Characters
- Aegialia — wife of Diomedes; corrupted in Nauplius tradition
- Aegisthus — adulterous partner at Mycenae
- Agamemnon — turned (in this tradition) toward Aegisthus by Nauplius’s counsel
- Cometes — lover of Aegialia (handbook)
- Nauplius — avenger; denied justice; corrupts wives; lights beacons (cross-ref 078)
- Odysseus — chief enemy; engineer of Palamedes’ death
- Palamedes — son slain by Odysseus’s plot
- Thyestes — refuse Nauplius justice at Troy
Places
- Aulis / Chalcis — maritime revenge (078)
- Mycenae — Clytemnestra and Aegisthus
- Trojan shore — Nauplius’s plea refused
Themes
Narrative
After Odysseus framed Palamedes and the army killed him, Nauplius came to the Troad to demand satisfaction. The chiefs refused him. He departed nursing a double revenge: to destroy their ships on the homeward voyage and to destroy their houses before they returned. Apollodorus and the mythographic tradition credit him with sailing among the Achaean kingdoms in the men’s absence and urging the wives to adultery—naming especially Clytemnestra toward Aegisthus and Aegialia toward a lover (Cometes) in Diomedes’ house; other catalogues add further seductions. Whether every adultery of the nostoi is laid to his whispering or only the most famous, the motif makes Nauplius the mortal engine of the “faithless wife” theme that greets Agamemnon and stains other returns.
Combined with the false beacons at Caphereus (078), Nauplius’s revenge is the nostoi’s human counterpart to Athena’s wrath: the army’s crime against Palamedes is paid in drowned crews and broken marriages. The Oresteia then absorbs Clytemnestra’s deed into the Atreid curse; Diomedes’ troubled return (072) absorbs Aegialia’s betrayal. This entry keeps the father’s agency visible as a single arc from unanswered plea at Troy to domestic and maritime sabotage.