Nostos

In Practice

As an idea, it is the theme of a hero's journey back from Troy to his own home and kingdom, and it stands opposite kleos, the lasting glory a hero wins through great deeds. Where kleos is what a hero is remembered for, nostos is whether he actually gets to go home and enjoy it, and the two do not automatically come together: a hero can win one and lose the other. Homer's Odyssey states the theme in its opening lines, before the story itself begins: the poet asks the Muse to tell of the man who wandered for years, suffering greatly at sea, trying to save his own life and win the return, nostos, of his companions. The entire twenty-four-book epic is built around that single word, following the one homecoming in the tradition that actually succeeds, after a full decade of delay, monsters, divine obstruction, and the deaths of every companion whose own nostos the poem's opening line has already told the audience will fail. Odysseus's nostos was not unique in ancient poetry, only the one that survived complete. A now-lost epic called the Nostoi, "the Returns," once told the homecomings of the other Greek leaders from Troy, and while the poem itself has not survived, Apollodorus's Epitome preserves a summary of its outline. It describes a fleet scattered by a storm that Athena herself asked Zeus to send, still angry at the Greeks for their conduct at Troy, wrecking many ships at once; Menelaus blown off course all the way to Egypt; and other leaders meeting death or prolonged wandering on their way home. Read against that outline, Odysseus's own decade-long ordeal looks less like an exceptional punishment aimed at him alone and more like the fate that met the entire victorious army returning from Troy, one version among several equally troubled returns, distinguished mainly by having survived as a complete poem in its own right. The pattern recurs across the wider tradition: Agamemnon's nostos ends in his murder the moment he reaches home, and other heroes are said to have wandered for years or founded cities far from where they started rather than ever truly returning. "Nostos" as a scholarly term now covers this entire pattern, the idea that surviving the war was never the same as making it home, and it survives in English in the medical word "nostalgia," literally the pain, algos, of nostos, of longing for a home a person cannot yet reach.

Where Accounts Differ

• Odysseus's nostos as exceptional versus as one of several troubled returns from Troy

• This entry covers nostos as a recurring epic theme and genre, drawing on the Odyssey and the summarized outline of the lost Nostoi; it does not restate Odysseus's own biography or the full plot of the Odyssey, which belong on his own page.

Where This Appears

• Character Odysseus
• Term Kleos
• Character Athena
• Character Poseidon
• Mythology Greek Mythology
• Mythology Roman Mythology

Sources