Penelope

Penelope (puh-NEL-uh-pee), in Greek Πηνελόπη, is the wife of Odysseus and queen of Ithaca, and in the Greek imagination she is the archetype of the faithful wife — the woman who waited twenty years for a husband the whole world believed dead, and kept his house and his son and his bed intact against every pressure to give him up. If Odysseus is the hero of mētis, of cunning intelligence, then Penelope is his match and mirror: her weapons are not the bow and the sword but patience, endurance, and a craft of her own as subtle as anything her husband devises. Homer's constant word for her, periphrōn, "circumspect," "of surrounding thought," names exactly what she is — a mind that guards the house by never quite saying yes and never quite saying no.

Her story is one of holding on. For ten years Odysseus was at Troy; for ten more he was lost on the sea, and no word came of whether he lived. In his long absence the great house of Ithaca filled with suitors — over a hundred young noblemen of the island and the lands around it — who camped in the hall, feasted on the estate's herds and wine, courted the queen, and pressed her to choose one of them and remarry, all the while eating the inheritance of her son to nothing. Penelope could not drive them out; she had no army, and her son Telemachus was still a boy. What she had was time and wit, and with them she fought a delaying war of years — most famously by the trick of the loom, weaving a great shroud by day and secretly unpicking it by night, so that the work was never done and the choice never came.

She is remembered above all for two things: her fidelity and her cleverness, which in her are the same virtue. When at last the disguised Odysseus returns, it is Penelope's own tests — the contest of the great bow that no suitor can even string, and the secret of the marriage bed known only to the two of them — that unmask the beggar as her husband and bring the epic to its close. The Greeks set her deliberately as the bright opposite of the faithless wife: against Helen who left her home, against Clytemnestra who murdered hers, Homer places Penelope, who kept faith across twenty years, and made her name a byword for constancy that has never faded.

The daughter of Icarius, and the marriage to Odysseus

Penelope was a Spartan princess, the daughter of Icarius (a Laconian nobleman — not to be confused with any other of the name), and she was cousin to Helen, whose beauty would launch the Trojan War. She came to Ithaca as the bride of Odysseus, son of Laertes, who won her (some say) as a prize in a footrace her father set, or through the good offices of Tyndareus in return for the shrewd counsel Odysseus had given him over Helen's many suitors. A tender tale attached to the wedding: when Odysseus took his bride home to Ithaca, Icarius, loath to part with his daughter, followed the chariot and begged her to stay in Sparta; Odysseus told her she was free to choose — to come with him or remain with her father — and Penelope said nothing, but drew her veil across her face for modesty, and by that silent gesture chose her husband. The place where Icarius gave up and turned back was said to be marked by a shrine ever after. From this marriage came one son, Telemachus, still an infant in arms when the summons came to sail for Troy.

The house besieged — the suitors

When Odysseus went to the war, Penelope was left to keep his house, his lands, and his infant son, and for twenty years she kept them. Ten years the war lasted; and when the other kings came home, Odysseus did not — lost on the sea, his fate unknown, neither certainly living nor certainly dead. Into that uncertainty came the suitors. As the years passed with no word, the young noblemen of Ithaca and the neighbouring islands — Dulichium, Same, Zacynthus — began to court the queen, insisting that Odysseus was dead and that she must remarry and give Ithaca a living lord. They numbered, in Homer's reckoning, more than a hundred — a hundred and eight suitors in all (Odyssey 16.245–253), besides their attendant servants and heralds — and they were no shy petitioners: they moved into the great hall of the palace, slaughtered Odysseus's oxen, sheep, and swine for their daily feasts, drank down his wine, abused his servants, and squandered the estate that was Telemachus's inheritance, all while pressing Penelope for her answer. She could not expel them by force, and to refuse them outright was dangerous; so she held them off by her wits, keeping them all in hope and none in possession, for as long as the trick could last.

The web of Penelope — the shroud of Laertes

Her most famous stratagem, and the one that gave her name a proverb, was the weaving of the shroud. Pressed to choose a husband, Penelope told the suitors she would remarry — but only when she had finished weaving a great funeral robe, a shroud for old Laertes, her husband's aged father, so that when death took him he should not lie without a burial-cloth, and the women of the land should have no cause to reproach her. It was a duty no one could deny a dutiful daughter-in-law, and the suitors agreed to wait. So she set up a great loom in the hall and wove at the wide web all day long — and every night, by torchlight, she secretly unravelled what she had woven, picking out the day's work thread by thread, so that the shroud was never finished and the promised choice never came. For three years she deceived them by this trick, and it might have gone on longer, but in the fourth year one of her own treacherous maidservants betrayed the secret, and the suitors caught her in the night undoing the web, and forced her to finish it. The stratagem is told three times in the Odyssey, so central is it to who she is; "the web of Penelope" became an ancient proverb for a labour deliberately and endlessly left undone.

The long endurance and grief

Behind the cunning lies a portrait of grief that Homer never lets the reader forget. Penelope weeps continually for the husband she cannot know to be alive; she withdraws to her upper chamber to cry herself to sleep, "until grey-eyed Athena cast sweet sleep upon her eyelids." She questions every traveller and beggar who reaches Ithaca for any word of Odysseus, and is deceived again and again by men who tell her hopeful lies for the sake of a welcome. Her position is agonising and precise: if Odysseus is dead, duty to her son and her house may require her to remarry; if he lives, remarriage is betrayal — and she cannot know which. She dreams anxious dreams — a famous one of an eagle that swoops down and kills her flock of twenty geese, which the dream-eagle then explains is Odysseus come to kill the suitors — and wakes uncertain whether the dream came through the gate of horn (true dreams) or the gate of ivory (false). Her endurance is not serene; it is the daily, wearing labour of a woman holding a hopeless position by will alone, and Homer honours it as the equal of any deed of arms.

The stranger in the house, and the tests she sets

In the twentieth year Odysseus came home at last — but secretly, disguised by Athena as an aged beggar, to spy out the state of his house before he struck. Penelope, not knowing the ragged stranger for her husband, treated him with the courtesy owed a guest, and in a long night-time conversation questioned him closely; he told her a cunning false tale, claiming to have hosted Odysseus once in Crete, and she wept to hear her husband described so exactly (the disguised Odysseus was describing his own true self). It is a mark of how alike the two minds are that even here, testing the stranger, she was laying her own plans. That night she resolved on the decisive move: she would set the suitors a contest, and give herself to whichever of them could perform her husband's feat.

The contest of the great bow

The test she chose was the contest of the bow. She brought down from the storeroom the great backset bow of Odysseus — a mighty weapon he had left behind when he sailed, so stiff that it took his own strength even to bend and string it — together with twelve axes, or axe-heads, which he had been used to set up in a row so that an arrow shot down the line would pass clean through the sockets of all twelve. She declared to the suitors that she would marry the man who could string Odysseus's bow and shoot an arrow through the twelve axes as her husband had done. One after another the suitors tried, warming the bow at the fire and straining at it, and not one of them could so much as bend it to slip the string over the notch — the contest silently proving that not a man among them was the equal of the husband they presumed to replace. Then the beggar asked to try; over the suitors' jeering objections he was given the bow, and Odysseus strung it as easily as a bard fits a new string to his lyre, sent the arrow singing through all twelve axes, and in the next moment turned the bow on the suitors and, with Telemachus and two faithful herdsmen, began the slaughter that cleared his hall. Penelope's contest had put the killing-weapon into the one hand that could use it, and only that hand.

The secret of the marriage bed

Even with the suitors dead and the stranger revealed as her returned king, Penelope would not yet believe. Cautious to the last — and wary, after twenty years, of being deceived by some god or impostor — she would not run to his arms on the word of her overjoyed nurse, but sat apart, studying him, while Odysseus grew hurt and angry at her coldness. Then she set her final and cleverest test, and she set it without seeming to test at all. She ordered the nurse to make up the bed outside the bridal chamber, and to bring out for the stranger the great marriage bed itself. At that Odysseus flared up: no one could simply move that bed, he said, unless a god had done it — for he had built it himself, and its secret was this: one post of the bed was the living trunk of an olive tree, rooted in the ground, around which he had built the whole bridal chamber with his own hands and worked the standing trunk into a bedpost, inlaid with gold and silver and ivory. The bed could not be moved because it was rooted in the earth. Only Penelope and Odysseus — and one trusted maid — had ever known this; and by naming the secret that no impostor could know, Odysseus proved beyond all doubt that he was truly her husband. The immovable bed, rooted in a living tree, is Homer's great symbol of a marriage that twenty years and a hundred suitors could not shift; and at that sign Penelope's knees went weak, and she ran weeping to embrace the husband she had waited for, and would not let him go. Athena held back the dawn to lengthen the night of their reunion.

The reunion, and the darker variants

With that recognition the great arc of the Odyssey closes: the faithful wife and the wandering husband are reunited in the bed no one could move, and Odysseus tells her at last the story of all his wanderings, and of the one last journey he must yet make to appease Poseidon. This is the Penelope the tradition kept and honoured — patient, cunning, and true. It should be noted, and set aside, that a few marginal and much later traditions blackened her name, telling that in Odysseus's absence she was unfaithful, or even that she was mother to the god Pan by all the suitors together, or by Hermes — scandalous variants that play cynically on her reputation for virtue precisely because they invert it. These belong to late and hostile mythography and to writers looking to shock; they run flatly against Homer, in whom Penelope's fidelity is the fixed point of the whole poem, and it is the Homeric Penelope — the weaver of the web, the setter of the bow-contest, the keeper of the secret bed — whom the Greeks meant when they spoke of a faithful wife.

A heroine of story, not of the altar

Penelope, like most of the mortal figures of Homer's epic, was honoured chiefly through the telling of her story rather than through a widespread formal cult; she was a paradigm — an exemplum, the rhetoricians would say — held up to the living rather than a goddess petitioned at a shrine. But she was not without local cult-associations, for the Greek landscape was thick with places that claimed a tomb, a shrine, or a memorial of a heroine of the great age, and Penelope had hers. Pausanias, travelling in the second century AD, records more than one tradition of her burial: at Mantinea in Arcadia the people showed a tomb they said was Penelope's, telling a variant in which, cast out of Ithaca by Odysseus on a charge of unfaithfulness, she died in Arcadia — a local story attaching a famous name to a local grave, of the kind the Greek countryside was full of.

The pattern of the good wife

Far more than through tombs, Penelope's ancient "worship" was moral and civic: she was invoked, endlessly, as the pattern of the ideal wife. In a society that prized above all in its women the virtues of sōphrosynē (self-command, chastity) and loyalty to the household, Penelope was the supreme literary model of both, cited by poets, orators, and moralists as the standard against which wives were measured. The very structure of the Odyssey sets her up this way, pairing her deliberately against her opposites — against Clytemnestra, who took a lover and murdered her returning husband Agamemnon, and against her own cousin Helen, who abandoned her home; the ghost of Agamemnon in the underworld praises Penelope's virtue and contrasts it bitterly with his own wife's treachery. To hold her up was to teach a lesson, and the Greeks held her up constantly.

Weaving, the household, and the woman's sphere

Penelope was also emblematic of the loom and the household economy that were the honoured centre of a Greek wife's life. Spinning and weaving were the defining labours and virtues of the respectable woman, and Penelope at her great web — turning even weaving into a stratagem — became the mythic patroness, in effect, of that whole domestic sphere: the wife whose command of the household arts is also a command of wit. In this she stands close to Athena, the goddess of both weaving and cunning intelligence, who favours and protects her throughout the poem; the mortal weaver and the goddess of the loom are natural kin.

The enduring archetype of fidelity

Penelope's true afterlife is not in cult but in the imagination of the world, where she remains, three thousand years on, the archetype of the faithful and patient wife. Her name is shorthand for constancy in the face of long absence and uncertainty; "a Penelope" means a woman who waits and keeps faith, and "the web of Penelope" or "a Penelopean task" is still used for any labour deliberately kept unfinished, forever undone as fast as it is done. Modern Hellenic devotion, where it honours her, honours her as a heroine and ancestral pattern — a figure whose story is retold and whose virtues of loyalty, endurance, and clever resourcefulness are set as an example, rather than a deity to be petitioned; a candle lit and her tale told keep her memory in the way the ancients thought a heroine most wished.

The wife reconsidered

In the modern age Penelope has become a figure writers return to in order to question as much as to praise. Where antiquity saw a simple paragon, recent poetry and fiction have been drawn to the silences in her story — the twenty years of her own experience that Homer leaves largely unspoken, her own cunning as the true match of her husband's, the darker cost of her waiting. Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad retells the whole epic from her point of view, and gives voice to the twelve maidservants Odysseus hanged; poets from Dorothy Parker to Carol Ann Duffy have written her wry, weary, or subversive. The very richness of these reinterpretations is a measure of how central she remains: a character deep and ambiguous enough to carry the retellings of every age.

Craft, cunning, and the equal of the hero

Above all, the modern reading has recovered what the epithet periphrōn always contained — that Penelope is not merely the passive object of Odysseus's homecoming but an active intelligence, his equal in mētis, who defends the house through cunning as surely as he wins his way home through it. The bow-contest and the trick of the bed are her devices, not his; the recognition at the poem's climax is a duel of wits between two well-matched minds, each testing the other, that only a Penelope could win. She endures, in the end, as the ancients made her and as every age has re-made her: the faithful wife, the great weaver, the woman whose patience is a form of genius.