Hospitality

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A guest friend is colloquially (obsolete) a friend in another place of residence where you (regularly) come to visit or while traveling.

institution

Historically, hospitality is much more than that, namely an institution known to many peoples that ensured that as a merchant or refugee one did not fall into the social role of the unprotected and unlawful stranger . How necessary this could be, because otherwise one was dependent on pure mercy , is shown in the well-known New Testament parable of the good Samaritan .

In ancient Greece the host ( πρόξενος próxenos ) and his guest were in a legal hospitality and under the special protection of the highest god Zeus , because a host could get into trouble in his own city. Even in the 20th century, the guest was z. B. a permanent institution in the Melanesian kula .

Literary

In this sense, “ the guest in Corinth ” in Friedrich Schiller's ballad “ Cranes of Ibycus ” from 1797 should be understood. For hospitality compare. also " Feet in the Fire " by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer .

Opposite meaning

However, just as the Latin “ hospes ” can designate both the landlord on the one hand and the stranger, the guest, on the other, the term “guest friend” is not understood by Franz Grillparzer as a host but as a “friendly guest”. The guest is the title of the first part of his trilogy Das goldene Vlies (1819). The Greek refugee Phryxos, who brings the fleece received from Apollon to Colchis , is murdered as a “guest” of Medea's father, his royal host, which burdens the possession of the golden fleece with the curse of the gods: “Father, what have you done? Slain the hospitality. Woe to you! Woe to us all! "

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Fr. Schiller, The Cranes of Ibycus (Wikisource)
  2. ↑ CF Meyer, Feet in Fire (Wikisource)
  3. ↑ The little Stowasser. Latin-German school dictionary, Vienna 1955, p. 244.
  4. ^ Franz Grillparzer: The guest friend . Final scene (PDF; 74 kB)

See also