Nostoi

• 1. Introduction

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  The Nostoi is a lost ancient Greek epic poem whose title translates simply as "Returns" - the homeward journeys of the Greek heroes after the fall of Troy. Only five and a half lines of its original text survive today. Yet those fragments, combined with a prose summary preserved by an ancient scholar, reveal a story full of storms, murder, divine wrath, and grief. The Nostoi asks a question that Homer's Odyssey never fully answers: what happened to everyone else who fought at Troy? Where did Agamemnon go? What became of Diomedes, Neoptolemus, Menelaus? This documentary follows that lost poem - its contents, its authors, its place in the larger architecture of Greek myth - and considers what it means to tell a story that almost nobody can read.

• 2. The Shape of a Lost Poem

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  Five books of verse written in dactylic hexameter - that is the structural fact we know about the Nostoi with confidence. Dactylic hexameter was the meter of Homer, the elevated rhythm that ancient audiences associated with epic grandeur. Five books placed the Nostoi among the shorter works of the Epic Cycle, the group of poems that together narrated the whole arc of the Trojan War and its aftermath. The Nostoi sat between the Iliupersis, which described the sack of Troy, and the Odyssey, which told the homecoming of one man, Odysseus, in great detail. The Nostoi handled everyone else.

  When scholars today try to reconstruct what the poem said, they rely almost entirely on a text called the chrestomathy attributed to an unknown Proklos, possibly to be identified with the second-century AD grammarian Eutychius Proclus. A chrestomathy is a collection of literary excerpts or summaries, a kind of ancient study guide. Whatever Proklos was, his summaries of the Cyclic epics are among the most important surviving windows into poems that no longer exist. A few other ancient references add small additional details, but Proklos remains the primary source for understanding the poem's shape.

• 3. The Question of Authorship

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  Three different names appear in ancient sources as the possible author of the Nostoi: Agias, Homer, and Eumelos of Corinth. All three are associated with the 8th century BC. The attribution to Homer reflects a very old tendency in ancient scholarship - many poems that later analysis would identify as distinct works were once attributed to the most famous poet of the tradition. The name Agias appears in some ancient discussions of the Cyclic poets, and Eumelos of Corinth is known as a composer of other early Greek verse.

  The date of the poem's composition adds another layer of uncertainty. While the events it narrates belong to the mythological world of the Bronze Age, the poem itself was most likely put into written form during the 7th or 6th century BC. The gap between those two facts is significant. Oral traditions about the homecomings of the Greek heroes almost certainly circulated for generations before anyone wrote them down. What the written Nostoi captured was one version among many, fixed at a particular moment in a living tradition.

• 4. Gods, Storms, and the Wrath of Athena

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  Athena's anger drives the opening of the poem. The Greeks had behaved impiously during the sack of Troy - the Iliupersis described what happened there - and the goddess was not inclined to let the matter rest. Her wrath sets the entire homecoming into motion as a kind of catastrophe in slow stages. Agamemnon, the king who led the Greek forces, chooses to wait and make sacrifices to appease her before sailing. Diomedes and Nestor, by contrast, set out immediately, and both reach home safely.

  Menelaus sails but pays a steep price. A storm scatters his fleet, he loses most of his ships, and contrary winds carry him all the way to Egypt, where he is stranded for years. Meanwhile a group of other Greeks, including the prophet Calchas, decide not to sail at all. They travel overland and reach Colophon, on the western coast of what is now Turkey. There Calchas dies and is buried. The prophet who had guided the Greek army through ten years of war did not live to see Greece again.

• 5. Neoptolemus and the Road Home

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  Before Agamemnon can sail, something strange happens. The ghost of Achilles appears to him and foretells his fate. Agamemnon hears the prophecy and sails anyway, making a sacrifice before departing. His fleet is hit by a Zeus-sent storm at Athena's request, and Ajax the Lesser dies on the Kapherian rocks at the southern tip of the island of Euboea. His death is one of the more vivid details the poem apparently contained.

  Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, follows a different path. His grandmother Thetis - the sea nymph who was also Achilles's mother - appears to him personally and tells him to wait, to make further sacrifices to the gods, and to travel home overland rather than by sea. Neoptolemus obeys. On his overland journey through Thrace, he encounters Odysseus at a place called Maroneia, who has traveled there by sea. The meeting of these two men - the son of the greatest Greek warrior and the man who will become the subject of the next epic in the cycle - is one of the rare glimpses the poem offers of unexpected intersections. Neoptolemus completes his journey and is recognised by his grandfather Peleus when he arrives home, though his companion Phoenix dies along the route.

• 6. Agamemnon's Return and Its Aftermath

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  Agamemnon arrives home and is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, who was Agamemnon's own cousin. The killing did not go unanswered. Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, later avenges his father's death by killing both his mother and Aegisthus. This sequence of events - the murder, the revenge, the mother killed by her son - is what ancient writers called the Oresteia.

  The Nostoi was not the only place this story was told. Homer's Odyssey, in its third and fourth books, has both Nestor and Menelaus narrate what happened to Agamemnon. The story served in the Odyssey as a kind of cautionary parallel to the situation of Penelope and Odysseus at home in Ithaca. Centuries later the story drew the attention of the playwright Aeschylus, who wrote a trilogy of tragic plays also called the Oresteia. What the Nostoi preserved, in verse form, was one of the foundational acts of violence in Greek myth - a homecoming that was also an assassination, and a son's revenge that was also a matricide. Menelaus finally arrives home from Egypt at the poem's close, the last of the returning Greeks, many years after the war ended.

• 7. The One Who Did Not Return

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  The Nostoi ends by naming a single exception. At the poem's conclusion, every surviving Greek hero has made it home - every one, that is, except Odysseus. His return is left for another poem to narrate. This structural choice is striking: the Nostoi, a poem about returns, ends precisely at the point where the most famous return has not yet happened. Odysseus's story required its own epic, one that would eventually become one of the most read poems in Western literature.

  The fragments and summaries that survive of the Nostoi were translated into English by H.G. Evelyn-White in 1914, a translation now in the public domain. A separate translation of Proklos's summary was produced by Gregory Nagy. In print, the Greek text is preserved in scholarly editions by A. Bernabe published in 1987, M. Davies in 1988, and M.L. West in 2003, whose Greek Epic Fragments volume was published by Harvard University Press. Those editions represent the most complete modern attempt to gather what remains of a poem that, in its five original books, once told the fates of an entire army.