Gift Horses...
Swords... ✅ Scorcery... ✅
Psychological angst and endless arguments about fidelity to an original I haven’t read. Also ✅
I went to see The Odyssey. It was great!
I’m no classicist or student of Greek literature. But the film keeps returning to a phrase Homer never actually uses (I’m told!):
Zeus’s Law.
In the film, it’s the ancient rule that you welcome every stranger who arrives at your door—feed them, shelter them and treat them with dignity—before you even ask who they are. Not simply because it’s polite, but because you never know whether the beggar on your doorstep might be a god in disguise, testing your character.
Telemachus puts it simply: treat others as you would want to be treated. The same thought turns up later in Christian teaching as “do unto others…”
The Greeks called the custom xenia—and it runs throughout Homer’s poem. No contracts, no receipts, no loyalty programme. Just an understanding that the stranger, with no local power, no leverage and nobody to vouch for them, was owed decency anyway. Because one day the positions might be reversed.
Strip away the myth and the gods, and xenia begins to sound like something fair trade is trying to recover: an exchange in which the person with less power is not merely tolerated, but protected.
A farmer who cannot influence the price of their harvest—or a worker whose livelihood depends on the decisions of a distant buyer—should not have that vulnerability treated as a useful market efficiency.
Too often throughout history, trade arrived dressed as a gift: commerce, opportunity, development. But what looked like mutual benefit sometimes concealed extraction. The Trojan Horse is an irresistible metaphor—not because all trade is deceitful, but because generosity is sometimes the language power uses to disguise what it intends to take.
Fair trade, at its best, puts the relationship back into the transaction: a fair price, protection, dignity and respect for people with very little leverage. Zeus might approve.
But it’s easy to point at exploitative trade and say, “That’s the horse; we’re the reins.”
It’s less comfortable to ask whether we are sure our own gift has nothing hidden inside it.
We plan to travel to Pakistan soon to visit the Bola Gema factory. We will arrive at its gates carrying cameras, video equipment and shot lists. We intend to gather footage, stories, snapshots of people’s lives and examples of the difference fair trade can make. These are things people quite reasonably ask us for. They want to see what fair trade means for the people who make our balls.
Will we take away more than we leave behind?
We use the World Fair Trade Organisation’s ten principles to guide our work. To adhere to principle 9 (promoting fair trade) would be simple. To honour principles 2,3,4 and 8 whilst doing so… more complicated.
For practical guidance, we are looking to Bond, the UK network for organisations working in international development. Its ethical-storytelling guidance treats consent not as a signature, but as an ongoing conversation—helping people retain control over how their stories are told and used.
It’s a good question to carry into the work: not "are we fair trade?” but "would we be happy on the other side of this interaction?”
That's closer to what xenia was actually asking of the Greeks at their gates — and it's a higher wall than a certification sticker.