Penelope: The Weaver Who Outwaited the Night

In the palace on Ithaca, the suitors go home at nightfall. The hall empties, the fires burn low, and a woman sets torches beside her loom and begins, thread by thread, to undo the day’s work. The Odyssey tells this scene three times, from three different mouths, and every version agrees on one thing: Penelope does her real work after dark. Her husband spent the same years steering by the stars and sleeping on strange islands. She kept her own night watch at home, and she was, in her way, every bit as cunning as he was.

A shroud for Laertes

The trick is first revealed by its victim. In book 2, the suitor Antinous complains to the assembly of Ithaca that Penelope has been leading them on for nearly four years. She set up a great loom, he says, and told them to wait for their wedding until she had finished a shroud for old Laertes, Odysseus’ father, so that no woman in the land could reproach her if a man who had owned so much were buried without one. By day she wove; by night, with torches at her side, she unravelled it. For three years the suitors suspected nothing. In the fourth, one of her women betrayed her, and they caught her at it.

Penelope tells the same story to a ragged stranger in book 19, and in book 24 the ghost of a dead suitor tells it again in the underworld. Few episodes in Homer are repeated so carefully. Antinous adds a grudging compliment: she knows fine handiwork and good sense and craft beyond any of the famous heroines of old, Tyro, Alcmene or Mycene, though none of them thought of a plan like hers. The word for her plans belongs to the same family as the mētis, the cunning intelligence, that defines her husband.

She came from a family used to clever choices. Her father was Icarius, brother of Tyndareus of Sparta, the king who raised Helen and Clytemnestra, so the two most famous queens of the Trojan story were her cousins. Pausanias, travelling through Laconia, records a local story that Icarius made her suitors run a race, which Odysseus won. When her father begged her to stay in Sparta, Odysseus told her to choose. Penelope said nothing, but drew her veil over her face, and Icarius understood that she would go. He set up a statue of Modesty on the spot.

Twenty geese and an eagle

Book 19 is a long night conversation. Penelope comes down to the hall after the suitors have left and sits by the fire with the beggar who is really her husband in disguise. She talks to him more freely than to anyone, and near the end she asks him to interpret a dream. She keeps twenty geese about the house, she says, and loves to watch them eat wheat soaked in water at the trough. In the dream a great eagle with a hooked beak swooped from the mountain and broke all their necks, and they lay heaped in the hall while she wept and the women of the town gathered round to comfort her. Then the eagle came back, perched on a jutting roof beam, and spoke.

Take heart, daughter of far-famed Icarius: this is no dream but a true waking vision, and it will come to pass. The geese are the suitors, and I, who was an eagle a moment ago, am now your husband, home again, and I will bring a shameful end on every one of them.

Homer, Odyssey 19 (our rendering)

When she woke, she says, the geese were still feeding at the trough, just as before. The stranger answers that no other reading is possible: Odysseus himself has explained it. Penelope is not convinced. Dreams, she tells him, pass through two gates. Those that come through the gate of ivory deceive, and those that come through the gate of polished horn come true. The Greek puns on the words: ivory, elephas, sounds like a verb for cheating, and horn, keras, like one for fulfilling. She does not think her dream came through the gate of horn. And in the very next breath she announces the contest of the bow for the following day.

Readers have argued over this scene for centuries. Why does Penelope grieve in the dream for geese that stand for the suitors? Does she enjoy their attention more than she admits? Has she already guessed who the beggar is, so that the dream is a message she is sending as much as one she received? The poem does not say. What it does make clear is that eagles are the signature of Odysseus’ return throughout the Odyssey. Two eagles fight above the assembly in book 2. In book 15, an eagle snatches a white goose from a courtyard in front of Telemachus, and Helen reads it as Odysseus coming home for vengeance. Penelope’s dream belongs to that flight of omens. Even Virgil remembered her gates: at the end of book 6 of the Aeneid, he sends Aeneas back to the living through the gate of ivory, a choice that has puzzled readers ever since.

The longest night

The reunion, in book 23, is also a night scene, and it ends with the sky itself standing still. With the suitors dead, Penelope still refuses to embrace the stranger. She tells her old nurse to carry the great bed out of the bedchamber and make it up for him outside. Odysseus explodes: no one could move that bed, because he built it himself around the trunk of a living olive tree, and made the bedpost from the stump. Only the two of them, and one servant, knew. At that her knees and heart give way, and she runs to him.

Homer turns the moment into a sea image. She is as glad to see him as shipwrecked swimmers are to see land, when Poseidon has smashed their ship and only a few escape the grey water, crusted with brine, onto the shore. The sailor’s homecoming is given to the woman who stayed home. Then Athena intervenes in the heavens. She holds the long night back at the end of its course and keeps golden-throned Dawn waiting at the stream of Ocean, refusing to let her yoke the swift horses that bring light to mortals, Lampos and Phaethon. The night that Penelope spent so many years filling with patient work is finally stretched out for her.

Birds of the autumn sky

Penelope never became a constellation; Homer’s heroines rarely do. But her dream flies overhead every autumn. On October evenings in Canada, Aquila, the eagle of Zeus, still rides high in the southwest after dark, with bright Altair at its centre, and Cygnus, the swan, flies along the Milky Way just above it. The eagle and the waterbird of her dream share the same stretch of sky, and you can find both in our Sky Atlas. In winter, Helen’s twin brothers Castor and Polydeuces, raised in her uncle’s house at Sparta, rise in the east as Gemini.

Later writers could not leave her story alone. Herodotus reports a Greek tradition that Pan was the son of Penelope and Hermes, and the summary of Apollodorus preserves still other endings, in one of which she married Telegonus, Odysseus’ son by Circe. Ovid gave her the first letter in his Heroides, addressed to her slow-returning husband: there is no point in writing back, she tells him, just come.

The faithful version is the one that lasted, perhaps because Homer made her faithfulness active rather than passive. While Odysseus spent a year on Circe’s island and strained at the mast to hear the Sirens, Penelope was outwitting a hall full of young men with a loom, a torch and a dream.