ODYSSEY MYTHOLOGY
Who Is Penelope?
The queen of Ithaca, who held out for twenty years with tricks worth her husband’s
Penelope is the daughter of Icarius of Sparta and the wife of Odysseus. When her husband leaves for Troy she is holding the infant Telemachus; she will not see Odysseus again for twenty years. The epic calls her the woman who waits, but her waiting is not passive: it is a long defensive campaign for her house, her son and her own right to choose.
Once Odysseus is presumed dead, more than a hundred nobles from Ithaca and the nearby islands install themselves in the palace, eat through the herds and demand that Penelope choose one of them. She holds them off for three years with the trick of the shroud: she is weaving a burial cloth for her father-in-law Laertes, she says, and cannot marry before it is finished — and every night she unpicks what she wove by day. Only a maid’s betrayal exposes her.
As a last resort she announces the contest of the bow: she will marry the man who can string Odysseus’s bow and shoot an arrow through the sockets of twelve axes. Not one suitor can even string it. The only man who can is her husband, in his beggar’s rags.
Even after the suitors are dead she does not simply believe. She tests the man claiming to be her husband with something only the two of them know: one leg of their bed is the living trunk of an olive tree, and that bed cannot be moved. When he knows it, she yields.
Role in the epic
Penelope is the mirror the epic holds up to Odysseus: the same patience, the same measured cunning, the same stubbornness. In the Odyssey the homecoming is not only a voyage — it is a home worth coming back to, and it is Penelope who keeps that home standing.
How you meet them in the game
In the game she is both your destination and the other side of the scale: she is what refusing Calypso’s offer of immortality actually means. In the land of the dead your mother Anticleia tells you she is still waiting; in the Ithaca chapter the contest of the bow and the recognition scene are played as encounters of their own.
Quick facts
- Role
- Queen of Ithaca, wife of Odysseus
- Origin
- Sparta (daughter of Icarius)
- Family
- Father Icarius, husband Odysseus, son Telemachus
- Epithet
- “Periphron” — circumspect, of steady mind
Related locations
- Ithaca — The last trial of a man coming home after twenty years
- Calypso’s Island (Ogygia) — Seven years between an offer of immortality and the way home
- The Underworld — A living man’s voyage to the country of shades
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Odysseus · Polyphemus · Circe · Calypso
Odyssey gods and monsters · Odyssey map: the 14 stops · The Odyssey story