I.3. Hesíodo : de una hospitalidad heroica a una hospitalidad pragmática

Hesiod’s Works and Days offers very interesting data on the nature and importance of relations with the foreigner in early archaic Greek society. On the one hand, the poem bears witness to a familiar hospitality akin to the one attested by the Homeric Poems, especially the Odyssey, prescribing the shelter and protection of the foreigner/guest-friend. Hesiod’s one, however, is a non-heroic and pragmatic guest-friendship circumscribed by the material and economic necessities of the mainly rural society depicted by the poem. On the other hand, apart from these ancestral traditions of private hospitality, the poem suggests the existence, in the public sphere of the polis, of incipient juridical mechanisms aimed at guaranteeing the security of foreigners by granting them the right of access to local justice.