Anticlea- Greek FigureMortal"Queen of Ithaca"

Lineage and Marriage

Anticlea's father was Autolycus, a thief who had his cunning from his own father Hermes. When the boy was born, Autolycus named him: he had been hateful to many across the wide earth, he said, and so the child would be called Odysseus. Through Autolycus the trickster god's blood ran down to Odysseus, though the Sophoclean scholia and Ovid name a different deceiver as the father. In these tellings, Sisyphus of Corinth lay with Anticlea before she married Laertes, and Odysseus was his son in blood if not in name. Laertes claimed him regardless. On Ithaca, Anticlea bore him a daughter as well: Ctimene.

Death from Grief

When Odysseus sailed to Troy, Anticlea expected him home within a year or two. But the war lasted ten years, and his wanderings another ten. As the years passed with no word — not knowing whether her son lived or lay unburied on some foreign shore — Anticlea's heart broke. Hers was not a dramatic death but a slow wearing away, consumed by sorrow and longing for a son who would not return.

The Meeting in Hades

When Odysseus journeyed to the edge of the underworld to consult the seer Tiresias, he performed the ritual of the blood-offering and the shades of the dead came crowding to the trench. Among them he saw his mother and was stricken — he had not known she had died. After Tiresias had spoken his prophecy, Odysseus let Anticlea's shade drink the dark blood, and she recognized him. She told him how she had died: not by disease or arrow, but by longing for him, for his gentleness and counsel. She described old Laertes wasting away on his farm, sleeping in dirty clothes on the bare ground, and Penelope weeping through the nights but holding the household together. Three times Odysseus reached out to embrace his mother, and three times his arms closed on empty air — she was only a shadow, as the dead must be.