Date

The date of composition of the Nostoi, and the date when it was set in writing, are both very uncertain. The text is most likely to have been finalised in the seventh or sixth century BC.

Content

The Nostoi relates the return home of the Greek heroes after the end of the Trojan War. In current critical editions only five and a half lines of the poem's original text survive. For its storyline we are almost entirely dependent on a summary of the Cyclic epics contained in the Chrestomatheia (see also chrestomathy) attributed to the 5th-centuryAD philosopher Proklos Diadochos. A few other references also give indications of the poem's storyline.

The poem opens as the Greeks are getting ready to set sail back to Greece. The goddess Athena is wrathful because of the Greeks' impious behaviour in the sack of Troy (see Iliou persis). Agamemnon waits behind, to appease her; Diomedes and Nestor set sail straightaway, and reach home safely; Menelaos sets sail, but encounters a storm, loses most of his ships, lands in Egypt and is delayed there for several years. Other Greeks, including the prophet Kalchas, go by land to Kolophon, where Kalchas dies and is buried.

As Agamemnon is getting ready to sail, Achilleus' ghost appears to him and foretells his fate. Agamemnon makes a sacrifice and sets sail anyway; Neoptolemos, however, is visited by his grandmother, the sea-nymph Thetis, who tells him to wait and make further sacrifices to the gods. Zeus sends a storm on Agamemnon and those accompanying him at Athena's request, and the lesser Aias dies on the Kapherian rocks on the southern end of Euboia. Neoptolemos follows Thetis' advice and goes home by land; in Thrake he meets Odysseus at Maroneia, who has come there by sea. Neoptolemos arrives home, though Phoinix dies en route, and there he is recognised by his grandfather Peleus.

Agamemnon arrives home and is there murdered by his wife Klytaimestra and her lover, Agamemnon's cousin Aigisthos. Later Agamemnon's and Klytaimestra's son Orestes avenges the murder by killing both of them. Finally Menelaos arrives home from Egypt. (This last section, known as the Oresteia, is narrated in Odyssey books 3 and 4 by Nestor and Menelaos; and it was later also the basis for Aischylos' trilogy of tragic plays, the Oresteia.)

At the end of the Nostoi the only living Greek hero who still has not returned home is Odysseus. His return is narrated in the Odyssey.

Editions

Online editions (English translation):

Fragments of the Nostoi translated by H.G. Evelyn-White, 1914 (public domain)

Fragments of complete Epic Cycle translated by H.G. Evelyn-White, 1914; Project Gutenberg edition

Proklos' summary of the Epic Cycle translated by Gregory Nagy

Print editions (Greek):

A. Bernabé 1987, Poetarum epicorum Graecorum testimonia et fragmenta pt. 1 (Leipzig: Teubner)

M. Davies 1988, Epicorum Graecorum fragmenta (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht)

Print editions (Greek with English translation):

West, M.L. Greek Epic Fragments: From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC (Loeb Classical Library No. 497)-