Nostos, a Journey towards Identity in Athenian Tragedy

This chapter investigates tragedy engagement with stories of heroes’ returns, nostoi, and the idea of nostos. Surveying all occurrences of the word nostos and its cognates in tragedy, it shows how these relate to characteristic traits of nostos tales and to the building or consolidation of identity. Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Tauris is singled out, as it offers the chance to explore different strands of analysis at once: how return narratives, usually presented in diegetic mode, can be reinterpreted in a mimetic genre; how the characters’ identity is constructed through self-referential first-person speech narratives that describe a separation from home and the desire to return to it; how these narratives have at their centre the mutual relationship between the narrating subject and his/her own community (family ties included); and finally, how these autobiographical narratives in particular articulate nostoi motifs from a female perspective, being mainly uttered by women.