This chapter explores the spatial dimensions of the trope of the epic return journey (the nostos) and focuses on the physical and emotive experiences which such a journey produces. Loney first highlights dislocation as an important feature in epic, and a motivating force behind its plot: the feeling of being separated in time or space from a more ideal past or home. Under this single conception of ‘dislocation’, the chapter brings together two poetic themes which scholars have traditionally treated discretely: nostalgia and homesickness. Archaic epics, especially Hesiod’s Works and Days, rely on a narrative of decline—of temporal dislocation—from an antecedent ‘golden age’, for which internal characters and external audiences are nostalgic. Similarly, characters in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey may be spatially dislocated and homesick, motivating a return journey (prototypically Odysseus, but also at moments Achilles and Helen).

Greek agriculture took place within a largely Mediterranean regime of annual, dry-farmed grains and pulses, alongside perennial vines and olives. Hesiod’s Works and Days, Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, the Attic orators, inscriptions, intensive survey, and comparative data from before 1950 form the main evidence. The agricultural year centred around winter sowing and summer harvest. Scholars propose two competing models of agriculture. Extensive agriculture used draft animals and biennial fallow and was more suited to at least mid-sized holdings, nucleated settlement, and transhumant livestock. Intensive agriculture required greater hand-cultivation and was suited to smaller plots, dispersed settlement, and mixed farming to provide year-round animal manure. High risk of crop failure made intensification, diversification, and storing a ‘normal surplus’ a rational subsistence strategy for smaller landowners. However, there is also evidence for connectivity and production for market. Debates over agricultural slavery, settlement, and possible intensification from the fifth century BCE intersect with the question of market participation.