The Person of Penelope

Abstract

What sort of person was Penelope? If Homer were consulted about the casting for a dramatization of the story, what type would he choose to play her part? What sort of person was this Penelope, for whom her husband abandoned a goddess—more than one goddess, indeed—but in whom he yet felt so little confidence on his return that she was almost the last person in the household to learn his identity? One hundred and eight suitors, according to Telemachos' careful count, buzzed about her; either she could not or she would not dismiss them entirely, but she put them off year after year, while she wept for her absent husband, and looked after the housekeeping, and managed the estate, with no help at all from her father-in-law—managed it pretty successfully too, one would think, for all Telemachos' dissatisfaction, or the house could hardly have stood the drain of such continuous entertainment. In all her appearances in the story she seems irreproachably circumspect; yet her own son, a rather staid and solemn fellow, said to a complete stranger, ‘My mother says I am Odysseus' son, but how should I know?’ Even allowing for a conventional reference to a proverbial saying, it is a strange remark from a modest, unsophisticated young man who did not set himself up for a wit, and who, as he justly remarked to his father, was ‘not in the habit of behaving like a light-headed fool’. It is certainly not the sort of answer that Homeric heroes customarily give about their lineage.