Nestor

The old king receives strangers on the shore

Telemachus and Athena land at Pylos while the whole community sacrifices to Poseidon on the shore. Nine companies of five hundred men each have gathered, with nine bulls for every company. Nestor’s son Peisistratus makes room for the strangers, gives them meat and offers the wine cup first to the guest he takes for the elder man. Only after hospitality is complete does the family ask their names.

The Odyssey introduces Nestor through an ordered household rather than a battlefield. The Iliad calls him the clear-voiced orator of the Pylians and the Gerenian horseman. One title describes what he does in assemblies; the other fixes him to a place that later geographers could not agree how to locate.

The generation only Nestor remembers

Nestor has outlived two generations of men raised with him and rules among a third. To Achilles and Agamemnon he names Peirithous, Dryas, Caeneus, Exadius, Polyphemus and Theseus, companions in a war against the mountain-dwelling Centaurs. The Iliad mentions that earlier group nowhere else. His memory opens the poem onto a heroic age before Troy.

He gives Patroclus a more concrete story from his youth: a raid against Elis when Pylos was weak and the Epeians owed it a debt. Nestor kills Itymoneus and drives home cattle, sheep, swine, goats and 150 chestnut horses. Nothing else in the poem confirms the boast. Nestor’s authority depends on listeners accepting that memory itself is evidence.

What he tells his son before a race

At Patroclus’s funeral games, Nestor advises his son Antilochus before the chariot race, whose team is slower than the others. Antilochus knows well, he says, how to wheel about the turning post; the horses of the other drivers are faster, but their men have no more cunning than his own. “By cunning,” he tells him, “is a woodman far better than by might; by cunning too doth a helmsman on the wine-dark deep guide aright a swift ship that is buffeted by winds; and by cunning doth charioteer prove better than charioteer.” He tells him to lay up cunning of every kind in his mind, so that the prizes do not escape him.

The cup later objects borrowed

Homer gives one object to Nestor in close detail: a cup he brought from home, studded with gold, with four handles, two golden doves feeding on each, and two supports beneath it. No other cup in either poem gets this much description. In 1876 Heinrich Schliemann recovered a gold cup from Shaft Grave IV at Mycenae and called it, in his own words, “vividly reminiscent” of Homer’s — though the Mycenae cup has two handles, not four, and Mycenae is nowhere named as Nestor’s city. The resemblance has been argued over ever since, and the archaeologist Stephanie Aulsebrook has written that Homer’s description is too vague to settle it either way. A third object carries the name on its own authority rather than a modern one: a drinking cup from a grave at Pithekoussai, on Ischia, inscribed in the late eighth century BC with the words “I am the Cup of Nestor, good to drink from.”

Whose Gerenian country

Nestor’s own epithet became part of a dispute about where he actually ruled. Strabo records a saying that there was “a Pylos before Pylos, and yet another Pylos,” naming three places of that name in the Peloponnese: one in Triphylia, one near the Peneius in Elis, and one in Messenia near Coryphasium. Elean writers pointed to a place called Gerenus and rivers called Geron and Geranius in their own territory, and argued that Nestor’s epithet Gerenian came from there; Messenians answered that their own territory held a better-known place called Gerena, with — Strabo says — the stronger claim. Apollodorus does not linger over the argument: he has Neleus banished from Iolcus, arriving in Messenia, and founding Pylos there outright.