Penelope

Her family

Penelope is the wife of Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey. The ancient writers do not agree on her family. Apollodorus, who retold the Greek myths, places her in a family from Sparta. Her father Icarius is a son of Oebalus, and her mother is Periboea, a Naiad, or water nymph. Other ancient family trees give her mother a different name: Polycaste, Dorodoche or Asterodeia.

The Odyssey cares less about this than about her place as the wife left in charge on Ithaca, the island home of Odysseus. Still, the disagreement shows that no single account ever fixed even her parents.

Three years at the loom

Odysseus is away from home. More than a hundred suitors move into his house, eat his food and press Penelope to marry one of them. She promises to choose once she finishes a shroud, the cloth wrapped around a body for burial, for Laertes, the old father of Odysseus.

Each day she weaves in front of everyone. Each night, by torchlight, she undoes the work. The trick lasts three years. In the fourth year one of her women tells the suitors, and they catch her at the loom.

The shroud does not drive the men away. It turns the work expected of a dutiful wife into time. Delay is the one power Penelope has that does not force her to declare her husband dead or to face armed guests openly. A betrayal inside the house ends it. After that she needs a test that can change the situation instead of putting it off.

The contest of the bow

The goddess Athena puts the contest into Penelope’s mind. Whoever can string the bow of Odysseus and shoot an arrow through a line of axe heads will marry her. The poem calls it both a contest and the beginning of death.

Penelope carries the bow into the hall. No one has told her that the beggar standing among the suitors is her husband in disguise.

Readers have long argued about how much she understands when she talks with the beggar before the contest. Some modern scholars see a tension built into the poem. Penelope cannot fully recognise Odysseus before their reunion, yet she has to act on what she partly knows for his return to begin. On that reading, until the test of the bed, the stranger in disguise and her absent husband stay two separate possibilities in her mind.

The test of the bed

Even after the contest, Penelope holds back. Twenty years have passed, and a scar and the bow have not been enough for her. She needs something that only the marriage itself could know.

So she tells a servant to move the marriage bed out for the stranger who says he is Odysseus. He bursts out in anger. No one could move that bed, he says. He built the bedroom around a living olive tree and carved its rooted trunk into one of the bedposts. Only Penelope, Odysseus and one servant know how the bed was made.

Her order sounds like an insult to the bed, and it draws out exactly that knowledge. Only then do her knees give way. Penelope is famous for waiting, and she recognises her husband through an act of doubt.

Faithful wife or cast-out wife

In the Odyssey, her good name will never die. In the world of the dead, Agamemnon praises her loyalty and says the gods will make a song of it.

Pausanias, an ancient travel writer, records a very different story told at the town of Mantinea. There Odysseus accuses Penelope of taking lovers and throws her out. She dies at Mantinea, where people showed her grave. Pausanias notes that another poem told it differently.

The later writer Cicero goes further from Homer. He makes Penelope the mother of the god Pan, by the god Hermes. The Homeric Hymn to Pan, an early poem in praise of the god, gives Pan another mother: an unnamed daughter of Dryops on Mount Cyllene. No source settles the conflict. The bed on Ithaca, rooted in the house and known to husband and wife, is the answer Homer gives.