprise,
expulsion, displacement, or an interest in the outsider. But mobility in itself was not articulated
as a distinct entity separate from the practices of the everyday. Scholarship has shown that in the
ancient world it was recognized as being ongoing and cyclical (Horden and Purcell 2000; Isayev
2017a; Tacoma 2016). Hence, we struggle to nd any single term either in Ancient Greek or in
Latin that categorizes all those on the move in the same way as the current usage of “migrant”
does in English.3 Transitor is the Latin term that comes closest, but it only emerged at the end
of the Roman Imperial period, developing through the Middle Ages,4 at a time when concepts
of immobility became associated with virtue (Horden and Purcell 2000: 384; Pottier 2009). e
appearance of such terminology signals a change (in this case pejorative) in the conceptualiza-
tion of mobility and the perception of those on the move.
In terms of hospitality, in the context of people seeking refuge in the ancient Mediterranean,
technically it was not the entry into the land under the jurisdiction of another community that
was sought a er, but subsistence, patronage, and protection in its broadest sense. e likeli-
Hospitality 䡲 9
hood of attaining refuge would in large part depend on the extent of preceding connections
and relationships with the hosts. Some people would have already been “known” to the hosts,
meaning they already had ties of kinship or xenia, and hence were part of reciprocal networks
of protection, even if those were ancestral. Ship merchants, for example, such as the eighth-
century BCE Corinthian exile Demaratus, could call on friends and contacts to provide assis-
tance. In Demaratus’s case, the Tarquinians of Italy, with whom he had traded for years, allowed
him and his entourage to make Tarquinii their new home, and his o spring became one of the
rst kings of Rome (Dionysius of Halicarnassus 3.46–49; Livy 1.34–35; with discussion in Isayev
2017a: chapter 3). is article does not focus on such privileged “outsiders” but rather on the
“unknown” strangers, who rely on supplication—hiketeia—to gain refuge. It considers the role
and predicament of such suppliants who are not part of their potential host’s networks, and who
lack the means of providing reciprocal hospitality, having only services to o er in lieu (o en
military), and possibly not even that.
e hosts, in granting refuge, could distinguish between accessing the land and accessing the
membership privileges of the community that occupied that land. Hence the possibility of gain-
ing the status of a resident alien—metic—who, in h-century BCE Athens, had certain privi-
leges and duties but without citizenship (Kasimis 2013, forthcoming). is status was the likely
outcome of the successful plea by the Suppliant Women in Aeschylus’s tragedy (Bakewell 2013:
58, 103–105, 121–125). Centuries later, the Roman statesman Cicero, in his De O ciis (3.11.47),
expressed the distinction more explicitly, by stating that while “it is right not to permit the rights
of citizenship to one who is not a citizen . . . to debar foreigners from using the city is clearly
inhuman.”5 Such a distinction would become di cult to articulate with the advent of the nation
state from the seventeenth century onwards, once territory and membership overlapped. e
resulting “old trinity of state-people-territory,” as Hannah Arendt ([1951] 1968: 358) referred to
it, created a particular form of statelessness (Gundogdu 2015: 2–5), in which the dimension of
physical placedness became part of the di culty in accessing human rights.
A Measure of Early Ancient Society
Some of the most recognizable episodes from the ancient world in which hospitality is chosen
explicitly as a measure of society are to be found in the early stories of divine visitations. ey
are in part about the importance of hospitality rituals; more signi cantly, they also demonstrate
the way in which responses to guests and suppliants served to articulate the nature of individ-
uals and communities. In Homer’s Odyssey, the hero’s son Telemachus does not disappoint the
goddess Athena when she arrives disguised as a family friend, during Odysseus’s long absence
from home (Homer, Odyssey, Book 1 at 115–124). e young man proves to be a model host,
even under the tyranny of the suitors who have entrenched themselves in the house, consuming
the family’s resources as they wait in hope of gaining his mother’s hand. e story foreshadows
their punishment to come, and the favors which Athena will grant to Telemachus and his father.
Composed around the same period, the infamous biblical story of Sodom recounts how Lot
alone welcomed the strangers into his home, unaware of their divine status and their mission to
nd but 10 righteous men in the city (Genesis 19.1–38). Lot’s unequivocal hospitality saved him
from the divine wrath that was to destroy Sodom. It is starkly juxtaposed with the threatening
treatment received by the visitors from the city’s other inhabitants.
Most commentators of this story focus on Lot’s extreme act in trying to prevent the Sod-
omites from harming his guests by o ering them his virgin daughters instead (Jipp 2013: 145).
It seems beyond comprehension. Lot’s story is that of a patriarch who is able to o er his daugh-
10 䡲 Elena Isayev
ters to the Sodomites to protect the guests, hence it is gendered in a particular way. We might
compare it to the predicament of the 50 Danaids in Aeschylus’s tragedy of the Suppliant Women
written several centuries later. As discussed below, these daughters of Danaeus seek refuge to
avoid a forced marriage and precisely the type of acts which Lot is willing to endure to protect
the guests. ere is no question or concern about the agency of the daughters in the story of
Lot. Conversely, in Aeschylus’s tragedy, produced against the backdrop of Classical Athens in
the h century BCE, the ight of the Danaids from Egypt to Argos becomes a challenge to
patriarchal frameworks. It is the daughters who drive the action of the play, despite the presence
of their father whose inability to protect them in Egypt has forced him to accompany them in
seeking asylum. ere is much more to explore in the way that hospitality is gendered, exposed
in the divergence of these two episodes alone, and we will return to this brie y below. In broader
terms, the biblical account is a discourse on the extremes of unconditional hospitality and its
use as a measure of virtue. It hones in on the struggle of balancing the obligation to protect the
outsider and that owed to the members of one’s own household and community.
It is the im/possibility of such hyperbolic hospitality that is of interest to Derrida, who uses
the Homeric epics to explore its extremes (Derrida [1997] 2000: 3–5, 15, 22). Within them,
especially in the Odyssey, hospitality is not merely positioned as pivotal to the culture, it pro-
vides the spectrum for its measure, from the barbaric to the civilized. For those who know the
story in Book 9, the image of the Cyclops Polyphemus proceeding to eat the guests—Odysseus
and his comrades—acts as an enduring symbol of a bad host, his name becoming synonymous
with barbarism. He is unmoved by the evocation of Zeus as the protector and avenger of sup-
pliants, and the threats of divine vengeance on those who transgress the rules of hospitality
(Homer, Odyssey, Book 9 at 265–280). e episode also serves to demonstrate the barbarism
of the Cyclopeans as a whole. In contrast, Book 7 portrays the welcome that Odysseus receives
at the royal house of Arete and Alkinoos on Scheria, which is legendary. ese nobles take in
the shipwrecked stranger who has nothing to o er but his bare life, having just washed up on
the shore. Nevertheless, he is cared for and given a place at the princely table, before even being
asked his name or where he is from.
Recounted in this familiar cursory way, these two accounts appear as archetypes of good and
bad hosting, but once the details of these encounters are examined they become less so, and the
agency of others begins to play a greater role, not least that of the guest. Within the Polyphemus
story, the rules of host–guest relations were rst broken not by the Cyclops, but by Odysseus
and his men who entered the house uninvited and began to help themselves to what they found
there without permission. Viewed from this perspective, they appear less as mistreated guests
and more as raiders who got their due punishment. ey may even share some characteristics
with the parasitic suitors who consume the resources of Odysseus’s own house in Ithaca while
he is away. In Scheria too there are other elements at play. at the destitute Odysseus is able to
reach the center of Alkinoos’s royal house to fall at Arete’s knees in supplication is because of
divine intervention. Athena, looking out for her favorite hero, gives Arete’s daughter Nausicaa
the courage to approach Odysseus when she nds him on the shore, and to direct him to her
parents’ house. en the goddess veils him as he makes his way through the city and over the
threshold, until he arrives in their presence.
Whether someone in such a destitute condition would have been otherwise allowed to enter
the royal household and receive such hospitality becomes questionable. Furthermore, we are
told that the reason Odysseus cannot just walk through the town openly is that its inhabi-
tants are likely to be hostile to strangers. eir hostility is explained by the relative isolation of
Scheria, implying that perhaps they were not used to seeing strangers in their midst. is may
go some way in highlighting the wisdom and generosity of Scheria’s elite rulers, but as a general
Hospitality 䡲 11
comment on society’s non-elite as being more hostile to strangers, it is problematic. One of the
other exemplary hosts in the Odyssey, Book 14, is Eumaeus, the poor swineherd who lives on
Odysseus’s estate in Ithaca. Although he exists on the edges of Greek elite-warrior society, his
hospitality reveals him as a hero at its center. His o er of xenia, no less than that which Odys-
seus receives in the royal palaces, serves to position these characters at the virtuous end of the
spectrum.
Hospitality at the Birth of the Polis—City-State
e epics of Homer, written down in the eighth century BCE, depict a face-to-face society,
which also pervades the biblical world in the Book of Genesis, believed to have been composed
around the same time (ninth to seventh centuries BCE).6 In such a society, hospitality and ref-
uge are sought at the doorsteps of individual householders—who are one and the same as the
host. e ultimate decision to grant xenia rests with them. e position of the host becomes
more ambiguous with the onset of Greek city-state culture of the Classical period ( h century
BCE), especially if those who seek refuge arrive in groups and make their appeals not at house
thresholds, but at the public altars and sanctuaries. is is exempli ed in the exchange between
the suppliant’s carer Iolaus and the men of the city in Euripides’ Children of Heracles (l.90–95):
Iolaus: ey are Heracles’ sons, strangers, who have come as suppliants to you and your city.
Chorus: What is your errand? Is it your wish to address the city? Tell us.
Under these new conditions, the nature of agency—the possibility for action—of those seeking
refuge becomes, necessarily, di erently expressed (Isayev 2017b). New democratic institutions,
which we know most about from Athens in the h century BCE, mean that responsibilities
and obligations are more di use. As before, the principles of xenia (hospitality or guest-friend-
ship) and hiketeia (asylum) remain protected by the gods, among them Zeus, in his attribute as
Xenios (protector of guests) and Hikesios (protector of suppliants). In ful lling these divinely
sanctioned duties, community leaders now had to take account of the will of the demos—the
people—who could support or deny their position of power.
e advent of polis society, therefore, meant that the ultimate decision to grant hospitality/
asylum was no longer the remit of individual households, but the prerogative of city-state lead-
ers and their demos. Encounters between hosts and guests now served not only to characterize
the nature of community, but also to address the pressure points surrounding the duties of the
state and its members. is is particularly evident in the Greek tragedies of Euripides’ Children
of Heracles and Aeschylus’s e Suppliant Women, which also confront the con ict between
divine authority (or customary law) and secular authority (that which is legally sanctioned).
e plays destabilize the seemingly incontrovertible hierarchy that positions suppliants as the
least powerful, with the polis in the middle, and the gods as the most powerful of all (Zeitlin
1992: 207–211). Initially it is this structure that appears to govern the action in the Children of
Heracles, performed circa 430 BCE. Within this mythical story, the suppliant children with their
grandmother Alcmene, under the care of Heracles’ friend Iolaus, appeal to Athens and its king
Demophon from their sanctuary at the altar of Zeus. ey seek Athenian protection in their
escape from Eurystheus, the king of Argos, who demands their return as they are his subjects.
In refusing to give up the suppliants, who would likely be killed by Eurystheus, the Athenians
have to face Argive aggression. As the Chorus of Old Men resign themselves to war, their lament
reveals the expected power relations (Euripides, Children of Heracles: l.750–770):
12 䡲 Elena Isayev
I pray, and raise your shout to heaven, to the throne of Zeus and in the house of gray-eyed
Athena! For we are about to cut a path through danger with the sword of gray iron on behalf
of our fatherland, on behalf of our homes, since we have taken the suppliants in. But it is
cowardly, O my city, if we hand over suppliant strangers at the behest of Argos. Zeus is my
ally, I have no fear, Zeus is justly grateful to me: never shall I show the gods to be inferior
to men.
e suppliants are objecti ed and seem to be the ones with least agency—the power to act—
yet it is their successful plea for protection that has led to the necessity for war, thus subverting
the power relationship. If indeed the hierarchy was so rigid, then it would be di cult to explain
the need for, and success of, supplication rituals, or conversely decisions to deny hospitality or
mistreat the suppliants, despite the possibility of divine retribution.
Moralizing strands pervade legends of divine anger in response to the mistreatment of sup-
pliants (Herodotus 6.75.3; Sinn 1993: appendix III). Punishments in the form of earthquakes
and tidal waves are a particular favorite, like the one that buried Achaean Helike in 373 BCE for
mistreating the suppliants who took refuge in its Poseidon Sanctuary (Pausanias 7.25.1).7 ese
stories serve to show not only the potential consequences of divine threats, but also the extent
to which they were ignored. It remains questionable what e ect pressure by a higher power,
such as the gods (or the UN today), actually has on decisions taken at the time of encounter.
at some power remains, ironically, can be seen in the extent to which states tried to exploit
technical ambiguities to avoid responsibilities owed to suppliants, while still appearing to follow
the recognized “international” moral codes.8
In the ancient world, avoidance schemes included attempts to draw suppliants away from
the protection of the gods through trickery, of the kind that the Athenians resisted in Euripides’
Children of Heracles (l.257–258). Athens is praised for its refusal to give in to deception, by lur-
ing the children away from the protective sanctuary of Zeus, at the suggestion of the Argives,
who wanted the suppliants turned over to them so they could be put to death. e Athenian
response has a nities with the underpinning principles of the non-refoulement clause in Article
33 of the UN 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees. Other methods of avoiding responsibility
in the ancient world included rules that prohibited seekers of refuge accessing sites, such as
sanctuaries, where they would be deemed under the protection of the gods, and hence inviola-
ble.9 Such acts resemble those of states in the twenty- rst century who excise their entry points,
such as airports or sea ports (or in Australia the whole country, for those entering by boat) so
that they cannot be used for the purpose of claiming asylum.10 Yet, however exclusionary the
rules of individual states may be, there appears to be a continuing interest in giving the impres-
sion that the duties of hospitality, and obligations owed to those seeking refuge, were/are not
being ignored. It is one way of symbolizing “civilization” and at the same time demonstrating
state power and sovereignty through the granting of asylum. is assertion of power, exhibited
through the choice to host, has also been harnessed by communities, such as the city, operating
on a di erent scale to that of the state, as we will see below.
A challenge for any polis in the Greek Classical period was how to secure a position at the
“civilized” or virtuous end of the spectrum, especially for those with imperial ambitions such as
Athens and Sparta. In honoring the duties of hospitality, a polis showed itself to be respecting
the will of the gods and hence in their favor. erefore, enemies could be charged with disre-
garding their responsibilities towards suppliants, as Athens and Sparta had done reciprocally
prior to their clash in the Peloponnesian War in the last decades of the h century BCE ( u-
cydides 1.126–128). Athens’ self-presentation was of a polis that was open to refugees and out-
siders, without undermining its myth of autochthony—the belief that its primordial inhabitants
sprung from the land (Horden and Purcell 2000: 384; Purcell 1990; Wilson 2006: 32). e city’s
Hospitality 䡲 13
hospitable character was showcased as a juxtaposition to that of their Spartan enemies, whom
the Athenians accused of being inhuman for throwing out “foreigners.”11 ese were political
claims. In real terms there may have been little di erence in how the two adversaries behaved
on the ground, especially in light of Athenians’ highly controlled access to their citizenship.
We know that when the Plataeans, on the takeover of their homeland by the ebans, came to
request asylum from Athens for the second time in 373 BCE, their claims were denied. One of
their points of appeal was to stress that such a denial would risk harming Athens’ long-standing
reputation of hospitality, as recorded by Isocrates in his fourteenth speech Plataicus (1–2, 53).
In this case its reputation, apparently, mattered less than the diplomatic and military necessi-
ties of the situation at this historical juncture, which required that Athens reject the plea of the
Plataeans.
Who Is the Host?
In the ancient Mediterranean, hospitality was a sought-a er badge which ancient poleis strove
to gain and hold onto, irrespective of their actual policies and attitudes towards the outsider
seeking refuge. With the coming of city-state culture, there had to be a recon guration of the
host–guest transaction, especially when it concerned groups of suppliants who addressed the
community en masse or as a city. As already noted above, it was no longer the house threshold
where such supplications were made, but public sites such as altars and sanctuaries where sup-
pliants were protected by the gods. e Athenian dramatists, through their intrinsic exploration
of the mechanics of such scenarios, were able to foreground the profound transformation of
their society and what it meant to live in a democracy with imperial ambitions. An understand-
ing of the meaning of the polis could be accessed through the simple question posed by suppli-
ants seeking refuge: Whom to ask?
is problem of whom to address their appeal to is one of the opening scenes of Aeschylus’s
play e Suppliant Women, performed in the middle of the h century BCE. A shore at the
edge of Argos is the backdrop for the mythical story, which tells of the ight of the Danaids,
the 50 daughters of Danaeus, who escape from Egypt to avoid a forced marriage. Gripping the
sacred altars of the sanctuary, they appeal to the Argive king Pelasgos for protection in his city.
e following dialogue takes place between Pelasgos and the Danaids (Aeschylus, e Suppliant
Women: l.365–375):
Pelasgos: You are not sitting at the hearth of my house.
If the city as a whole is threatened with pollution,
it must be the concern of the people as a whole to work out a cure.
Danaids: You are the city, I tell you, you are the people!
A head of state, not subject to judgement,
you control the altar, the hearth of the city.
Within this passage we witness a clash between the outdated aristocratic frameworks of an
oligarchic regime (which the Danaids voice in their response) (Bakewell 2013: 13, 30–32; Cole
2004: 63; Zeitlin 1992) and the rise of the new democratic state which appeals to the will of the
people—the demos. rough the king’s words, the audience of Classical Athens is reminded
that the private, exclusive guest-friendship, which underpinned inter-elite horizontal ties, and
hence their authority, no longer had a place in the new polis society (Bakewell 2013: 13, 30–31;
Garland 2014: 13; Walbank 1978: 2–3). e play proceeds with the king going back and forth
between the sanctuary and the city, to consult his people, until nally they agree to take in the
14 䡲 Elena Isayev
suppliant women, despite the risk of ensuing war with the Egyptian suitors, who demand the
return of the Danaids (Aeschylus, e Suppliant Women: l.365–375).
Deliberations on whether to take in suppliants are also at the core of Euripides’ Children of
Heracles. Here, however, the community is not explicitly consulted by their king, Demophon;
rather, the will of the city’s inhabitants is represented by the Chorus of the Old Men of Athens,
who are the rst to respond to the suppliant pleas for help. In his acknowledgment of the divi-
sive nature of the decision, Demophon’s concern shows an interest in the will of the people, and
the di culty of nding any single resolution (Euripides, Children of Heracles: l.415):
Now you will see crowded assemblies being held,
with some maintaining that it was right to protect strangers who are suppliants,
while others accuse me of folly. If I do as I am bidden, civil war will break out.
e anxiety of some of his city’s citizens in taking in the children is not presented as an
anti-migrant stance. Rather, the discourse is around ascertaining priority of obligations. What
measures is the community expected to take in adhering to: (1) the will of the gods, (2) its fellow
citizens, (3) the suppliants? e initial threat of war by the Argives does not deter the decision
to put the suppliant children under their protection. However, an oracle indicates that Athenian
victory will only be guaranteed if a noble maiden is sacri ced to Persephone. e gods can be
cruel! is is a step too far for the hosts. Demophon, their king, states that he is not willing to
sacri ce his own child, or force any of the Athenians to do so (Euripides, Children of Heracles:
l.410–415):
erefore, consider these facts and join with me in discovering how you yourselves may be
saved and this land as well, and how I may not be discredited in the eyes of the citizens. I do
not have a monarchy like that of the barbarians: only if I do what is fair will I be fairly treated.
eir desperate predicament leads Macaria, one of the maiden children among the suppli-
ants, to o er herself for sacri ce, thus allowing the rest of her family to be saved, and the Athe-
nians to be victorious (Euripides, Children of Heracles: l.500–506):
en fear no more the Argive enemy’s spear! I am ready, old man, of my own accord and
unbidden, to appear for sacri ce and be killed. For what shall we say if this city is willing to
run great risks on our behalf, and yet we, who lay toil and struggle on others, run away from
death when it lies in our power to rescue them? It must not be so. . .
is episode raises issues about gender relations and hierarchies of power, which may at rst
glance appear straightforward. Both in this play and in Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women, it is the
most vulnerable members of society—women and children—who seek refuge en masse from
communities whose men make the decisions about whether to allow them access. Such a sce-
nario ts with our expectations of ancient patriarchal society, but on closer examination of host–
guest/suppliant encounters, a subversion of traditional roles becomes notable. e Danaids of
Aeschylus’s tragedy, as the female suppliants of Euripides’ play, are the ones who speak with the
most powerful voice. It is their agency that directs the action of the plays, even if that means
sacri cing oneself: the Danaids’ threat of death, and hence pollution of the sanctuary, forces
the Argive king Pelasgos to plead with his community to allow them entry. Macaria, through
choosing to be sacri ced, exhibits male qualities of virtue—it is her heroic act that allows the
men of Athens to go to war, be victorious, and prove their own heroism. ese suppliant women
are visible in a way that the women of the host community are not. e women of the poleis,
whether Argos or Athens, seem distant from positions of power and decision making, unlike
Hospitality 䡲 15
the female gures of the earlier pre-polis society of interconnected warrior elites, who appear in
Homeric epics. Episodes such as the one of the destitute Odysseus, clasping the knees of Arete,
the queen of Scheria, in supplication, indicate the presence of women as gures of power and
in uence within the household.
In Euripides’ tragedy of the Classical period of the polis, decisions about how to respond to
suppliants who sought refuge also frame a wider discourse on the positioning of sovereign enti-
ties within the inter-state system. Froma Zeitlin (1992: 211) refers to suppliant transactions as
the earliest form of foreign relations. When the Chorus of Athenian men is put under pressure
by the Argive herald’s bullying tactics for Athens to give up the suppliants, not least by try-
ing to drag them from the altar himself, they remind him of Athens’ sovereignty, stressing the
transgression of his acts (Euripides, Children of Heracles: l.110–115). e Chorus challenges the
Argives’ tyrannical attempt to institute the use of their own laws within Athenian jurisdiction,
threatening it in the same way as they had other states who o ered the suppliants protection
(Burnett 1976). Demophon’s emphatic response to the herald is (Euripides, Children of Heracles:
l.284–287):
Clear o ! I am not afraid of your Argos. You were not going to remove these suppliants from
Athens and disgrace me. e city that I rule is not Argos’ subject but sovereign.
Athenians proceed to emphasize that they are the protectors of the weak and destitute. In
their re ection on the decision to help the suppliants, the Chorus echoes the Athenian slogan of
generosity (Euripides, Children of Heracles: l.329–332).
It is always the desire of this land to side with justice and help the weak. erefore she has
borne countless toils on behalf of friends, and now too I see another such struggle coming
upon us.
e historical context of the play’s performance, in the second year of the Peloponnesian
War, is relevant here. It may be a comment on Athens’ reassertion of sovereignty in the face of
aggression from its rival Sparta, where the ability to grant asylum becomes a statement of state
power and autonomy. Or, conversely, it may be foreshadowing the appraisal of Athens’ treat-
ment of autonomous entities as the war progressed. ucydides, in his not uncritical account
of the war, exposes the disparity between Athenian adherence to democratic principles in con-
ducting internal a airs, and acting akin to a tyrant in external dealings, at times forcing auton-
omous states into submission. is is captured in Book 5 (84–116) of his Peloponnesian War,
in his stark dramatization of the dialogue between the men of Melos—a neutral state—and the
Athenians who were poised to destroy it in 416 BCE. In justifying their actions, the Athenians
resort to outlining the reality of the power relations of the two states, implicitly acknowledging
that autonomy and freedom are not enough to be allowed to act independently ( ucydides,
Peloponnesian War: 5.89):
you know as well as we know that what is just is arrived at in human arguments only when
the necessity on both sides is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, while the weak
yield what they must.
e Athenians of ucydides’ historical narrative have taken on the role of the tyrannical
Argives in the tragedy of Euripides’ Children of Heracles. It is they, the Athenians, who are in
the role of the outsiders, arriving not as suppliants but as the uninvited, imperially sanctioned
“raiders,” who demand allegiance and resources. It is their aggression that leads to people eeing
and seeking refuge in others’ homes. In light of Athens’ role as tyrant, is Euripides’ play about the
16 䡲 Elena Isayev
city’s ancestral hospitality an attempt to assert its place at the moral end of the spectrum, or is it
a critical comment on the irony of its role in creating the very suppliants it rejects?
Conclusions and A erthoughts
In the ancient context, the literature reveals that communities were keen to position themselves
as being hospitable to strangers and open to those who came to seek asylum, whatever their
actions may have been on the ground. is was an important measure of society and it allowed
states to present themselves as “civilized.” By casting their enemies as doing the opposite, they
could be shown to be barbaric and inhuman. Ancient authors also reveal the intricacies and
challenges of making such decisions. ey use the discourse of hospitality to re ect on societal
relations, the real place of power and the moral dilemmas of leaders and communities. With the
onset of democratic polis culture, we can trace some of the transformations in the nature of this
discourse. To what extent does it make hospitality and asylum more di cult? And for whom?
Proposing that in certain ancient-world contexts the treatment of outsiders was a core mea-
sure of society does not mean that the decisions to welcome and protect the guests and sup-
pliants were necessarily favorable. Rather, it is to show some of the ways that such an outlook
shaped strategies for appeal and deliberation of what action to take. It also indicates that the
refusal of hospitality is framed as the exception that needs explaining, rather than its opposite.
Cicero’s powerful statement that to deny outsiders access to the city is inhuman echoes this
sentiment. Such an outlook ts a society in which mobility was perceived as an everyday norm,
rather than something outside it. e issue for authorities, who anticipated such ongoing mobil-
ity in their policies, was not how to keep outsiders out, but how to keep one’s own community
members in the same place for long enough to count them, tax them, and recruit them into the
army (Isayev 2017a). We would expect that historically, the protection, well-being, and the will
of fellow citizens would have been the priority for any consideration and especially true for the
decision makers whose positions of power depended on the will of the demos. As a measure of
society, however, the welfare of one’s own community members appears less prominently in the
literature. It was people in the position of guests and suppliants who were explicitly protected
by the gods.
In the centuries and millennia that follow, we note shi s in the positioning of mobility and
obligations owed to outsiders. As was brie y suggested above, there is some indication that in
the late Roman Imperial period the notion of immobility gains in value. e intensi ed inter-
connectivity of the twenty- rst century has not made immobility a privileged position in the
same way. While sedentism is assumed as the norm, and incomers of a certain class/background
may be treated as abhorrent, mobility itself, conversely, is the anticipated privilege of passport
holders from the so-called Global North. It is they who have the potential for the most extensive
protected legal movement, and it is the nation states to which they belong that have the most
tightly controlled borders that prevent outsiders from coming in.
is latest permutation of approaches to mobility owes much to seventeenth-century dis-
course centered on cosmopolitanism and the values associated with free movement (Benhabib
2004: 27, 40; Kant 1983). Within it, justi cations of mobility, in terms of colonial ventures and
expanding empire, developed alongside sovereign entities’ exclusionary policies, which saw
hospitality become the exception. Vincent Chetail traces the turning point in the writings of the
seventeenth-century natural law theoretician Samuel von Pufendorf, for whom the admission of
foreigners became determined by the host states’ own interest, and granted as a favor (Pufendorf
[1672] 1749: book 3 at 3.251–252; Chetail 2016: 911). e position was further consolidated by
Hospitality 䡲 17
the more extreme approach of Christian von Wol , who approved the states’ discretion to admit
outsiders to be enforced by criminal sanctions (Chetail 2016: 911). His views were underpinned
by the belief that “in a state of nature there is no right to emigrate” (von Wol [1749] 1934: vol. 2
at 3.83.154). Although beyond the scope of this investigation, we may observe that the imperial
enterprise, which provided the platform for such attitudes, was unlikely to have been explicitly
recognized as the end product of a particular “emigration,” nor would those over whom empire
was extended have been cast in the role of the host. ese few excerpts from seventeenth-
century discourse capture a moment of states’ reframing of their responsibilities owed to out-
siders—as a favor rather than an expectation.
Twenty- rst-century public perception of migration as an exception to an otherwise sed-
entary existence buttresses exclusionary state policies, which increasingly frame “migrants” as
undesirable for the well-being of nation states. Does this attitude re ect a shi in the key mea-
sure of society to the way in which states treat their own subjects? e following observations
of some current practices are cited here by way of one possible preliminary response. ey
do not purport to capture the complexity of the situation. at there has been a shi may be
observed in the now acceptable justi cation for military action against other sovereign states on
the principle that “they—or political regimes—default on legitimate statehood by virtue of their
antidemocratic or nonliberal behavior; in so doing, they undermine the ethic of coexistence that
sustains the society of states” (Elliot 2010: 287). Sovereignty itself appears to be conditional on
the “appropriate” treatment of one’s subjects (Long 2013: 22). For Nicholas De Genova, it is not
hospitality but deportation that becomes the locus for theoretical elaboration of the “co-consti-
tuted problems of the state and its putative sovereignty, on the one hand, and that elementary
precondition of human freedom, which is the freedom of movement” (De Genova 2010: 39).
e contradictions, inherent within an international system of liberal nationalism that allows
for such scenarios, leave those seeking refuge in a state of limbo that makes it di cult for them
to access human rights.
A further sign that the measure has shi ed away from hospitality is apparent in Joseph
Carens’ challenging study of the Ethics of Immigration (2013: 195). Within it, he addresses the
merits and risks of open borders, assessing the necessary precondition for uidity across them.
In so doing, he appraises the European Union as a model, pointing to the relatively similar dem-
ocratic governance structures of its states and their comparable economic positions. Part of his
analysis confronts the question: “Why should democratic states take in refugees at all?”12 In out-
lining the disparity between some of the wealthier states that resist taking in refugees and less
well-o states that do, he controversially warns against romanticizing refugee-receiving states,
in that to a certain extent their openness may be the result of the inability to keep refugees out
rather than the willingness to let them in (Carens 2013: 195). Is the implication here, in part, that
such states have weak governments which do not have the capacity to put the well-being of their
own subjects rst? He may have been thinking about such countries as Lebanon, for example: by
2015, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), a quarter
of its population was made up of refugees, and by 2017 that proportion had almost doubled.
By way of comparison, the one million people who arrived in Europe seeking asylum in 2015
represent 0.2% of the total European population.
When Carens wrote his book, published in 2013, although people were already eeing war,
persecution, and drought to seek asylum in the millions, the displacement to Europe caused by
the con ict in Syria was not yet at its peak, which it was to reach by 2015. Carens was also writ-
ing prior to Germany’s decision, that same year, to allow some one million people the opportu-
nity to claim asylum within its state borders. e controversial (rather than celebrated) decision
taken by Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, to take in the substantial number of asylum
18 䡲 Elena Isayev
seekers in 2015 was not explicitly in response to internal pressure to take in asylum seekers. As
Carens proclaims, “I do not imagine that moral criticism moves the world, at least not o en”
(Carens 2013: 311). ere are economic and historically contingent reasons as to why Merkel
was able to make this decision. ese took into account both the UN directives that outline the
responsibilities owed to people seeking refuge, and the need for an intake of newcomers to make
up for Germany’s falling birth rate. Decisions made in the ancient world context considered here
were likely driven by similar concerns, but the discourse was di erently framed; inhospitality
was the exception that needed justifying.
As a nal observation, by way of contrast we can point to the concurrent dynamism of such
citizen-initiated movements as the City of Sanctuary,13 and refugee support organizations that
operate outside of o cial state structures. Although it may be questionable to what extent their
activities of hospitality, support, and protection of refugees a ect state policies, such actions
help to position the city as its own agent. Furthermore, over the long term, by creating con-
texts where diverse groups can come together and interact, such initiatives contribute towards
shi ing public discourse, which in the end is the main driver of policy. e emerging power of
cities is evident precisely in the tensions with national agendas over questions of mobility and
welcome. By choosing to provide alternative models of hosting to those of the states, Cities of
Sanctuary—seemingly going against the grain—create environments where being inhospitable
is what needs to be explained.
䡲 ELENA ISAYEV is author of Migration, Mobility and Place in Ancient Italy (Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2017), “Between Hospitality and Asylum,” for the International Review of the
Red Cross (2018), and is co-creator of the volume Xenia, a publication with students and
Campus in Camps (2017). She is the initiator of Future Memory, co-founder of ROUTES
center at Exeter, and a Trustee of Refugee Support Devon. Her research into migration
and hospitality has been supported by fellowships through the Davis Centre at Princeton
University; the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council; HRC, Australia National Uni-
versity; and the University of Tuebingen. She is Professor of Ancient History and Place at
the University of Exeter.
䡲 NOTES
I am grateful to the editors and anonymous readers of this article, for their thoughtful and important
suggestions, which have helped to sharpen the ideas presented here.
1. Xenia is the Ancient Greek term that encompasses what we refer to today as hospitality. Its more
speci c meaning is guest-friendship. One understanding of xenia, then and now, is expressed in
the co-created publication, Xenia (http://www.campusincamps.ps/projects/xenia/) and also explored
through the initiative www.viewalmaisha.org. ese initiatives and their participants, near and
far, have been seminal for thinking together about the meaning and potential of hospitality across
centuries.
2. e investigation that follows draws on, and develops, some of the points made in an exploratory
article on the possibilities for agency in contexts of displacement, prepared for the International
Review of the Red Cross (Isayev 2017b).
3. Terms do exist for the foreigner/outsider in Ancient Greek—xenos (although initially the term could
also be used to mean host), or enemy—polemios; and in Latin for the friendly outsider—hospes, and
the one who is much less so, an enemy—hostis (originally the term was also used to mean stranger or
foreigner). None of these express the same sentiment as the modern usage of “migrant.” Instead they
Hospitality 䡲 19
focus on the speci c relationship of the individual to the host community (Cicero, de O ciis 1.12.37;
Va rr o , Lingua Latina 5.3, with discussion in Isayev 2017a: Chapter 2).
4. Ammianus 15.2.4 (Lewis and Short 1900).
5. Translation by the author, adapted from the 1928 translation of Cicero’s De O ciis by Walter Miller.
Subsequent citations refer to the same edition.
6. e composition of Genesis was likely to have derived from the literary tradition found in the North-
west Semitic inscriptions of the ninth–seventh centuries BCE (Arnold 2008: 14–17; Emerton 2004).
7. Also, the Spartan earthquake is blamed on their ejection of Helots from the Poseidon Sanctuary in
464 BCE ( ucydides 1921: 1.128.1).
8. For evidence of a Greco-Roman assumption that supplication was a universal practice, see Naiden
2006: 19.
9. One example was the prohibition of foreigners’ entry into sacred precincts (Chaniotis 1996: 73). For
others, see Garland 2014: 117.
10. For some examples, see Carens 2013: 198–200.
11. ucydides: 1.144.2, 1.67, 1.39.1, 2.39.1; Herodotus on Sparta being closed to strangers: 1.65.6–9;
1.69–79 (with Garland 2014: 95–98, 126; Sinn 1993: 67–84, 71).
12. In his response he identi es three primary kinds of reasons: causal connections, humanitarian con-
cerns and the normative presuppositions of the state system (Carens 2013: 195).
13. For a critical analysis of the City of Sanctuary movement, see Bagelman 2016.
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