Homecoming, and what it takes to get there.
The Odyssey announces homecoming as its subject in its very first lines, and everything the poem does is measured against that goal. The Telemachy shows what a homecoming involves by setting several returns from Troy side by side, while the one that matters most has still not happened.
1.1–21 the proem 1.60–79 the divine council 1.194–205 “your father is alive” 1.211–212 the great name lament 1.239–305 Athene’s plan
Have your Book 1 workbook open alongside this page. Quotations on this page give the workbook’s own line numbers.
Nostos means return or homecoming. It covers the journey and the arrival, and, as this lesson will show, it also covers what has to happen after the arrival. The Odyssey announces it as its subject in the first lines: a man who wandered far and suffered at sea while trying to get home. Everything the poem does is measured against that goal.
This makes the Odyssey a different kind of poem from the Iliad, which is about winning glory in war and the cost of doing so. The Odyssey asks what happens afterwards: whether a man can get back to the life he left, and what he finds when he does.
Nostos also depends on xenia. No one in the poem gets home alone. Menelaus says outright in Book 4 that he and Helen made it back only because strangers fed and sheltered them on the way. Every homecoming is a chain of hospitality scenes, and if one link breaks the traveller does not arrive.
A completed nostos has four parts, and the Telemachy shows each of them failing for someone.
Agamemnon is the poem’s proof that arriving and coming home are two different things. He survived the war and the voyage and reached his own hall, yet he never came home. His story is told again and again in Books 1–4 because it separates the two so brutally.
It also shows why nostos is bound up with the household and with timē. Odysseus’s return will have to deal with the suitors, reclaim his wife and restore his son’s inheritance. The Telemachy shows the household falling apart so that the audience understands how much the homecoming will have to repair.
Common mistake. Nostos is more than reaching Ithaca. Agamemnon reached Mycenae and was murdered before the day was out, and the poem makes it very clear that reaching the door is a different thing from coming home.
The Telemachy’s peculiar power comes from the fact that its central nostos has not occurred. Odysseus is alive but stuck, and no one at home knows this. For four books the poem shows what a missing homecoming does to the people waiting for it:
Telemachus says as much in Book 1. If his father had died at Troy there would at least be a grave and a name 1.211–212. For the family, not knowing is worse than a known loss.
This is also a matter of technique. The audience knows from the divine council that the return is fated 1.60–79; the characters do not. The Telemachy works in the gap between what the audience knows and what Ithaca knows, and this is why the suitors’ dismissal of the eagle omen in Book 2 is so pointed: the audience knows that they are wrong.
Books 1–4 line up several homecomings from the war side by side. Read as a set, they make the poem’s argument: there are many ways for a nostos to succeed or fail, and Odysseus’s is the one still in the balance.
| Who | Kind of return | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Nestor | Complete and prompt | Sailed straight home and kept his household and honour intact. The untroubled model, told by the man himself in Book 3. |
| Menelaus | Complete but delayed | Blown to Egypt and stranded for years; home only after seizing Proteus for a way back. Wealthy, but he says he would give it up to have his dead comrades back. |
| Agamemnon | Arrival without homecoming | Murdered in his own hall by Aegisthus and Clytemnestra; avenged by Orestes. The anti-nostos the poem returns to repeatedly. |
| Ajax | No return | Died at sea, as Proteus tells Menelaus. A homecoming that never began. |
| Achilles | Return refused | Chose glory at Troy over a long life at home. This is the Iliad’s choice, and the one Odysseus does not make. |
| Odysseus | Pending | Alive, detained by Calypso, longing for home. The whole plot is the working-out of this one unfinished return. |
| Telemachus | A journey in reverse | Leaves home to find news that might bring his father back, and by Book 4 faces an ambush on his own return. |
Book 1 announces nostos as the poem’s subject, settles on Olympus that Odysseus will return, and then shows Ithaca learning for the first time that a return is even possible.
The poem defines its hero by his journey home, names Calypso as the one detaining him and Poseidon as the god opposing him.
Zeus agrees that the gods will bring Odysseus home; Poseidon may delay the return but cannot stop it.
“Mentes” tells Telemachus that Odysseus is alive, held on an island, and resourceful enough to find a way back.
Telemachus wishes his father had died at Troy, where he would have had a burial mound and a famous name.
Athene tells Telemachus to call an assembly, then sail to Pylos and Sparta for news of his father’s return.
Phemius sings of the Greeks’ return from Troy; Penelope comes down in tears and asks for another song.
Tell me, Muse, the story of that resourceful man who was driven to wander far and wide after he had sacked the holy citadel of Troy. … He suffered great anguish on the high seas in his struggles to preserve his life and bring his comrades home. But he failed to save those comrades, in spite of all his efforts.
… Odysseus alone was prevented from returning to the home and wife he yearned for by that powerful goddess, the Nymph Calypso, who longed for him to marry her, and kept him in her vaulted cave.
Book 1, workbook lines 1–15
Nostos is announced as the poem’s subject before anything else happens. The proem also names Poseidon as the god who pursued Odysseus “with relentless malice till the day when he reached his own country” (workbook lines 18–20), so the audience already knows who is delaying the return.
‘That is why, ever since Polyphemus was blinded, Poseidon the Earth-shaker has kept Odysseus in exile, though he stops short of killing him. But come now, let all of us here together contrive a plan to bring him home. Poseidon will relent. For he will not be able to struggle on alone against the united will of the immortal gods.’
‘… tell Calypso, the Nymph with the plaited tresses, of our unalterable decision that the patient Odysseus must now set out for home.’
Book 1, workbook lines 68–80
From the first scene on Olympus the audience knows that the return will happen. The people on Ithaca do not, and the rest of the Telemachy depends on that difference.
‘… the gods must be hindering his return, because the good Odysseus is not dead, but alive somewhere on this earth. He must be on some distant island out in the sea, in the hands of enemies, savages no doubt, who keep him there by force. … Your father will not be exiled much longer from the land he loves so well, not even if he’s kept in iron chains. He will think of a way to return – he is endlessly resourceful.’
Book 1, workbook lines 173–181
A homecoming now becomes possible in the minds of the people waiting for it, and the news changes Telemachus’s whole posture for the rest of the book.
‘… they have made him vanish. His death itself, if he had fallen among his men at Troy or died in friendly arms at home with all his fighting done, would have caused me less distress. For in that case the whole Achaean nation would have joined in building him a mound, and he would have left a great name for his son to inherit. But there was to be no famous end for him; the Storm-Fiends have snatched him away. He has gone where he cannot be seen or found and to me has left nothing but sorrow and tears.’
Book 1, workbook lines 207–215
For Telemachus a failed homecoming with no body is worse than a heroic death. The moment is also about kleos, since a death at Troy would have left a great name, and so it hurts twice.
‘Choose your best ship, man her with twenty oarsmen, and set out to inquire after your long absent father. … Go to Pylos first and question the excellent Nestor; then on to Sparta to see auburn-haired Menelaus, since he was the last of the bronze-armoured Achaeans to reach home. If you hear that your father is alive and on his way back, you should reconcile yourself to a year more of this wastage. But if you hear that he is dead and gone, return to your own country, build a mound with all the proper funeral rites, and give your mother in marriage to a new husband.’
Book 1, workbook lines 246–256
He found them listening in silence to a song which their famous bard was singing to them about the Achaeans’ return from Troy and the disasters that Pallas Athene made them suffer.
‘… give us no more of your present song. It is too sad; it never fails to wring my heart. For in that catastrophe no one was dealt a heavier blow than I, who pass my days in mourning for the best of husbands, the man whose name rings through the land from Hellas to the heart of Argos.’
Book 1, workbook lines 284–302
Here homecoming is literally a song sung in a hall, and one that a waiting wife cannot bear to hear. Telemachus answers that “Odysseus is not the only one who has never returned from Troy” (workbook line 310).
Worth noticing. The first nostos the gods explicitly guarantee to anyone on Ithaca is the son’s, in Penelope’s dream at the end of Book 4.
Most stories of return are told from the traveller’s point of view. The Telemachy does something rarer: for four books it tells a homecoming entirely from the side of the people waiting for it.
Penelope’s weaving trick, Telemachus’s silence among the suitors, the household’s wealth draining away and the suitors’ growing confidence that the master is dead are all what a delayed nostos looks like from inside the house.
When Odysseus finally does return, the audience already knows exactly what he is returning to, and how much has been at stake in every year of his absence. In this way the Telemachy earns the homecoming before it happens.
These are positions for you to test. Decide how far the text supports each one, and mark your verdict.