The Return from Troy

The fleet leaves in disagreement

Troy has fallen, but the Greek commanders do not leave together. In Nestor’s account to Telemachus, Menelaus wants to sail at once. Agamemnon stays behind to sacrifice and appease Athena. Half the army follows each brother, and a second dispute at Tenedos divides the ships again. Odysseus turns back towards Agamemnon; Nestor and Diomedes continue.

The disagreement makes several homecomings out of one departure. Nestor reaches Pylos after a direct passage. Other commanders travel by sea or land, lose ships, arrive late or reach home only to die there. Ancient tradition called these returns the Nostoi, a plural title suited to routes that no longer form a single expedition.

What survives of the lost Nostoi

A prose summary by Proclus heads the Nostoi as a five-book poem attributed to Agias of Troezen. The poem itself is lost. Its summary follows the Iliou Persis, the epic about Troy’s destruction, and 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, while Neoptolemus takes an overland route and reaches the Molossians. The summary closes with Agamemnon’s murder by Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, Orestes’s revenge and Menelaus’s safe return.

That sequence is an outline, not a surviving performance of the poem. It supplies the order and main outcomes, but not the scenes, speeches or changes of emphasis that five books once contained. The complete Odyssey therefore preserves one return in a form the Nostoi no longer can.

Nestor tells the shortest return at Pylos

The Odyssey places Nestor’s account inside another family’s search. Telemachus comes to Pylos to ask what happened after Troy and whether anyone knows Odysseus’s fate. Nestor can describe the fleet’s division because he sailed in it, but his own voyage gives him no news of those who took other routes.

He and Diomedes pass Lesbos, ask for a divine sign about their course and cross towards Euboea. Diomedes reaches Argos on the fourth day. The wind then carries Nestor on to Pylos without failing. His easy passage explains both his presence at home and the limit of his evidence: the first commander safely returned cannot report the disasters that unfolded elsewhere.

Ithaca hears the returns before Odysseus arrives

On Ithaca, the wider cycle is already a song. Phemius sings about the grievous homecoming Athena imposed on the Achaeans. Penelope hears him from upstairs and asks for another subject because this one renews her grief for Odysseus. Telemachus refuses to silence the singer. The collective return is public knowledge, while the fate of one absent man remains unknown inside his house.

Odysseus later reaches Ithaca without a fleet or surviving crew. The Phaeacians carry him into the harbour of Phorcys while he sleeps, place him on the sand and leave his possessions beside the olive tree. Even then, Athena’s mist prevents him from recognising the island until she names its landmarks.

The Odyssey continues through the tests by which Odysseus is recognised and recovers his household. Those scenes belong to the poem’s own entry. Within the return cycle, his sleeping arrival supplies the opposite of Nestor’s account: Nestor knows his route but not the others’ fates; Odysseus reaches his own shore before he knows where he is.

Why arrival does not settle every return

Agamemnon’s route ends at home too. In the Nostoi summary, his murder comes after the journeys and before Orestes’s revenge. The commander has survived Troy and the voyage, yet his arrival leads directly into another family conflict.

The Return from Troy is therefore not a final voyage shared by the victors. Pylos holds the story of a quick passage told by the man who completed it. Ithaca first hears the returns as news of general suffering, then receives Odysseus alone and asleep. Agamemnon reaches his country without securing a life there. The surviving accounts keep these outcomes beside one another because departure from Troy is the last event the commanders share.