Penelope

Penelope was the daughter of Icarius. Apollodorus's Library names her mother as Periboea, a Naiad nymph, and gives her five brothers. Icarius was a brother of Tyndareus, the Spartan king who married Leda. That made Penelope a cousin of Clytemnestra and, through Tyndareus's household, of Helen. When Helen's suitors crowded into Sparta, Odysseus told Tyndareus to bind them all by oath. In return, Tyndareus asked Icarius to give Penelope to Odysseus.

Pausanias heard two Spartan stories about the wedding. In one, Icarius held a foot-race for Penelope's suitors along the road later called the Aphetaid Road, and Odysseus won. In the other, Icarius begged the couple to settle in Lacedaemon and followed their chariot as they left. Odysseus told Penelope to choose between them. She said nothing and covered her face with a veil. Icarius understood, let her go, and set up a statue of Modesty at the spot.

Odysseus left for Troy while their son Telemachus was a baby. In Homer's Odyssey, twenty years later, suitors from Ithaca and the nearby islands fill her house and waste its wealth. In Book 1 she comes down from her room and asks the singer Phemius to stop his song of the Greeks' sorrowful return. Telemachus sends her back to her loom. She weeps for Odysseus until Athena closes her eyes in sleep.

Her best-known trick is the web. In Book 2 the suitor Antinous complains that she promised to marry once she finished a shroud for Odysseus's father Laertes. She wove it by day and unravelled it by night, and fooled them for three years. In the fourth year one of her women betrayed her. Antinous grudgingly admits that no woman of old, not even Tyro or Alcmene, matched her in cunning. In Book 19 Penelope tells the same story herself, and adds that her parents are pressing her to remarry.

Book 19 also brings her face to face with Odysseus, disguised as a beggar. He tells her a false tale of meeting her husband in Crete. She weeps while he hides his own tears. She then asks him to read a dream. An eagle killed her twenty geese, then spoke, saying the geese were the suitors and he was her husband. Penelope doubts it, since some dreams pass through the gate of ivory and deceive. Instead she announces a contest: she will marry whoever strings Odysseus's bow and shoots through twelve axes.

In Book 21 Athena puts the contest in her heart. Penelope fetches the bow from the storeroom and weeps over it before carrying it to the hall. Even after the suitors are dead, she will not trust the stranger. In Book 23 she tells the nurse Eurycleia to move Odysseus's bed out of the bridal chamber. Odysseus flares up: he built that bed around the trunk of a living olive tree, and no one could move it. Only the two of them and one maid knew this. Her knees give way, and she runs to embrace him.

The Odyssey closes her story with praise. In Book 24 the ghost of Agamemnon says Penelope stayed loyally mindful of her husband. The gods, he says, will make a song in honour of constant Penelope. He sets her against the daughter of Tyndareus, his own wife Clytemnestra, who killed her husband.

Other poets carried her story past Odysseus's death. Proclus's summary of the Telegony, a lost epic by Eugammon of Cyrene, says Telegonus, Odysseus's son by Circe, killed his father without knowing him. He took the body, with Penelope and Telemachus, to Circe's island. Circe made them immortal, and Telegonus married Penelope. Apollodorus's Epitome has the same marriage, but Circe sends the couple to the Islands of the Blest.

Darker versions also circulated. Apollodorus's Epitome reports that some said the suitor Antinous seduced her, and Odysseus sent her home to Icarius. At Mantinea in Arcadia she bore Pan to Hermes. Others said Odysseus killed her over the suitor Amphinomus. Pausanias saw a mound near Mantinea called her grave, where locals said Odysseus had cast her out for taking lovers. Herodotus reports that the Greeks made Penelope and Hermes the parents of Pan.