Penelope

Penelope’s situation is structurally hopeless. Odysseus has been absent for nearly twenty years, and more than a hundred young men from Ithaca and the surrounding islands have installed themselves in her house, eating its stores and demanding that she marry one of them. Telemachus is too young to enforce the law of the household, and the suitors’ families are powerful.

Her famous trick is the shroud of Laertes. She tells the suitors she must finish weaving a burial cloth for Odysseus’ father before she can choose a new husband; each day she weaves, and each night she unpicks the work. The trick buys three years. When the suitors discover it, she is forced to promise a decision, and the poem moves toward the contest of the bow.

Penelope is not merely passive or merely faithful. She tests Odysseus before accepting him. When the beggar claims to be her husband, she does not throw herself into his arms; she orders the marriage bed to be moved out of the royal chamber, a thing only Odysseus would know cannot be done because he built it around the root of a living olive tree. The test proves his identity as surely as the scar does.

The reunion in Book XXIII is deliberately delayed and deliberately physical: the bed, the tree, the secret that nobody else could know. Penelope’s kléos in the poem is not the glory of battle but the intelligence and endurance that preserve a household through twenty years of absence.