Bathing a guest and rubbing them with oil

It’s conceivable that it was something done in real life, but the simplest explanation is that it’s an element of a religious rite called theoxeny.
There are a few places in epic that come very close to depicting theoxeny: Athena’s visit to Telemachus in disguise in Odyssey book 1 is an example; one that’s more obviously a religious celebration is Poseidon’s visit to the Aethiopes, mentioned in Odyssey 1.22-26 (‘He had gone to visit the Aethiopes … that’s where he was sitting, enjoying the feast’). The theoxeny that’s most religious in tone is in one of the ‘Homeric hymns’, the Hymn to Demeter, Demeter’s visit to the house of Keleos.

• Homeric epic (and the Hymn to Demeter) has about two dozen ‘hospitality scenes’. These have been analysed as a quasi-formulaic ‘type scene’, with repeated sequences of motifs that represent how civilised the participants are. But as well as that, hospitality scenes very closely imitate the format of theoxeny. Features that they share in common include:
  • ceremonious greeting of the guest at the door
  • procession to the seat
  • the seat laid with a blanket or sheepskin
  • offering of a meal without small talk
  • bath or ritual washing of the cult image
• It’s a pretty decent bet that all the repeated motifs that we see in hospitality type scenes are in fact elements of theoxeny. In connection with that, we can observe that two actual theoxenies in epic — Athena’s visit to Telemachus, and Demeter’s visit to Keleos — are framed as hospitality type scenes, and the Demeter scene is a particularly full example of the type scene.

Now, bear in mind, we have little evidence that Homeric guest-friendship was actually practised in real life in the Archaic period. Our only evidence for it is … Homer. Nothing in funerary inscriptions, nothing in lyric poetry, and no documentary evidence until centuries later. It looks very much as if guest-friendship is a fiction constructed for the purposes of poetry, based on the religious rite of theoxeny. We have much better evidence for proxeny, an institution that was more like an official consulate than a personal friendship: we have one late 7th century sepulchral epigram for a man named Menekrates who served as the Oianthean proxenos on Kerkyra, and the Kerkyrans built a large monument for him at public expense.

Guest-friendship is well attested in later times … but later cases of guest-friendship are very likely modelled on Homer! That is, real-life theoxeny gave rise to Homeric guest-friendship, and the Homeric model inspired real-life guest-friendships — life imitating art, imitating religion. And that wouldn’t be an isolated example. In a similar way, hero-cult festivals with sports gave rise to Homeric funeral games (the games for Patroclus in Iliad 23), which in turn inspired a few real-life instances of funeral games.
The earliest non-Homeric evidence for guest-friendship dates to 458 BCE, in Aeschylus, Agamemnon 55-62, which has some material on Paris’ violation of guest-friendship — but of course that’s heavily informed by Homer. We don’t start to see actual guest-friendships until later in the 400s, like Pericles and Archidamus (Thucydides 2.13). You could argue there’s an earlier model in the case of Croesus and Cyrus (Herodotus book 1), but that model doesn’t follow the Homeric model at all closely — no hospitality scenes in sight, it doesn’t appear to be a relationship anyone could inherit in the next generation, and it’s definitely not a mutual relationship between equals.