ed his identity, Odysseus, Telemachus, and two servants, with Athena herself, proceed to slaughter the suitors.
This scene of carnage was the motif for Gustave Moreau’s unfinished The Suitors (c 1852-1885), in which (Pallas) Athena, or Minerva, dominates. In his repeated reworking, Moreau came to obscure the figure of Odysseus, who is seen holding his bow in the doorway at the back, an owl above his head. Moreau would perhaps have done better to have considered the strength and endurance not of Athena, but of Penelope herself.
In 2005, about 2700 years after Homer’s Odyssey became the epic that we know today, Margaret Atwood’s novel The Penelopiad finally told Penelope’s story.