killing fields around Troy. News of what had happened was very slow to reach outposts like Ithaca, a small island in the Ionian Sea off the west coast of mainland Greece.
When she heard that Troy had fallen and the victors were returning home, Penelope must have spent days watching and waiting. As she heard reports of other wives regaining their husbands, her hopes must have run like a roller-coaster.
Beccafumi’s Penelope holds a thread in her right hand, which refers to her daily task of weaving the funeral shroud for Laertes, to spinning as a symbol of time and its passage, and to the Fates, who might be the figures shown at the bottom right.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Penelope (1869) is shown at her loom, the shuttle held in her left hand, as she stares lost in thought of her absent husband, whose ships are seen in her weaving.
For Heva Coomans, Penelope Awaiting Odysseus (c 1900) is weaving an image of her husband as warrior, celebrating the victory at Troy. She pauses to look over her shoulder in the hope that the sails of his ships might appear any minute now.
Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée, painting in the late eighteenth century, showed one event which we know didn’t happen: Penelope Reading a Letter from Odysseus.
Instead, her husband’s protracted absence brought suitors for Penelope’s hand, as shown in John William Waterhouse’s Penelope and the Suitors (1912). They took over her court, living off Penelope’s kingdom, raping a dozen of her maids, and rose to more than a hundred in number by the time that Odysseus returned.
Penelope was forced to resort to devious tactics to keep them at bay. The most celebrated was her promise that she could only consider her suitors once she had completed weaving the shroud for Laertes, which they could observe her working on each day.
As Angelica Kauffman shows in Penelope Awoken by Eurykleia (1772), each night Odysseus’ nurse would wake her up, and she would then resort to a subterfuge.
While the suitors were asleep, the queen undid her day’s weaving, as seen in Joseph Wright of Derby’s Penelope Unravelling her Web by Lamp-light (1785). By her son’s bedside, and under the watchful eye of Odysseus’ statue, Penelope ensured that she would remain faithful to her husband alone.
But as time went by, the suitors wondered why the shroud grew in size only very slowly. One of Penelope’s household revealed the subterfuge, and the queen was forced to use other techniques. Telemachus was sent by Athena to discover what had happened to his father.
It is after the return of Telemachus, when Odysseus himself is back on Ithaca, that Ovid’s fictional letter was written by Penelope. Robinet Testard’s miniature, illustrating an early French translation of the Heroides, shows Penelope (c 1510) writing it.
Often assumed to be the ultimate expression of marital fidelity, Ovid’s letter, which opens his Heroides (meaning ‘heroines’), is far more perceptive and insightful. It addresses the restless fear that comes in true love. It recounts, with some curious inaccuracies, some of the events of the Trojan War which must have had greatest impact on Odysseus’ family. It accepts her husband’s inevitable unfaithfulness over those twenty years, during which Penelope has remained steadfast and chaste. It explains how important a father would have been to Telemachus as he grew up.
Ovid’s fiction is the prototype of every letter which could be written by the partner of any man who goes to war (and more).
There has been long debate as to whether, at that time, Penelope already knew that Odysseus had returned. What followed, and is so often skipped over in readings of the Odyssey, is actually its entire purpose, and the climax of the epic.
Penelope set the suitors the challenge of shooting a single arrow from Odysseus’ bow through the heads of a dozen axes: a task which none can attain. This is shown brilliantly in Lovis Corinth’s wall painting Odysseus in the Battle with the Suitors (1913), for the Villa Katzenbogen.
The only person who could string the bow and achieve this task was Odysseus himself. Having confirm