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Hornblower (S.), Biffis (G.) (edd.) The Returning Hero. Nostoi and Traditions of Mediterranean Settlement. Pp. xxii + 354, ills, maps. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Cased, £75, US$99. ISBN: 978-0-19-881142-8.
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...