Penelope as Heroine
While today we primarily read the works of Homer for the eloquence and literary skill of this great Greek poet, we may also examine his texts for the clues that they provide to a deeper understanding of Greek society. For we must recognize that every text is both a product of the time and place in which it was created as well as a portal to that place, a means of transport to a world marked by its particular set of values and visions. The Odyssey was recognized by the Greeks not only as a great epic, marked by a superb literary style, but also as something far more than merely engaging tales. This story of Homer's was also a tale about virtue and heroism: Not only that of Odysseus, or even primarily that of Odysseus. For the story, while celebrating virile virtues, is actually more Penelope's story than it is that of her husband. She is Homer's heroine, especially in the second book of the epic but also throughout the poem.
The stories were for the ancient Greeks themselves a venerable source of lessons about morality, about the nature of heroism and about the proper ways in which a society should be structured. Given the value that the Greeks placed on these stories as exemplars of the values of Hellenic society, we can do the same by looking to the texts to help us understand how the Greeks understood their world. This task is, however, a difficult one because our own worldview is so fundamentally different (because based on such different life experiences) that it is often hard to know if we are experiencing a story like the Odyssey in anything resembling the ways in which the Greeks themselves understood it. However, a careful reading of the text allows us to understand the importance of the role that Penelope has.
This is not to say that Odysseus too is not also a hero. In Odysseus - who is known in English as Ulysses,...
Odysseus was for Homer and for the Greek audiences of the epic poems an ideal combination of intellectual and physical strength, both a scholar and a warrior. It is this combination of abilities in both the physical and the intellectual that marks Odysseus as a man who deserves not only the respect of other but also their subservience. He is a man who is not transformed by war because he is already the embodiment of human force for good.
But Odysseus is an inconstant hero in this tale, often beyond the ken of the reader, while Penelope remains at the heart of the story: She is constant, wise, and powerful. She is also devious: Truth is a commodity that the Greeks understood must sometimes be rationed. Her virtues are summarized in her last response to her suitors:
Listen, my lords. You have fastened on the house, in the long absence of its master, as the scene of your perpetual feasts, and you could offer no better pretext for you conduct than you wish to win my hand in marriage. That being the prize, come forward now, my gallant lords; for I challenge you to try your skill on the great bow of King Odysseus. And whichever man among you proves the handiest at stringing the bow and shoots an arrow through every one of the twelve axes, with that man I will go, bidding goodbye to this house which welcomed me as a bride, this lovely house so full of all good things, this home that even in my dreams I never shall forget.'
Penelope has found herself defending her actions to the suitors because in the first book Mentes has accused the suitors of misconduct to Telemachus; in the second book the suitors respond to the Ithacan…
