One who asks for protection from a host or a god and therefore falls under the guardianship of Zeus. The gesture proper to it is to embrace the knees of the one from whom help is sought: Odysseus does so before Queen Arete, in the palace of the Phaeacians, and he also supplicates a river, which stops its current. He speaks to Nausicaa from a distance, so that she will not be angered, and to the Cyclops he invokes Zeus as the avenger of suppliants.
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