“One must honor guests and foreigners and strangers, even those much poorer than oneself. Zeus watches over beggars and guests and strangers. What I have to give is small, but I will give it gladly.”

The sentiment more poignant and “relatable,” on the one hand, because uttered by a slave. But, on the other, because uttered by a slave, radically confined within its context, genuinely strange, non-transferable: a context of pious hospitality, slavery, misogyny, and violent pillage.

One night, a tall young man walked up to me at Macy’s and softly began to tell a story the end of which was a request for money. When I refused and walked on, he shouted at me, “Well, you can suck my dick!”