Oldal 55 [55]
"Stop our convoys home for every castaway (- alien) chancing on
our city!” So speaks the noble king. This is much more viable than
to welcome them. This attitude, we believe, seemed completely
natural at the time, but it is even more so when seen from today’s
world. This is because the wanderers of the sea, the Greeks, as well
as the Egyptians and Phoenicians, in addition to clashing with
each other, were forced to rely on each other. Cooperation was not
only natural but also contained an element of self-interest when it
came to defense. They provided help they could call on each other’s
help in times of need. All this was an interesting feature of the
lives of the peoples of the seashore, a special mixture of distrust
and cooperation. The sea, the unknowable and inexhaustible, the
fearsome and incomprehensible, played the most important role
in their lives. It is no coincidence that the Greeks, as mythology
shows, populated the world of the imagination with a plethora of
sea monsters. The sea is big and unpredictable, but it is also a source
of life. Their creation myths are testament to this, as Qxeavéc, the
sea of the world, plays a decisive role in each of them. Life comes
from water, but it is also lost there. And reality is often very ugly.
“Earth-shaking Poseidon,” as Homer names him, is one of the
most formidable deities. Odysseus owes almost all his sorrows and
bitterness to him. And Poseidon does not want those who suffer
his wrath to be helped, so he afflicts the Phaeacians, unless he gets
a nice, tasty sacrifice.
Yet the other has a special relativity. In the first instance the “oth¬
er” is always different in relation to something, for example in
this situation you are the other, and for you I am. However, the
other of something is not independent of its existence in its own
private reality, that is it does not have its own otherness, and as
such it belongs to it to the greatest degree; the two affix each other.
In-itself (the hyphen is not accidental) neither can be understood.