Homecoming? by Richard Seltzer

Posted on Medium September 20, 2025

Feedback welcome. seltzer@seltzerbooks.com
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I’m surprised this wasn’t obvious to me before:

Of the Greek leaders at Troy only Nestor had a “happy homecoming””

·         Agamemnon murdered

·         Diomedes exiled

·         Ajax the Lesser dead in a ship wreck

·         Teucer exiled

Neoptolemus didn’t return to Scyros or Phthia, but rather went to Epirus and was killed by Orestes.

I didn’t know about Idomeneus, but found this in Wikipedia:

“A later tradition, preserved by Servius the Grammarian in a commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid, continues the story as follows: after the war, Idomeneus’s ship hit a terrible storm. He promised Poseidon that he would sacrifice the first living thing he saw when he returned home if Poseidon would save his ship and crew. The first living thing was his son, whom Idomeneus duly sacrificed. The gods were angry at Idomeneus’s murder of his own son and sent a plague to Crete. The Cretans sent him into exile in Calabria (ancient name of the Salento in Apulia), Italy and then Colophon in Asia Minor where he died.”

Menelaus and Odysseus eventually returned home, but only after long years of struggle and danger.

For all but Nestor, homecoming was a disaster.
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