One of the very first definitions of nostalgia in western culture comes, not surprisingly, from Homer's Odyssey. Having returned to Ithaka, disguised as a Cretan prince and Trojan War refugee, Odysseus idly asks the aged swineherd Eumaeus for his own story of exile and enslavement. Eumaeus proposes not simply a narrative, but a sharing of memories, one refugee to another: ᾽ , , .[But we two will drink and feast in the hut, and will take delight in each other's wretched sorrows as we remember them. For in after time a man can even delight in grief, whoever has suffered greatly and wandered far.] (Homer, 1995: 15.398-401; translation mine) The signature of what would come to be called nostalgia is starkly legible here: a form of memory that can convert previous suffering (algos) into delight, although that style of memory is limited to exiles and refugees, those whose homecoming (nostos) has been indefinitely delayed or permanently prevented. It is also a collective endeavor, here a late-night conversation between two older men, each with their stories, whether true or feigned, of multiple dislocations to tell. Over two millennia prior to the word's coinage by a Swiss physician, the swineherd's invocation of a shareable, potent mnemonic alchemy by which painful wanderings can become shared pleasure already defines the 'nostalgia' that increasingly vexes and preoccupies modern scholarship.The vexation produced by nostalgia is, in fact, intimately related to its capacity for offering solace and pleasure. Even in this rather tender Homeric scene opportunities for skepticism suggest themselves. Eumaeus is, in fact, in rather serious error as to the identity of his interlocutor, who has presumably heard Eumaeus's story already and is more interested in testing the continued loyalty of his family's retainer than in transforming pains into delightful recollection over a rustic meal. Whereas for Eumaeus an evening of nostalgic recollection is a pleasure, for Odysseus it is part of a strategy. It is tempting, then, to read this moment as less touching than tense, rife with future Memory Studies 3(3) 269-275