The Return from Troy

The fleet leaves in disagreement

Troy has fallen, but the Greek commanders do not leave together. The story comes from Nestor, one of those commanders, as he tells it to Telemachus, who is searching for news of Odysseus.

Menelaus wants to sail at once. His brother Agamemnon wants to stay behind to make sacrifices and calm the anger of the goddess Athena. Half the army follows each brother. At the island of Tenedos a second quarrel divides the ships again. Odysseus turns back towards Agamemnon, while Nestor and the commander Diomedes sail on.

So one departure becomes several homecomings. Nestor reaches his home at Pylos by a direct passage. Other commanders travel by sea or by land. Some lose ships, some arrive late, and some reach home only to die there. Ancient tradition called these returns the Nostoi, a Greek word for homecomings. The title is plural, because the routes no longer made up a single voyage.

The lost poem of the returns

A poem in five books called the Nostoi once told these returns. A summary of it in prose, made by a writer named Proclus, names its poet as Agias of Troezen. The poem itself is lost.

In the summary, the Nostoi comes after the Iliou Persis, the poem about the destruction of Troy. It begins with Athena causing the quarrel between Agamemnon and Menelaus. Nestor and Diomedes sail home safely. Menelaus reaches Egypt with five ships after a storm destroys the rest. Ajax the Locrian is destroyed at the Capherean rocks. Neoptolemus goes home over land and reaches the Molossians. The summary ends with the murder of Agamemnon by Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, the revenge of Orestes and the safe return of Menelaus.

This is only an outline. It gives the order of events and how each return ends, but not the scenes, speeches or shifts of emphasis that five books once held. The Odyssey, which survives complete, keeps one return in a form the Nostoi no longer can.

Nestor’s short voyage to Pylos

In the Odyssey, the epic poem of Homer, Nestor’s account sits inside another family’s search. Telemachus comes to Pylos to ask what happened after Troy and whether anyone knows what became of Odysseus. Nestor can describe how the fleet divided, because he sailed with it. But his own voyage gives him no news of those who took other routes.

He and Diomedes sail past Lesbos, ask the gods for a sign about their course and cross towards Euboea. Diomedes reaches Argos on the fourth day. The wind then carries Nestor on to Pylos and never fails him. His easy passage explains why he is safely at home. It also explains the limit of what he knows: the first commander home cannot report the disasters that happened elsewhere.

Ithaca hears the returns before Odysseus arrives

On Ithaca, the home of Odysseus, the returns have already become a song. The singer Phemius sings about the grievous homecoming that Athena forced on the Achaeans, the Greeks of the poem. Penelope, who waits for Odysseus, hears him from upstairs. She asks for another subject, because this one renews her grief. Telemachus refuses to silence the singer. Everyone knows the story of the returns, but inside the house the fate of one missing man is still unknown.

Odysseus reaches Ithaca later, with no fleet and no surviving crew. A people called the Phaeacians carry him into the harbour of Phorcys while he sleeps. They lay him on the sand and leave his possessions beside the olive tree. Even then, a mist sent by Athena stops him from recognising the island, until she names its landmarks for him.

Three different endings

The Odyssey goes on to tell how Odysseus is tested, recognised and takes back his household. Those scenes belong to the entry on the poem itself. Among the returns from Troy, his sleeping arrival is the opposite of Nestor’s account. Nestor knows his own route but not what happened to the others. Odysseus reaches his own shore before he knows where he is.

Agamemnon’s route also ends at home. In the summary of the Nostoi, his murder comes after the journeys and before the revenge of Orestes. He has survived Troy and the voyage, but his arrival leads straight into another family conflict.

The Return from Troy has no final voyage that all the victors share. Pylos holds the story of a quick passage, told by the man who made it. Ithaca first hears the returns as news of general suffering, then receives Odysseus alone and asleep. Agamemnon reaches his country but does not live on there. The surviving accounts keep these endings side by side, because leaving Troy is the last thing the commanders do together.