The Returning Hero is a collection of eleven chapters and an introduction from the 2016 conference, ‘Nostoi: Traditions of Mediterranean Settlement’. The book has a twofold purpose: querying the importance of nostos as an individual ‘return’ and the social contexts of Mediterranean settlement. The chapters are ordered roughly chronologically from the archaic period to the Roman principate and cover a geographical expanse from Italy to Alexander's Indian expedition.
Hornblower's introduction offers an overview of nostos as a conceptual framework from the Trojan cycle through to Hellenistic prose authors of nostoi; this review covers nostos and related words as well as the concept of return with non-nostos words. While the summary is helpful in that Hornblower introduces an array of texts, overall the summary is confusing as each section does something a little different than the previous section: there are thematic overviews, summaries of texts, discussions of the themes in the following chapters and even a historiography of nostoi studies. The scattered nature of the nostos overview detracts from the goal of giving ‘a rounded, thematic account of ancient … attitudes to return’ (p. 3) as the reader is never quite sure where said account of nostos is going. This is exacerbated by the length of the introduction, which at 42 pages is twice the length of most chapters. As a final note, Hornblower chose to use an in-text system of cross-references which, while not overly disruptive, is still jarring.
The nostoi myths participate fully in the processes behind Hellenic identity formation. R.L. Fowler (Chapter 2) examines the break between the Achaean heroes who fought at Troy and the development of the Hellenic genealogy. By tracing the heroes who return and their failed lines or non-Greek descendants, Fowler argues that ‘a returnee from Troy cannot found a Hellenic tribe’ (p. 51) and that consequently the Hellenic genealogy is an independent tradition from the nostoi myths, one to which the nostoi myths themselves were fitted. G. Genovese (Chapter 5) also looks at the process of ethnogenesis as he examines the nostoi of Philoctetes and Epeios as a means of sanctioning the pacification of non-Hellenic peoples and as symbols of cultural interaction among Greeks and non-Greeks in southern Italy. Genovese's presentation of ethnogenesis as an inherently oppositional process shows little engagement with scholarship highlighting aggregative approaches to identity formation, but his chapter overall is a good introduction to how multiple ethnic groups can draw on nostoi myths as a shared common past, particularly in times of conflict.
C. Morgan (Chapter 10) examines how nostoi myths may have been used to express regional identities and relationships in the Ionian and Adriatic regions, focusing on the bracketing texts of the Odyssey and the Alexandra alongside the material record for the area. Her three case studies (a dedication at Olympia by the citizens of Apollonia; a dedication at Dodona by Agathon, son of Echepylos, from Zakynthos; and a shrine to Diomedes on Vela Pelagruža) indicate a pattern whereby nostoi myths primarily serve to connect cities and regions to one another. This chapter covers a lot of ground, and one suspects that it would have been more successful had Morgan spent more time on less material. Turning to nostoi and civic myth, N. Mac Sweeney (Chapter 11) examines the place of Kalchas at Kolophon, whose nostos failed completely when he died there after losing a prophecy contest to the local hero Mopsos. As Mac Sweeney demonstrates, Kalchas’ importance for Kolophon lies not in his role as oikist but rather in building ties with Rome through ‘ancestral analogy diplomacy’ (p. 263): Rome's ancestors fought the Greeks, just as Kolophon's founder Mopsos fought a Greek. Kalchas thereby serves as a means of connecting Kolophon's Trojan past to its Roman present.
Biffis (Chapter 7) turns to the tragic use of nostos as the return of an individual to their community and the confirmation of their social identity (note: Biffis uses the term ‘personal identity’). Beginning with the principle that the term nostos and its cognates structure a relationship between individuals and their communities that informs individual and communal identities, Biffis then turns to how Athenian tragedies revolve around the disruption that removal from home creates and that is resolved by the reintegration of individual and community, a process that confirms the identities of both. Biffis ends with how the reintegration of individuals into their community serves as a means for integrating non-Athenian heroes and spaces into Athenian civic space as a continuation of Athenian self-presentation as the protector of the Greek world. While the chapter is persuasive overall, it would have been more so if Biffis had engaged with the theory around identity more; as it stands, her engagement primarily involves an article arguing that ‘identity’ is not useful as a heuristic concept for non-modern and non-Western societies (R. Handler, in J.R. Gillis [ed.], Commemorations [1994], pp. 27–40.) without addressing why she maintains the usefulness of identity as a heuristic concept for ancient Greece despite Handler's arguments to the contrary.
The idea that nostoi myths can familiarise non-Greek space is the topic of R. Lane Fox's chapter (Chapter 9), who examines Macedonian and Thessalian associations of Asian space with Greek heroes. The nostos here is Virgilian – namely, the return to a place where blood or linguistic relatives have been and/or resided previously –, and Lane Fox traces the connections made by Alexander between Greek heroes and foreign lands (e.g. Perseus at Siwah via the persea tree) as well as those by the Thessalians under his command (e.g. the Argonaut Armenos in Armenia and local shrines to Jason). Following Alexander's death, the use of nostoi myths to populate non-Greek space and make it familiar continued, as seen at Apameia in Syria, and served to interrelate Greeks and non-Greeks to one another.
One of the reasons why nostoi myths are so conducive to querying identity formation is their connection to the movement of Greeks around the Mediterranean. S. West (Chapter 3) uses this movement to engage with the disconnect between the opening ten lines of the Odyssey and the fantastic travels that he experiences. She argues that the opening lines, Odysseus’ lying tales, and Zenodotos’ variation of Telemachus’ journey to Idomeneus suggest that Crete figured heavily in an alternative version of Odysseus’ travels. This version was replaced by fantastic travels to places identified later with the northern and western Mediterranean due to historical movements in those directions. West begins the chapter by imaging the handing down of the epic by a master poet to his students; the relevance to the remainder of the chapter is not immediately apparent, and it is unclear why space was spent on this scenario rather than exploring more deeply the connections between settlement patterns and Odysseus’ travels. Also engaging with the processes of archaic settlement, I. Malkin (Chapter 4) uses the bidirectional movement encapsulated by the term nostos to examine the reciprocal and multi-directional networks between polis and apoikia, particularly those involving the right to return to the former from the latter and the right to emigrate from the former to the latter. Here the hero of the nostoi myths stands to explain direction away from home as a new start and is a parallel to the experiences of the settler and exile.
The bidirectional movement associated with nostos contributes to N. Purcell's (Chapter 12) examination of how nostos functions within the concepts of home and mobility, particularly regarding the linear departure from and return to home and the circular wanderings of the individual who can never return home. The former appears in nostoi myths as heroes return or find a home, while the latter surfaces in the experience of exiles, captured brides, prisoners of war, deracinated slaves and forcibly resettled people; the definition of ‘home’, Purcell argues, sits beside the de-homing of others and the threat of losing one's own home. T.S. Scheer (Chapter 6) also looks at the question of who does not receive a nostos, focusing on the role of nostos as a construction of positive masculinity (leave and long to return) and femininity (cannot leave because others return to them). Instead of being a positive protagonist in nostoi myths, women either serve as a reason for nostos or as obstacles to the successful completion of a nostos, whether on the way home or upon the moment of return. When women travel, except for Helen and Iphigenia, the departure from home results in the disruption of their status as daughters/wives and threatens the loss of reputation.
The concept of home underlying Purcell's chapter is also critical to N.J. Lowe's chapter (Chapter 8), who uses nostos as an access point to place attachment (‘the emotional bond between people and places’ [p. 178]) and the emotional value of home as expressed in Greek literature. After reviewing the treatment of home in nostoi myths from the Odyssey to the Alexandra and the tragic and comic plots structured around the idea of return, Lowe argues that tragic nostoi take the group identities that foundation myths construct via heroic nostoi and turn them into personal emotional experiences which, as they are expressed in embodied space, can then coalesce into collective narratives around displacement and belonging.
Overall, the volume is strong, with material to engage specialists in nostoi myths, mobility and settlement patterns, and ancient identity formation. Hornblower notes that all Greek is translated, with the Greek text moved into the footnotes, so that the book can be accessible for non-specialists, but, unfortunately, the presence of untranslated transliterated Greek undermines that aim, as does the preference for the Greek form of place names without the more common Latin form in parentheses. Several chapters also assume a high level of familiarity with texts and/or geographical regions that do not figure prominently in undergraduate and even graduate education, which also hampers the volume's accessibility for non-specialists; these chapters include Genovese's, Lowe's and Morgan's, with Lowe's being particularly egregious in the familiarity expected around narratology, cognitive theories of space and the Alexandra, which is not a standard teaching text though it has become more popular with scholars. Finally, as a note on the twofold purpose of the book (to engage with nostos as individual return and the social variables of Mediterranean settlement): the former is seen in Scheer's, Biffis’s, Lowe's and Purcell's chapters, while the latter dominates in the remaining chapters and is also in line with the title of the 2016 conference. While the introduction's (brief) discussion of the two themes helps mitigate the disconnect that many conference volumes suffer from, it would have been helpful to have had a fuller discussion, possibly in a short conclusion, on the two themes and their connections to one another as seen in the volume.
