Penelope- Greek FigureMortal"Queen of Ithaca"

Origins and Parentage

Penelope was the daughter of the Spartan prince Icarius and the naiad Periboea. Apollodorus records that Icarius cast his infant daughter into the sea, but penelopes, a species of duck, rescued and nursed her back to life. Her name came from theirs. Icarius was brother to Tyndareus, king of Sparta, and Penelope grew up in the orbit of the Spartan royal household.

The Courtship of Odysseus

Odysseus came to Sparta as one of many suitors seeking the hand of Helen, the most beautiful woman in Greece. He could not compete with wealthier princes. Instead he advised Tyndareus, Helen's father, to bind all the suitors by oath to defend whomever she chose. In gratitude, Tyndareus helped arrange the marriage between Odysseus and his niece Penelope. When Icarius begged his daughter to remain in Sparta rather than depart for distant Ithaca, Penelope silently drew her veil over her face. She chose her husband over her father. A statue of Modesty was later erected at the spot on the road from Sparta where this act of quiet resolve took place.

Departure for Troy

When Paris abducted Helen and the oath-bound kings gathered to reclaim her, Odysseus tried desperately to avoid the war. He feigned madness, yoking a horse and an ox to his plow and sowing his fields with salt. But Palamedes placed the infant Telemachus in the path of the plow, and Odysseus swerved to save his son, proving his sanity. Penelope watched her husband sail away to a war expected to be brief. It consumed ten years of fighting and ten more of wandering. She governed Ithaca alone.

The Siege of Suitors

Years passed without Odysseus's return after the fall of Troy. Suitors descended upon his palace from across the Ionian islands: one hundred and eight men who occupied the great hall and slaughtered his cattle for daily feasts. They demanded Penelope accept Odysseus's death and choose a new husband. When young Telemachus began to assert his authority, they conspired to ambush and murder him.

Penelope set her own traps. She sent private messages of encouragement to individual suitors and extracted costly gifts from each. Antinous denounced her before the assembly: she had been deceiving them all, he said, and each man believed he was favored. He was right.

The Shroud of Laertes

Faced with relentless pressure to remarry, Penelope devised a stratagem worthy of her husband's reputation for cunning. She announced that she would choose a new husband only after she finished weaving a burial shroud for Laertes, Odysseus's aged father. She claimed it would be a disgrace for him to lie unwrapped when death came. By day she wove at her great loom in full view of the household; by night she crept back and unraveled the day's work by torchlight. For three years this deception held the suitors at bay. In the fourth year, one of her own maidservants betrayed the secret, and the suitors caught Penelope unweaving in the dark and forced her to complete the shroud. Even then she refused to yield.

Mother of Telemachus

Telemachus grew up in a palace overrun by men who wanted his mother and his inheritance. When he resolved to voyage to Pylos and Sparta in search of news of Odysseus, Penelope was stricken with fear. Athena sent her a dream in the form of her sister Iphthime to calm her. Her fears were justified: the suitors, learning of the voyage, laid an ambush with a ship near the island of Asteris to murder Telemachus on his return. Penelope discovered the plot from the herald Medon.

When Telemachus publicly ordered her to return to her chambers and her loom, she was startled but obeyed. Her child had become a man.

Dreams and Omens

Penelope described to the disguised Odysseus a vision that had come to her in sleep. An eagle swept down and killed twenty geese she kept in her courtyard, then spoke with a human voice: the geese were the suitors, and he was her husband come home for vengeance. Penelope told the stranger she could not trust it. Dreams pass through two gates, she said, one of ivory that sends deceptive visions and one of horn that sends true prophecies. She could not know through which gate this dream had come.

The Contest of the Bow

When all other stratagems were exhausted, Penelope devised a final contest. She brought out Odysseus's great composite bow, which he had received as a gift from Iphitus, along with twelve iron axe heads. Whoever could string the bow and shoot an arrow cleanly through the rings of all twelve axe handles would become her husband. The suitors tried one after another and failed. They could not even bend the weapon enough to string it. Meanwhile, the disguised Odysseus quietly revealed himself to the swineherd Eumaeus and the cowherd Philoetius and laid his plans. When the ragged beggar asked to try the bow, the suitors mocked him, but Penelope insisted he be given the chance. Odysseus strung it effortlessly and sent an arrow singing through all twelve axes, then turned the bow upon the suitors. The slaughter began.

The Test of the Bed

Even after Odysseus had slaughtered every suitor and revealed his identity, Penelope held back. Telemachus rebuked her apparent coldness, but she replied calmly that she and Odysseus shared secret signs known only to them. She instructed the nurse Eurycleia to move the marriage bed out of the bedchamber for the stranger to sleep in. Odysseus erupted in dismay. He had built that bed himself around a living olive tree rooted in the earth, its trunk forming one of the bedposts. It could not be moved unless someone had sawn through the tree. This was the secret only the two of them shared, and his passionate knowledge of it shattered her last defense. She ran to him weeping and clasped his neck. Athena held back the dawn so that their reunion could stretch through a long night of shared stories.

Variant Traditions

Pausanias recorded a different ending. Odysseus banished Penelope upon his return, and she traveled to Mantinea in Arcadia, where her tomb was shown in historical times. A separate tradition made her the mother of Pan, fathered by Hermes during Odysseus's absence. Another attributed Pan's birth to all the suitors, his name read as "all."

The Telegony, a lost epic attributed to Eugammon of Cyrene, carried the story past the Odyssey. Telegonus, the son of Odysseus and Circe, arrived in Ithaca and killed his father with a spear tipped with a stingray's spine. Telegonus then married Penelope. Telemachus married Circe. Both couples departed for Aeaea.