Talk:Hospitium

Wikify!

This article is a mess, dificult to read and not up to Wikipedia standards! The Ogre 16:18, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

The article isn't exactly below Wikipedia standards; it just doesn't conform to Wikipedia conventions. It was apparently taken letter-by-letter from the scanned online version of the 1911 Britannica. So the Greek came through as nonsense characters, the style is archaic, the content omits 20th- and 21st-century scholarship, and the article isn't Wiki-organized. Users, however, won't go away with a misbegotten notion of what hospitium was. I added a link to the equivalent Smith's entry, and replaced the gibberish with actual Greek. I agree that a more thorough revision would be welcome, and I'm surprised that two years after Ogre's flag nobody's undertaken it. Cynwolfe (talk) 19:06, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

And whatever's happened in the meantime to the article, it's still not modernized a year later, and is particularly deficient in describing hospitium as a Roman social institution. (And come to think of it, the Greek concept and practice should probably be a separate article, and not squeezed under the Latin term.) Cynwolfe (talk) 15:23, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Three years later

• NB—copied from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome

Yikes! That's just a teardown: unadulterated Britannica gibberish. I'd be willing to tag-team it with someone who cares about Rome in the semi-distant future. — the cardiff chestnut | talk — 18:48, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

I could knock out something semi-coherent on hospitium without distracting myself too much from another off-wiki project I've got going. But I'd forgotten we also have Xenia (Greek), to which theoxenia redirects. Might the solution be to treat the two concepts separately, according to article title? Although plenty of RS equate the two, I'm not convinced that hospitium in the so-called "central" period of Roman history (2nd century BC to 2nd century AD) has all that much to do with xenia in, say, the Iliad or myths involving the sacredness of the stranger received into one's home. The xenia article, at any rate, emphasizes hospitality as an ideal given mythological character, and perhaps out of ignorance, that's what I too think of in regard to xenia. Hospitium, however, seems to be primarily a practical social institution of the usual Roman "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" sort, best discussed in relation to amicitia and clientela. What would anyone think of simply moving any xenia content from Hospitium to Xenia (Greek)? Or deleting it, except for the conventional "the Greek equivalent is" and summary background on how (or if) the two concepts were explicitly seen as a continuity in ancient sources. If this is acceptable, and Cardiff Chestnut would volunteer to do it, I could cobble together a few basic paragraphs for Hospitium. And I suppose we should copy this discussion to Talk:Hospitium? (BTW, surely "cheerful" is the word needed above, not "insufferable".) Cynwolfe (talk) 20:41, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, the Greek material, save some obligatory backgrounding/comparatisting, should probably just be deleted from hospitium. I'll think about this, but offer a few things now. Some helpful material or bibliography might be found in Konstan's Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge, 1997), which doesn't appear to mention hospitium. One reviewer (Gabriel Herman, JRS 88 (1997) 181–2, at 182) remarks:

"If one read only this book, one could easily end up under the impression that no such institution as hospitium, the Roman counterpart of the xenia discussed in K.'s book, had ever existed. The relevance of hospitium to K.'s subject can be demonstrated simply by citing Cicero's remarks concerning Deiotarus ('public life has bound me to him in friendship [amicitia], mutual regard in hospitium, intercourse in intimacy [familiaritas]; while his great services [magna ... officia] to me and to my army have riveted me to him by the closest of ties [summam . . . necessitudinem]' (De Deiot. 14.39)), or his letters 'to his friends', in which he uses stock phrases such as 'I have with X ties not only of hospitium, but also of closest familiaritas' (e.g. ad Fam. 13.36.1, 52.1, 73.2). The Roman nobility, as Wiseman has observed, maintained extensive ties of hospitium with other nobles both elsewhere in Italy and overseas. Livy could thus write, reconstructing the past in terms of his own experience, that Tarquinius Superbus 'strove particularly to befriend the Latin people, so that his strength abroad might contribute to his security at home. He contracted with their nobles ties not only of hospitium but also of marriage' (Liv. 1.49.8). It appears unlikely that ties potent enough to be deemed commensurate with marriage and with improving the security of one's political position were established to fulfil emotional needs." (This bit has to do with the reviewer's complaint that Konstan's analysis is too cuddly.)

Here as elsewhere the parallel is a modern argument, not something framed as an antique realization of Graeco-Roman commonality. The sort of easy lexical parallels that classicists like to fall back on in these situations are lacking. The Greek side can offer none: ὁσπίτιον is a late (1st in 4th c.) borrowing that brought with it only the meanings "house" and "hospital". A couple Latin texts almost make the connnection (Vitruvius 6.7.4, Serv. on Aen. 4.424 and, perhaps more closely, Hyg. Fab. 57's paraphrase of the Bellerophon myth uses hospitium where Gk. authors would use a ξεν-word (Diod. Sic. 6.9.1)), but these would require OR, so a RS on hospitium as concept would probably be the only real way to approach continuity if anyone really thinks there was any significant continuity, as opposed to a demonstrable parallel, which is of course a viable approach, but harder to present briefly and critically. (Still, I'll bet that somewhere else in Cicero's letters there's some repulsive statement that could clear the clouds.) — the cardiff chestnut | talk — 03:10, 6 January 2012 (UTC)