When you go to see Christopher Nolan’s new epic film The Odyssey (as Louise and I did on Saturday), you’ll be bathed in the revelation that Trump and his military lickspittles are breaking the most ancient law that created what we today call western civilization.
The movie even explains Iran’s rageful response to Trump’s violations of “Zeus’ Law” and tells us of the possible consequences of his illegal and morally criminal attack on that country (which had not attacked us first) as his war of choice plays out.
First, a tiny bit of backstory:
Theoxenia isn’t a word that gets thrown around a lot these days, but it’s at the core of both ancient Greek, Hebrew, Christian, and Iranian religions (among others) and traditions and The Odyssey. It means that there are gods wandering the Earth disguised as humans, and therefore we have an obligation to treat others — particularly strangers or people we don’t know or understand — as we would want to be treated, ourselves. With compassion, honor, and generosity.
In the movie, it’s referred to as Zeus’ Law, and its violation is the thread that runs through the entire three hours. It honors Zeus in his aspect as Zeus Xenios, protector of strangers, guests, and suppliants. In the Greek religion of that day, hospitality wasn’t mere courtesy but a sacred obligation, and Zeus himself stood behind it as both guarantor and avenger. Any stranger at your door came under his protection, so to mistreat a guest was to offend the king of the gods directly.
The Odyssey is built around this idea of xenia from end to end: you can read the whole poem as a ledger of good and bad hosts. The Phaeacians who bathe and feast the shipwrecked Odysseus without even knowing his name first are the ideal, while the suitors devouring his household in his absence are the great domestic violators, and their slaughter at the end reads as xenia enforced with a sword. The Cyclops Polyphemus is the ultimate anti-host, a creature who eats his guests and openly scorns the gods, which is why his punishment feels like cosmic justice rather than mere revenge.
Theoxenia also appears in Judaism, Christianity, and Iranian pre- and post-Islamic traditions.
Most people who’ve been through Bible School as kids remember how, in Genesis 18, Abraham sees three strangers approaching his tent in the heat of the day and rushes out to meet them, washing their feet, slaughtering a calf, and setting out a feast before he has any idea who they are. Only later in the encounter does it become clear they’re divine messengers, and one delivers the promise that Sarah will bear a son.
The very next chapter gives us the dark mirror image of that generation’s Trump-like behavior: the men of Sodom, who greet the same visitors with violence rather than welcome. In the Jewish tradition this pairing became foundational to hachnasat orchim, the welcoming of guests, and it’s why later rabbinic thought treats Sodom’s real sin as cruelty to strangers. The lesson drawn by these twin stories is that when you open your door to the stranger, you may be receiving God unawares.
When Jesus tells his followers in Matthew 25 that whatever they did for the least of these — the hungry, the stranger, the naked/homeless, the imprisoned — they did for him, he’s standing squarely inside that Abrahamic story, where the guest carries a hidden divine presence. His parable of the Good Samaritan works the same theme, making the despised outsider the only one who actually fulfills Zeus’ Law. And Paul’s letter to the Hebrews makes the connection explicit when he urges believers not to neglect hospitality to strangers, “for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it,” a direct reference to Abraham’s three visitors.
And it’s also intrinsic to both ancient and modern-day Iranian hospitality traditions. The ancient Persian counterpart to Zeus Xenios is Mithra, the Zoroastrian yazata or divine being whose entire jurisdiction is the law that strangers must be treated well because they could be divine beings in disguise. In living Iranian culture it’s known as mehman-navazi, which literally means “guest-cherishing” the deep-rooted tradition of treating guests with extraordinary honor, expressed in the elaborate ritual courtesy of ta’arof:
مهمان حبیب خداست. Mehman habib-e khodast. The guest is the beloved of God.
When Iranians first met with Kushner and Witkoff and then went to a February 28th meeting in Tehran to discuss the details of the deal offered, the compound where the meeting was taking place was bombed by the US and Israel, killing Ayatollah Khamenei, most of his family, and around 40 senior officials.
This was viewed by many in the region as a basic violation of Zeus’ Law. While the meeting with the strangers took place in Geneva, Switzerland, their offer was brought — like the Trojan Horse — into the home of the Supreme Leader himself and arguably led straight to his slaughter.
On the Muslim street there was real popular fury at this violation, most sharply in Pakistan, where protesters tried to storm the US consulate in Karachi and at least nine people were killed, and in Iraq, as well as with rallies and vigils elsewhere.
Iranian MP Amirhossein Sabeti was explicit about the now-clear danger of continuing to have good-faith negotiations with Witkoff and Kushner:
“Didn’t war happen in the middle of negotiations before? So you want to negotiate again so war happens and our new leader gets assassinated too?”
Last week, veteran reporters Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill shared a shocking allegation they say was presented directly to them by Iranian officials: that the Iranians had informed VP Vance that Kushner and Witkoff, instead of negotiating in good faith, were simply moving the negotiations along in fits and starts that would send the price of oil up and down, all while betting on oil futures.
The reporters laid it out on their Drop Site News Substack newsletter:
“In June, Iran calculated profits from such alleged manipulation had reached $9 billion and formally requested, in writing, that Iran should share in the proceeds.
“‘We have conveyed through intermediaries that $4.5 billion of this sum should also be allocated to the Iranian side,’ the Iranian official said. ‘The exchanged texts will ultimately become part of the historical record.’”
Odysseus paid for his reluctant role in the pillage and rape of Troy — and his coming up with the betrayal idea of the Trojan Horse — by being punished by the gods for twenty years, ten of them a god-cursed wandering through storms, monsters, and the loss of his men.
And that event is often cited as the pivot point when the ancient world turned from centuries of civilization to centuries of barbarism and democracy was lost for millennia.
The sack of Troy was not merely a victory but a desecration, a night when the Greeks butchered old King Priam at his own household altar, hurled the infant Astyanax from the city walls, and dragged Cassandra screaming from the temple of Athena, violating in a single evening every sacred bond the gods guarded: the suppliant’s safety, the altar’s sanctuary, the guest-friendship that had bound even enemies.
The Trojan Horse itself was the perfect emblem of that turn, because it weaponized trust, taking the oldest rule of the ancient world — that a gift offered and accepted creates a sacred obligation — and rigging it as a trap.
And the gods answered in kind, scattering the victors across the wine-dark sea so that the men who’d trampled the laws of heaven learned, one drowned crew and one ruined homecoming at a time, that a civilization that wins by betraying its own sacred order will not survive the winning.
And, of course, with Trump it’s not just Iran. His betrayals of trust and tradition include Greenland, Cuba, Ukraine, NATO, Venezuela, Canada, and our own citizens. He even betrayed every one of his three wives, and now he is betraying our Constitution.
One wonders how long America — and worldwide democracy itself, along with the civilized rules and respect for law it requires — will similarly pay for Trump’s and Netanyahu’s analogous violations of Zeus’ Law.