The Seba library treats Nostos in 9 passages, across 3 authors (including Gregory Nagy, Homer, Peterson, Cody).
ôleto men moi nostos, atar kleos aphthiton estai I have lost a safe return home [nostos], but I will have unfailing glory [kleos].
This passage establishes the definitive Homeric antithesis — nostos as the mortal path of return and life, sacrificed by Achilles in exchange for the immortal glory that the Iliadic tradition preserves.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979thesis
On the semantics of nostos in Homeric poetry: Frame 1978. On nostos as not only ‘homecoming’ but also ‘song about a homecoming’: Ch.6§6n2.
Nagy directs readers to Frame’s semantic analysis, which expands nostos beyond narrative event to include its genre-dimension as a song tradition, structurally parallel to kleos.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979thesis
lest they [the Trojans] burn the ships with blazing fire and take away a safe
In this passage, nostos figures as something that can be seized or destroyed — a tangible possession of the Achaean warriors whose loss is tied directly to Achilles’ mênis and its consequences.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979supporting
On the contrast in genre between kleos and nostos: Nagy, pp. 11-13; also Ch.2§§3 and 11, to be read in conjunction with Ch.6§6nn2 and 5.
Nagy explicitly frames nostos and kleos as distinct generic traditions within archaic Greek epic, not merely thematic opposites, giving the contrast formal literary-historical weight.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979supporting
First, he took many good men off to sail with him, and lost the ships, and killed the men! Now he has come and murdered all the best of Cephallenia.
Eupeithes’ indictment of Odysseus frames the returning hero’s nostos not as triumphant restoration but as a source of communal grief and violent reckoning, complicating the celebratory valence of homecoming.
, The Odyssey, 2017supporting
Nestor tells how the Greeks destroyed Troy, and then were cursed by Athena. The brothers Agamemnon and Menelaus quarreled, the troops split up, and the fleet was scattered on their homeward journey.
The Telemachy situates nostos within a pattern of divine cursing and heroic failure, showing that the return is structurally imperiled for every hero of the Trojan War, not Odysseus alone.
, The Odyssey, 2017supporting
the heart barked within him… Odysseus ‘strikes his chest’, compressing the vessel to contain the surge of heated emot
Peterson’s account of the mortal thumos under pressure illustrates the psychic cost of nostos: the returning Odysseus must forcibly contain interior volatility to sustain his disguise and reclaim his home.
, The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel: The Homeric Response to ‘Answer to Job’, 2025supporting
You sing in very correct fashion the fate of the Achaeans, all the things that they did and suffered and struggled for.
Odysseus weeping at Demodokos’s song signals the emotional burden of the nostos figure — the returned hero who must re-encounter his own story as external song, grief, and identity.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979aside
She kept her lawful husband, Odysseus, well in mind. Thus the kleos of his aretê shall never perish.
Penelope’s fidelity is the domestic correlate of Odysseus’s nostos — her memory preserves the possibility of return and is rewarded with its own form of kleos, binding the homecoming to the household’s moral endurance.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979aside