At last, the final write-ups of these lectures…
The Greek word Nostos means ‘return’. In the ancient world, these nostoi formed a cycle of post-homeric epic poems about the homeward journeys of the heroes from Troy. Of this tradition, only the Odyssey really remains, and scattered references elsewhere, such as Agamemnon’s murder upon his homecoming, and Menelaus’ wanderings through Egypt before returning to Sparta with Helen.
When I was an undergraduate studying the Odyssey, I fell in love with this tradition. Nostos implies a return to something, a homecoming, and these myths focus a lot on exploring what ‘home’ means to a Greek. There are very visceral feelings associated with the oikos, as Odysseus’ reaction to his wife’s suitors shows, or Cassandra’s triumphant pronouncements in the Trojan Women that the Greeks had done as much damage to their own country, by leaving it empty of husbands and fathers for ten years, as they had to Troy by destroying it outright. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata echoes these feelings in the more ‘immediate’ context of the Peloponnesian war.
The struggle to come home, the constant determination to get back to one’s house and the people at the centre of it, is what really draws me to these myths. They place an importance on emotional bonds within the family that you don’t often see valorised elsewhere. So while there is hubris, divine wrath, shipwreck, and intra-familal violence, there are also some happy endings, and the poems that pick up from the end of the Odyssey, such as the Telegony, demonstrate once again that Homer is not the be-all and end-all of Greek myth.
Tags: Greek literature, Greek myth, Nostoi, oikos, teaching, Trojan War
