Zeus’s Law

What is this Zeus’s Law?

If you have recently seen Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey, you will have picked up on the frequent references to Zeus’s Law. Having never heard it called as such, I was curious to find out what it was. It turns out it is Nolan’s own invented name for what the Ancient Greeks called Xenia (ξενία). But whatever the inspiration for the term, it’s a good name for something Greeks and Turks have practiced for millennia…

Very briefly, the law states that Civilisation is founded on unwritten principles shared amongst humanity. These are not written down “laws” in the strict sense of the word but rather a code of conduct to which “civilised” people adhere. Foremost among its principles, is that hospitality should be given to a stranger – that a guest should be welcomed into your home and treated as one of the family. And in return, the guest is supposed to show respect to their hosts. 

The reason often cited for this is that you never know who the stranger might be – they may be a god in disguise. But the further assumption is that if this code breaks down, then civilisation starts to split at the seams.

Those of us who have travelled in Greece and Turkey will be familiar with their hospitality – it is one of the things that visitor’s comment on most. In Greek it is known φιλοξενια and in Turkish as misafirlik. The two traditions are similar, albeit not absolutely identical.

In Turkey it might manifest itself in being offered a glass of tea whilst sitting in a shop. You are not expected to pay for this tea – it is simply an expression of hospitality. Or you might be offered a splash of cologne on your hands as you leave a restaurant. In Greece, you might be offered a dessert “on the house” once you have paid for your meal at the restaurant.

Those of us from northern Europe are inclined to be suspicious of such generosity – harbouring the suspicion that it comes with hidden motivations.  After all, we have the saying: “beware of Greeks bearing gifts”.

As an anthropology student in London, I remember being stirred into thought by Marcel Mauss’s treatise The Gift: in which he expounds that there is no such thing as a “free” gift, however altruistic it may seem. 

This is true… but what Zeus’s Law tells us is that the act of giving or receiving a gift is not a simple bidirectional transaction, just a single thread in a vast mesh of a much wider system of commerce, law and behaviour which operates beyond our level of understanding. 

Zeus’s Law and the modern traveller

I think back, in particular, to my own travels in North Eastern Turkey in the 1990s….

It was a time when I was obsessed (with good reason I might add) with hunting out Georgian and Armenian churches in the area. From my map, I had identified a Georgian church, high in the mountains above the main road between Artvin and Şavşat. My plan to reach it was to take the dolmuş between the two towns and get off at the road that led up to the village.

I had already ridden from Artvin to Şavşat without finding the road up to the village, but on the return journey I spotted a sign to the village. “Müsait bir yerde inebilir miyim?” I called out to the driver. I clambered down from the minibus, but instead of speeding off, the driver got out of his cab to remonstrate with me.

“Where are you going?” he implored.

“I’m going up the village, up there,” I pointed.

“But why?”

“I’ve heard there is an interesting building up there.”

The bus driver was insistent I shouldn’t go. It was already the afternoon – by the time I got down from the village it would be dark and only the other month a foreigner like me had been killed on this road by a gunman wanting money.

“Wait till tomorrow,” he insisted. “I will take the day off work, and I will take you there personally. It is too dangerous for you to go on your own.”

Petulantly, I declined his offer and set off up the track. I can remember feeling the force of his incredulous stare drilling into my back as I walked….

The track was good but steep and I began to break out in a sweat as I climbed. The day was still hot.

After half an hour, I encountered a truck coming down the hill towards me. About fifty yards in front of me it stopped and three men got out. I remembered the bus driver’s words about the foreigner being killed the month before. 

“Where are you going?” one of the men inquisitioned me.

“I’m going to the village up there – I’ve heard there is an interesting old church I would like to see…” I replied implausibly.

The three men began discussing between themselves in a dialect I could not understand. Georgian maybe? Two of them turned to get back in the lorry whilst the third turned to me and said he would walk with me up to the village. The lorry disappeared down the track in a cloud of dust.

The conversation was easy and I relaxed. I was confident my guide wasn’t going to kill me. As we walked up the hill, Mehmet explained – they had been on their way to Konya (a day’s drive away!) to buy sheep. But Mehmet had been so taken aback that a foreigner would want to visit his village that he renounced his journey to escort me there.

It was another half hour up the track until we arrived at the village – or what there was of it – just a few wooden huts and a heap of stone where once there had been a Christian church. I surveyed the rubble briefly and realised exactly why Mehmet had been so incredulous that anyone would want to come all the way just to see this. And then Mehmet suggested we got to his house for “dinner”.

He ushered me in through the front door of his wooden chalet. His wife and two children were surprised to see him back so quickly, but he quickly silenced them.

“We have an important foreign visitor. Prepare whatever there is for our guest!” He ordered.

I caught ear of his wife’s reply: “but we only have rice and tomatoes…”

A few minutes later, I was served a meal fit for a king – of rice and tomatoes. But with a generosity of spirit that made me appreciate it a hundred times more.

As I finished the meal, Mehmet pulled me up. “It is getting late. If you need to get back to Artvin, then we need to get going.” I remembered the bus driver’s story of the foreigner having been butchered the month before.

We set off down the track with Mehmet assuring me he would make sure I made it safely back to Artvin that evening. He worked for the forestry commission, he explained and would stay in their lodgings that night. Half an hour later, we were almost back to the main road.

“You go and stand by the road,” Mehmet instructed. “If a dolmuş comes by, stop it and tell the driver your friend is just arriving…”.  And he disappeared into some bushes. I headed down to the main road to wait for a minibus. It was beginning to get dark, but to my relief, a quarter of an hour later a minibus came up the road. I hailed it to a stop and called up to the bushes: “Mehmet – the bus is here!”. A few seconds later the forester came scrambling down from the bushes and we climbed aboard to take our seats at the back.

The conductor – actually a young boy – came to collect our fare and I offered him the meagre sum for us both. Mehmet cut in immediately.

“No. Don’t take any money from this man. He is our visitor. He cannot pay, I will pay. Only I don’t have any money…”

Mehmet opened his jacket to reveal a shirtful of figs that he had just picked to pay for the bus fare…

Back in Artvin, we said our goodbyes and I headed to my hotel. 

The following morning, I went down to the town square to have breakfast – a slice of börek and some tea. Fifteen minutes later I asked for the bill….

“No, sir. It has already been paid. Your friend came by a few minutes ago and saw you sitting there. He has already paid your bill.”

I caught up with Mehmet in the town. There was no question of paying him back for breakfast. We went to the local market to look at axe heads, before it was time for me to head to the bus station to catch my bus back to Trabzon.

At the bus station, Mehmet even wanted to pay for my onward bus ticket to Trabzon, but this time the ticket office didn’t accept figs…

I left Artvin with a debt that I have never been able to repay, but with a lifelong fondness towards the town that perhaps repays this debt many times over. This year, in taking one of our groups to stay in Artvin, I felt that in some way I was beginning to repay this debt.

Zeus’s Law in the Odyssey

This then is Zeus’s law – a complex system of transactions, made without the exchange of money or payment, that is larger than any one person can comprehend. The vast majority of it is invisible to the single individual and yet it is a way of holding society together. It’s an explanation for harmony in the world.

And yet, the Ancient world in which Nolan chooses to set his film is far from harmonious. There are dark undercurrents stirring, provoking further struggle for the Greeks. Odysseus makes reference to the mystic “Sea Peoples” who are taking over the Mediterranean – people who do not live by Zeus’s Law. (There is some historical truth in all of this as we know there were indeed an unidentified people who brought strife to the Bronze Age Mediterranean).

Odysseus blames the Sea Peoples for subverting World Order, but also admits that the Greeks too have been guilty of breaking it. On his return to Ithaca, Odysseus recounts the story of the Trojan horse to Penelope and he admits that they entered the city of Troy by a deceit – that this was guilty of breaking Zeus’s Law – and that therefore they deserve all that is coming for them. Nolan’s Odyssey, then, ends less as triumph than warning: break Zeus’s Law and the consequences outlast the deed itself. 

It is tempting to read that as a caution for our own age too, one not exactly short of Sea Peoples of its own. But then I think of Mehmet, turning back from a two day drive to Konya for no better reason than that a stranger had wandered into his valley, and I suspect the law survives regardless of what kings and armies do with it. It persists not because anyone reads it in a book, but because ordinary people, in a village above Artvin or a shop in Antalya, keep quietly deciding to live by it. 

Personally speaking, more than any film, rural Turkey is where I would go looking for Zeus.