Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Diomedes son of Tydeus returned safely and swiftly from Troy to Argos in the common *Nostoi* notice—yet later tradition does not leave him at ease in the Argolid. Aphrodite’s anger (for his wounding her in *Iliad* 5) and domestic intrigue unravel his homecoming: his wife Aegialia (Aegiale) is said to have taken lovers (Cometes son of Sthenelus, in Apollodorus), driven by Aphrodite or by Nauplius’s vengeful false letters. Diomedes left the Peloponnese. He went first to Aetolia, his father’s country, and settled affairs there (helping restore Oeneus or ordering the land). Then—following Greek colonial myth—he crossed to Italy, to Daunia (Apulia). King Daunus received him; Diomedes aided in war, married the king’s daughter (or received land), and founded cities. Two islands off the Apulian coast were called the Islands of Diomedes; birds there were said to be his transformed companions (Ovid’s Roman heron-metamorphosis after his death). Strabo and Greek geographers treat the Daunian cult and tombs as the western end of the hero’s nostos: the Argive who wounded gods at Troy ends as an Italian founder, still under Aphrodite’s long grudge, his Achaean home closed by adultery and divine spite.