As we have seen, Polyneices' “word of truth” evokes an idealized age in which the gods served as the ultimate arbiters and dispensers of truth and justice. Nostalgia for an earlier period is not a new phenomenon when it appears in the texts of Euripides and his contemporaries, but is already present at the beginnings of Greek literature, in the poetry of Homer and Hesiod (ca. eighth century b.c.). The idealized nature of this yearning is perhaps implicit in the original Greek meaning of the word “nostalgia.” Derived from the Greek words nostos, meaning “return,” and algos, meaning “pain,” “nostalgia” literally means “a painful yearning for a return home,” as we have seen. Homer's Odyssey, the archetypal epic of return, vividly illustrates “nostalgia” in its colloquial sense of “homesickness.” Early on in the epic, Athena paints a vivid picture of its hero, detained far from home by the nymph Calypso: “ … Odysseus, / straining to get sight of the very smoke uprising / from his own country, longs to die” (1.57–9). And, when we first meet Odysseus himself, Hermes finds him “sitting out on the beach, crying, as before now / he had done, breaking his heart in tears, lamentation, and sorrow, / as weeping tears he looked out over the barren water” (5.82–4).

Odysseus' heartsick longing for home qualifies him as the archetypal nostalgic hero in Western literature.