For the Greeks of the great age of Athens (5th and 4th centuries BCE), one traveled the country from house to house, not from inn to inn. Hospitality to strangers (xenia) was an expectation. This at a time when homes were the only sanctuary from the lawlessness of the open road.
A host was expected to provide food, drink, and a safe haven, even to strangers – actually, especially to strangers. A guest was expected to treat the host with respect, not be demanding and offer the news of the larger world in exchange.
Xenia was a counterbalance to xenophobia, fear of strangers. At a time when Athenians believed themselves superior to other places and peoples who they thought of as barbarians based upon their language and customs, this counterpoise offered a beginning to a more open mind. Hospitality weakens the appeal to xenophobia.
However, in a time of no police force to keep order and patrol the roads, the anarchy that could lie outside the home made the home itself a kind of fortress and the family the refuge of first and last resort. Therefore, murder within the family or the kin group was treated with absolute condemnation and itself spurred cycles of vengeance and murder that passed through generations.
In Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon the first sin occurred when Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, murdered the sons of Thyestes and tricked him into eating them. Aegisthus, the only surviving son of Thyestes, joins with Clytemnestra in murdering Agamemnon in his bath in his home when he returns from Troy.
Clytemnestra had her reason for vengeance. Agamemnon had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia, at Aulis, in order to secure a wind that would take the great fleet to Troy.
Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, later kills his own mother in her home because she had killed his father. He is then pursued by the Furies, the dark forces of familial vengeance who lived deep below Athens, because he murdered within his blood line/kin group.
Murder becomes a domestic dynamo, a machine that sustains its energy through the desire for vengeance. Once hospitality is breached, especially through violence, catastrophes begin and do not end until a god decrees it so or one family is exterminated.
One could argue that the great family vengeance plots in modern fiction and movies has its roots in the Athenians. Don Vito and Michael both understood this. I could list 100 books and movies that make this kind of vengeance central to human life. The Greeks knew that this impulse sits deep within us — it is the beast in the cellar, the wolf in the cave, the dagger we reach for in a dream.
