Odysseus Guest-Host Contract

Odysseus, the supposedly great hero of Homer’s epic The Odyssey, embarks on a fantastical journey to return home after years spent fighting in Troy. Athena’s favored, a ‘wise and courageous king of Ithaca,’ binds himself to a strict moral code throughout the poem, and attempts to hold others to that same ethical standard. His believed rigid forms of behavior, however, do not extend to being a courteous guest when he visits Polyphemus’s island. Odysseus allows his men to attempt to concoct a plot to carry off Polyphemus’s possessions and repeatedly taunts him after he blinds the Cyclops, deciding that the guidelines of Zeus’s social contract only apply to him occasionally. Odysseus’s purposeful ignorance and abuse of the guest-host relationship

prove that he is in fact at fault for his disastrous confrontation with the Cyclops Polyphemus.
Upon arrival at the Cyclops’ Island, Odysseus and his men pay no heed to the rules of the guest-host contract while they trespass in Polyphemus’s cave and plot to steal his livestock and food. While one might argue that Odysseus and his men did this out of necessity and hunger, they had in fact “feasted well [all day long till the sun went down]” (216). But instead of patiently waiting for Polyphemus to return to his cave as provided by social customs, the crew invades the Cyclops’s territory and schemes to first steal his cheese and then return for his sheep. The sole reason Odysseus rejects his men’s intrigue is to see “what gifts [Polyphemus would] give” (218). Though Odysseus already has the opportunity to steal whatever he desires from the cave, he greedily craves more, even attempting to pinch gifts from Odysseus on the unstable grounds that the gods will punish him if he doesn’t. Outright bullying Polyphemus does not lend itself to Odysseus’s cause so he continues to lie to Polyphemus, claiming that Poseidon destroyed his ship and that his name is “Nobody” (223). Polyphemus responds only in the way natural to him after Odysseus begins a sort of mental warfare with him that hence transgresses the boundaries of accepted behavior since he invades the cave and allows his men to plot against Polyphemus.
The guest-host contract only rings true when it suits Odysseus, as he employs cruel trickery to seriously wound and then further taunt Polyphemus.

Polyphemus is indeed so injured that when he wrenches the spike out of his eye, “out with it [comes] a red geyser of blood” (224). Odysseus has gravely hurt Odysseus by tricking him into drinking the strong wine and preventing him from receiving medical aid from his brethren through the Nobody ruse. Thus, while Polyphemus does not obey the guest-host contract, Odysseus too openly flouts it by attacking his host. A man often described as clever and wily could surely devise an alternate method to take out Polyphemus without making him “mad with pain” (224). But in Odysseus’s mind, this pain equals the pain Polyphemus caused his men as he devoured them. As a hero, however, Homer considers Odysseus to be above such vengeful actions, and Odysseus should not debase himself to physically wound his enemy. Odysseus also quite literally adds insult to injury when he riles up Polyphemus as he escapes, proclaiming himself to be the hero to “[blind and shame him so]” (227). Polyphemus, distressed and understandably upset, has no choice but to send a desperate plea to his absentee father Poseidon—who casts the curse on Odysseus as a direct result of his unkind taunts to Polyphemus. Odysseus’s tactics are a prime example of how he abuses Zeus’s social contract though he expects others to consistently uphold

it.
After years away from home, Odysseus is anxious to get back home, but his unseemly behavior toward Polyphemus violates the gods’ social covenant that he believes to uphold. In an act of poetic justice, the indecorous lie that Odysseus feeds Polyphemus that his ship has been destroyed by Poseidon actually comes true; Poseidon does indeed destroy his ship and journey—one crew member at a time.