Nestor

The oldest king at Troy

Nestor was the son of Neleus and Chloris and the king of Pylos. In Homer’s poems he is the oldest of the Achaeans, the Greeks who fought at Troy. Two generations of men who grew up with him have died, he says, and he now rules among a third.

The Iliad, Homer’s poem of the Trojan War, gives him two titles. He is the clear-voiced speaker of the Pylians, which describes what he does in assemblies. He is also the Gerenian horseman. That title ties him to a place that later geographers could not agree how to find.

Much of what Nestor brings to the poem is memory. His long speeches tell of heroes and fights from before the war, which the rest of the poem does not mention.

Stories from his youth

Nestor speaks to the Greek leaders Achilles and Agamemnon about the men he knew when he was young. He names Peirithous, Dryas, Caeneus, Exadius, Polyphemus and Theseus. They were his companions in a war against the Centaurs who lived in the mountains.

The Iliad mentions that earlier group nowhere else. Through Nestor’s memory, the poem looks back to an age of heroes before Troy.

Nestor tells the Greek warrior Patroclus a more concrete story from his youth. Pylos was weak at the time, and the Epeians of Elis owed it a debt. Nestor led a raid against Elis. He killed a man named Itymoneus and drove home cattle, sheep, pigs, goats and 150 chestnut horses.

Nothing else in the poem confirms the boast. Nestor’s authority depends on his listeners accepting his memory as evidence.

Advice before a chariot race

After Patroclus dies, the Greeks hold funeral games in his honour. Before the chariot race, Nestor gives advice to his son Antilochus, whose horses are slower than the others. Antilochus knows well how to turn his chariot around the post at the far end of the course, Nestor says. The other drivers have faster horses, but they have no more cunning than he does.

“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 his son to store up cunning of every kind in his mind, so that the prizes do not slip away from him.

The cup of Nestor

Homer describes one object of Nestor’s in close detail: a cup he brought from home. It is studded with gold and has four handles, with two golden doves feeding on each, and two supports beneath it. No other cup in either poem gets so much description.

In 1876 excavation at Mycenae found a gold cup in a grave known as Shaft Grave IV. The man who found it compared it at once with Homer’s cup, and the name stayed with it. Yet the Mycenae cup has two handles, not four, and Homer never names Mycenae as Nestor’s city. People have argued over the likeness ever since. Some modern scholars hold that Homer’s description is too vague to settle it either way.

A third cup carries the name on its own authority, not a modern one. This drinking cup comes from a grave at Pithekoussai, an ancient settlement on the island of Ischia. It was inscribed in the late eighth century BC with the words “I am the Cup of Nestor, good to drink from.”

Nestor at home in the Odyssey

The Odyssey, Homer’s poem about the hero Odysseus, shows Nestor at home after the war. Odysseus’s son Telemachus and the goddess Athena land at Pylos while the whole community is sacrificing to the god Poseidon on the shore. Nine groups of 500 men each have gathered, with nine bulls for every group.

Nestor’s son Peisistratus makes room for the strangers and gives them meat. He hands the wine cup first to the guest he takes to be the older of the two. Only when this welcome is complete does the family ask the visitors their names. The poem first shows Nestor through an orderly household, not on a battlefield.

Which Pylos was his

Nestor’s title Gerenian became part of a dispute about where he ruled. The geographer Strabo records a saying that there was “a Pylos before Pylos, and yet another Pylos”. He names three places called Pylos in the Peloponnese: one in Triphylia, one near the river Peneius in Elis, and one in Messenia near Coryphasium.

Writers from Elis pointed to a place called Gerenus and to rivers called Geron and Geranius in their own land. They argued that the title Gerenian came from there. The Messenians answered that their land held a better-known place called Gerena, and Strabo says theirs was the stronger claim.

The ancient writer Apollodorus does not dwell on the argument. In his account Neleus was banished from Iolcus, came to Messenia and founded Pylos there.