Nostos: The Homecoming

The Epic of a Single Word

Nostos (νόστος) means "return, homecoming." It is the theme-word of the Odyssey — one could say the whole poem is the unfolding of this single word. The opening lines tell us first not of the hero's victories but of the return denied him: the man who "saw the cities of many men and learned their minds," who suffered much — and could not get home. Twenty-four books and twelve thousand lines hang on the question: can he make it back.

The word was strong enough to support a whole epic tradition on its own. After the Trojan War nearly every Greek hero had his own nostos: the Nostoi ("Returns") was part of the Trojan epic cycle, and of all those poems only the Odyssey survives in full. What we read, in other words, is the sole survivor of an entire genre of homecomings — the returns of the other heroes are lost, and Odysseus' return has become "the return" itself.

Three Homecomings

The first four books of the Odyssey lay out a genealogy of homecomings like a school in the subject, and the pupil is Telemachus — a boy who has never seen his father, sent out to learn what a man who came home looks like.

• Agamemnon is the cautionary return: he won the war and was murdered on his first night home by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. In the Underworld of Book 11, Agamemnon warns Odysseus in person:

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Do not tell your wife the whole truth, whatever you know — tell her only a part of it, and hide the rest. The day of faithful wives is gone forever.

• Menelaus is the fortunate return: after storms and a long detainment in Egypt, he learned his way home by capturing the sea-god Proteus, and came back to Sparta with Helen and his wealth, with a place in Elysium promised after death. And Nestor's return was so smooth as to be hardly worth telling — fair winds, straight home. Not every homecoming is a story; and, in reverse, the homecomings that become stories are usually the ones that went wrong.
• Odysseus is the third kind: the one still in suspense. His return is the poem itself — it may still slide into Agamemnon's ending (the deepest fear of Penelope), or it may, like Menelaus', take hold of life again. The tension of the whole epic is the swaying between these two outcomes.

Why Homecoming Is So Hard

Homer does not write nostos as a problem of navigation. Its difficulty lies on three levels.

First, choosing home means choosing mortality. In Book 5, Calypso makes Odysseus an offer that would end all suffering: stay here, she says — preside in my house, and you will be ageless and immortal. Odysseus refuses. To choose nostos is to choose death: a human dies once, and should die in his own house, among his own people. The prophet Tiresias even foretells that death will come to him "from the sea" — a gentle death — and even that prophecy hangs like a riddle at the far end of the return.

Second, not everyone has a right to the return. All of Odysseus' companions die at sea — and the last and most consequential time, they die because they themselves slaughter the cattle of the Sun on Thrinacia, placing the hunger in front of them above the home ahead of them. Nostos is not given freely; it demands a self-command that must hold to the final night.

Third, the home has changed. In Book 13, the Phaeacians carry the sleeping Odysseus ashore on Ithaca. He wakes and does not recognize his own island — Athena has veiled it in mist. This is the poem's pivot: coming home is not returning to the place you left, because twenty years have rewritten that place. The father has aged, the wife is besieged, the son has grown into a stranger's face. The test of the reunion in Book 23 therefore closes on the bed — a bed whose post is a living olive root in the ground, immovable. A true homecoming requires two recognitions at once: he recognizes his home, and his home recognizes him.

Nostos and Nostalgia

Nostos did not die with the ancient world. In 1688 a Swiss medical student coined nostalgia from two Greek words: nostos (return) and algos (pain) — the pain of longing for home. The disease he described afflicted soldiers who had been away too long, wasting away for which the only cure was to go home.

Modern readers may feel the word more keenly than Homer's first audiences did: in an age of routine mobility, the problem of nostos has become everyone's problem — whether the one who left can still come back, and whether what waits there is still the home that was left. The scholar Douglas Frame has argued that in early Greek nóos ("mind, awareness") and nostos are etymologically kin: at its root, coming home is coming awake. Every step Odysseus takes on Ithaca — recognizing the swineherd, the old nurse, his wife — is an act of waking. His homecoming is not a geographical event but an event of recognition: recognizing his home again, and recognizing himself.