Food and Banqueting

In a culture that holds hospitality as an all-important test of character, feasting and festivities are a measure of hospitality and human civility. Often, defects in the banquet signal some fundamental flaw in the host. For example, Polyphemos feasts on human flesh, which makes him, well, an inhuman monster. Circe seems hospitable because she serves good food, but proves to be a witch by poisoning that very food with a drug that turns the diners into animals. Odysseus’s men transgress boundaries of hospitality by dining on Helios’s sacred cattle and suffer death as a consequence. The most obvious example of a misused banquet is the suitors’ pillaging of Odysseus’s provisions. This shows that the supposedly "noble" men do not have the human qualities of restraint and propriety; they are therefore somewhat less than human and worthy of death (or so the Odyssey argues). On the other hand, Nestor, Menelaos, and the Phaiakians serve proper banquets – full of good food, wine, and singing. They are considered not only good hosts, but great human beings.