Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(78)

The reason we have so few stories about Odysseus and Penelope together is not because poems, plays and pottery have been lost, as is so often the case. Rather, it is because the majority of Penelope and Odysseus’ marriage is spent apart: Telemachus is only a baby when Odysseus has to leave to fight at Troy. He besieges the city for ten years, and then spends another decade trying to get home to Ithaca. In literature and art, Penelope has been idealized for millennia for her patience, endurance and loyalty during the twenty-year period while her husband is away. She raises their child alone, she does her best to maintain his kingdom and she doesn’t remarry, even when everyone thinks he must be dead.

It’s enough to make you wonder if the ideal wife is one you scarcely even see, let alone spend any real time with. Because there is no doubt about it: Penelope has been presented as a perfect wife for as long as her story has been told at all. And yet, her wifely qualities are what, precisely? If we were considering the characteristics we might look for in a long-term partner, we would probably think of compatibility – emotional, psychological and sexual – as being pretty key. And though we might get that impression of Penelope and Odysseus from their brief pre-war relationship, we see little evidence of it because they are separated so early in their marriage, and for so long. Penelope’s wifely virtues as we see them in Homer’s Odyssey are being a single mother and being chaste (and also chased, but we’ll come to that shortly).

This portrait of Penelope is often contradictory; she changes depending on whom she is talking to and who is influencing her at any given moment. The Odyssey is a poem which depends upon the unreliability of various figures, Odysseus most of all. He is sometimes disguised by Athene as a battered old beggar, and sometimes made extra-handsome by the same divine intervention. Sometimes he tells the truth about himself, sometimes he lies. Sometimes he lies by telling stories about Odysseus while pretending to be someone else. Partly because of his unpredictability, we find ourselves trying to unpick how much Penelope knows or guesses about him, when and whether she is being sincere or ironic. His untrustworthiness rubs off on our reading of her. Or perhaps they’re a good couple because she is like him, as prone to dishonesty as he is.

We first meet her in Book One, when she is listening to a bard singing about the journeys home which the Greeks have been making from Troy, and how they have been cursed by Athene. To clear up any confusion: Athene was highly pro-Greek and anti-Trojan during the ten-year war. But in the fall of the city, her temples were profaned: Cassandra, for example, was raped by Ajax as she clung to Athene’s statue, meaning that the rules of sanctuary were disregarded even before the rape affronted Athene further. As a result, Athene set herself against many of the Greeks, particularly Ajax. (This is, confusingly, a different Ajax from the one who slaughters livestock and kills himself, whom we met earlier on). But Odysseus – always Athene’s favourite – kept her support even when the other Greeks had squandered it. So when Penelope hears this particular song, she is understandably distressed because she cannot know that Odysseus still has the goddess’ favour.

Homer introduces her with her patronymic: the daughter of Icarius, wise Penelope.5 The very first thing we learn about her character, therefore, is that she is clever, or thoughtful (periphrōn can mean both). It is a word which Homer will use to describe her many times. Whatever else we conclude about Penelope, we know she is smart. She had heard the bard singing from upstairs and come down to hear him better. She is accompanied by two female attendants. Her house is – as we learned a few lines earlier, during Telemachus’ conversation with the disguised goddess Athene – filled with suitors. More than a hundred men have made their way to Penelope’s palace during the latter part of Odysseus’ absence. They obviously stayed away during the war itself, because news returned from Troy with reasonable regularity telling them that their king was alive and well and would be returning home. But in the ten years that have followed the war, the stories which have made it back to Ithaca have become somewhat threadbare. Telemachus has just been instructed by Athene to go looking for his long-lost father, and travels to Pylos and Sparta to question Nestor and Menelaus (their respective kings) about Odysseus’ potential whereabouts. As we already know from the very start of the poem – which begins with a council of the gods during which Athene demands that Odysseus be allowed to return home – Odysseus is held captive (willingly or unwillingly – another part of his story open to interpretation) by the nymph Calypso on her distant island of Ogygia. He has spent the past seven years as her husband-in-all-but-name. Finally, Athene feels that the gods must let him return to Ithaca.

So stories about Odysseus’ adventures have dried up, because for seven years he has been about as far from Ithaca as possible. Many people have assumed he must be dead, which is what has motivated the suitors to descend on Penelope, all bidding to become her second husband. They have moved into her palace, and are eating and drinking their way through her supplies. The more she delays, the more they consume, and the more they reduce the value of her property (which is also Odysseus’ property and Telemachus’ inheritance). All this would obviously stop if she would simply pick one and marry him. But she has not given up on Odysseus, even if everyone else seems to have done so.

Penelope attends the suitors, looking like a goddess among women.6 She holds a veil in front of her face and stands by a pillar. Even this description might baffle us a little. How does she resemble a goddess if she is veiled, when goddesses are not? What can the suitors even see of her? Is she tall? Goddesses often do appear to be taller than mortals. Or are these just literary niceties? Penelope is the wife of the hero so she must resemble a goddess?