4 Homecoming and reunion

Although much of the Odyssey narrates Odysseus’ adventures between the end of the Trojan War and his return to Ithaca, this is ultimately a poem about finding one’s way home. The Greek term for homecoming is νόστος (pronounced nostos, plural nostoi; combined with the Greek for ‘pain’, ἄλγος, pronounced algos, it produces the English word ‘nostalgia’, which might quite literally mean something more like ‘homesickness’ than the idea of longing for the past which it carries today). A whole strand of the Trojan War tradition seems to have revolved around the nostoi of the Greek heroes after Troy; you may remember that the bard Phemius sings of the Greeks’ homecomings in the first book of the Odyssey. As you may also remember from the animation you watched in Activity 1, in the Odyssey the action builds towards Odysseus’ return to Ithaca and his eventual reunion with Penelope. This takes place in Book 23 of the poem. You are going to spend some time thinking about how the reunion plays out in the poem, and what the reunion scene might reveal about the characters of Penelope and Odysseus.