Hospitality, which the Greeks call xenia, is the rule of welcoming the stranger and the suppliant who arrives at the door, and in the Odyssey it measures the worth of a people and of a man. The reason is religious: Zeus, who protects guests and suppliants, is the avenger of those who mistreat them. Nausicaa tells her frightened maidservants that "all strangers and beggars are from Zeus," and the swineherd Eumaeus repeats the phrase when he welcomes the beggar into his hut.
The hospitality scene follows an almost fixed script. The host receives the visitor, seats him, offers him a bath, clothes, and food, and only after he has eaten does he ask who he is and where he comes from: Nestor says it is "more fitting to ask" guests once they have had their fill, and Menelaus does the same. At parting come the gifts and, if the visitor needs it, an escort. Peisistratus, son of Nestor, welcomes the strangers before knowing their names, and Alcinous promises Odysseus a ship to carry him home, even before knowing who he is.
For this reason Odysseus, on each arrival, asks the same question, which is repeated almost word for word in Books VI, IX, and XIII: will the inhabitants be "arrogant, savage, and without justice, or hospitable, with a mind that fears the gods?" The Phaeacians pass the test. The Cyclopes do not: Polyphemus says he cares nothing for Zeus or the gods and devours his visitors instead of giving them the guest gift. In Ithaca, the poem measures the suitors by the same yardstick, because they eat up the house of an absent man without paying and mistreat a beggar.
Xenia also works as disguise and as test. One of the suitors reminds them that the gods, "resembling strangers from other lands," roam the cities observing the excess and good order of men, and Athena appears to Telemachus as a visitor. Whoever treats a stranger well may be treating a god, and whoever treats him badly risks Zeus's wrath. It is this logic that prepares the end of the story: the beggar whom the suitors humiliate is the master of the house.