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"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 “other” 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.
