Memória de vinculação simbólica: a hospitalidade homérica em contexto de hostilidade

Abstract

The oldest symbolic repository of the West, embodied in the poetic testimony of Homer, concentrated its expressive vitality trying to clarify the enigma of the origins of the world, of men, and of the mysterious forces that somehow animated them. In that retelling of the beginnings of human experience, the Iliad and the Odyssey – and the extensive constellation of mythical works that derive from both – adopting as fundamental the theme of conflict, privileged as their peculiar framework the Trojan War, which the ancient Greek worldview believed to have been the stratagem chosen, by divine determination, to alleviate the excessive weight of the earth, granted to men by the gods as a provisional dwelling. While they sought in Troy to conquer the lot of fortune that they considered their own, the unfortunate mortals, coerced by superior interference, unleashed with their guilt and misery the crises that would plunge them into misfortune, irrevocably assuming their mortality in the face of the eternal bliss of the gods. In this generalised context of conflict, the dynamics of hospitality – based on the fundamental respect for otherness and the promotion of the most basic human rights – seem to consubstantiate in the sphere of human socialisation a basic ethic of peculiar relevance in the hierarchy of Homeric values. Within this peculiar expressive framework, the symbolic re-reading of the Iliad and the Odyssey, as the first significant testimonies about the Homeric ethics of hospitality, is imposed.