We've talked a lot in the past about various heroic ladies who go on quests, rule their kingdoms, or manipulate the universe itself, but today we're going to look at one of my favorites: Penelopeia, or Penelope in most modern translations.
Pēnelópeia appears in Homer's Odýsseia, where she is the legendarily faithful wife of Odysseús. She's an intensely interesting figure because she embodies the idea of the hero's journey in a very feminine way - she follows all of its steps and eventually wins her way to glory, but she does it in various ways that the Greeks considered to be essentially female behaviors, from traditional womens' occupations like weaving to emotional trickery to leveraging her position as mother to send her son on errands to simply being smarter than everyone else in the room. She is spoken of with high praise by everyone, not just as Odysseús' perfect mate - the only other person clever enough to match and hold ground with his cleverness - but as just a generally awesome example of humanity herself. In fact, Homer refers to her with the prized hero-description arete, meaning that she is both incredibly skilled and possessed of extreme moral virtue and spiritual strength.
But let's talk about what Pēnelópeia actually does, because it's all pretty hardcore.
Penelope Unraveling Her Work at Night, Dora Wheeler Keith, 1886
Pēnelópeia's journey to badassness begins when she is born a Spartan princess and her father Ikários promptly throws her off a cliff and into the sea; like many other ancient asshats, he had wanted a son and forcibly took the unwanted daughter from her mother to have her killed. Fortunately for everyone, that mother is Periboea, one of the naiades, the ocean-nymph daughters of Okeanos, and because her blood runs in Pēnelópeia's veins the baby is rescued by sea birds and fed until her father discovers her again. Not being completely dense, he realizes that she must be blessed by divine powers and takes her home again with no further attempts at infanticide. Pēnelópeia's early connection to the sea is actually very interesting, considering that while the sea saves, protects, and nurtures her, it also impedes, confuses, and outright tries to murder her husband Odysseús later. Oh, ye jealous waves.
Once she's an adult, Pēnelópeia is married to Odysseús, king of Ithaka; he was actually in town to sue for the hand of the famously beautiful Helénē (of Trojan fame), but when it became obvious that that wasn't going to happen, he instead wooed Pēnelópeia, winning the right to wed her only after successfully defeating all her other suitors in a foot race. It's the first time he has to demonstrate his peak excellence in order to be worthy of Pēnelópeia's consideration, but it won't be the last.
Fine, I guess I'll marry the best guy who exists or whatever
During his sojourn to the Trojan war and subsequent years of attempting to find his way back home, Pēnelópeia was left to govern Ithaka on her own with their young son Tēlemakhos, which she did ably until Odysseús had been gone so long that people began to generally assume that he was dead. As a result, a slew of new suitors (over a hundred!) arrived in Ithaka, all of them hoping to win the coveted prize of marriage to Pēnelópeia and rulership over her kingdom (and, interestingly, Athena totally makes the situation worse by encouraging Pēnelópeia to let them see how beautiful she is and get really frenzied about it, on the theory that it's not a real heroic test of her smarts and virtue if they're not trying very hard). A large number of them actually moved into her palace and generally treated the place as their own, since they were hoping to make that true through marriage soon anyway, and Pēnelópeia is in danger of losing not only her faithful conviction that her husband would eventually make it home but her entire kingdom, too.
This would be a problem for someone with less badass creativity, but luckily Pēnelópeia is no such person. When she was unable to convince the suitors that Odysseús might still be alive, she declared that she could not possibly marry anyone because she was currently busy with the sacred duty of weaving the burial shroud for Laértēs, her father-in-law, who was due to die any day now and had to be sent off in proper style. Each day, she worked on weaving the shroud all the daylight hours for all to see, and then each night she unraveled all the work she had done the day before, making it appear that she was constantly employed in weaving but somehow never finished. She does this for three straight years, which is impressive partly because nobody ever catches on and partly because three years is a really long time to go without getting any sleep.
Y'all have GOT to be kidding me with this nonsense
Unfortunately, years of having all these sexy, well-born dudes in the house constantly bothering their mistress has gotten to her twelve serving girls, who have begun taking dating some of them and are kind of agreeing that maybe Pēnelópeia should move on with her life, and one of them eventually tells the suitors what she's up to. Outraged that she's been punking them all this time, they demand she choose one of them right now.
Pēnelópeia remains undaunted, however. She declares that she's not about to settle for anyone lesser than her previous husband, who had to win her through incredible feats of awesomeness, and that therefore she'll hold a contest to choose the worthiest suitor. She sets up an obstacle course of twelve axeheads, brings out Odysseús' bow, and declares that she'll marry anyone who can shoot an arrow through all twelve axes. And then she makes fun of them, because her old husband could do it, how hard can it be, guys?
Of course, the bow is magical - only Odysseús can shoot it, and he considers it such an important and dangerous artifact that he won't even take it outside the kingdom, which is why it's here and didn't go to the wars with him. The suitors fail miserably at attempting to even string the bow, much less manage to shoot it, and decide to do some sacrifices to Apollo for better archery skills and try again later, but finally Odysseús himself, disguised as a beggar, steps up and performs the feat. Pēnelópeia's like, "Welp, guys, thanks for playing, guess I'm marrying this random guy we just found on the street," and when the suitors get angry and unruly, Odysseús reveals his identity and he and Tēlemakhos, with some help from Athena, kill them all in battle, as well as later executing the serving maids who gave away Pēnelópeia's tricks.
Shoot that guy just like RIGHT in the head, if you would
Here, however, is where Pēnelópeia becomes most interesting. Odysseús has revealed himself, and he certainly looks like he might look after being gone for a few decades, and he definitely did the thing with the axes, and he's been talking to their son Tēlemakhos who certainly believes it's him, and Pēnelópeia herself has been talking to him on the sly ever since he got here in disguise, so she knows it's him. However, at this point she declares that she doesn't know for sure that it's him, so he has to prove himself to her as well. She's concerned that he might be a god in disguise - she's been around, she knows what Zeus is up to on any given day - and therefore she's not about to let him just march back into kingship and her bedroom, just in case. This is an excellent moment because not only is Pēnelópeia savvier than 98% of all Greek mythological people by even considering the possibility, she's also literally exercising her power over her kingdom over its very king himself. Odysseús may be the rightful king of Ithaka, but he's been gone for years; Pēnelópeia is the ruler with power there, and she isn't about to give it up unless she knows for certain it's the right thing to do.
Also, scholars have been arguing for literal centuries over whether Pēnelópeia is just doing this entirely because she's worried that he might be an impostor, or if she is also intentionally kicking Odysseús' ass a little bit just because she can. Like Odysseús himself, she's incredibly clever and solves most of her problems with hilarious trickery, so she may not be able to resist pulling one on the trickster himself, knowing that he can't stop her; and after the dude has been gone for decades, leaving her to raise their son alone and run the entire kingdom and be harassed by jackasses for years on end, she may feel like he deserves a little kicking around before he's back in her good graces again.
At any rate, she has her son set up a fake wedding to one of the dead suitors, both to prevent the kingdom from realizing what's going on up there and to test how Odysseús might respond, and thanks him for his help but tells him he's not getting any special treatment other than allowing a servant to move Odysseús' bed into the hallway for him to sleep on (alone). Odysseús, however, knows that his bed was carved with one bedpost being a living tree planted in their bedroom to symbolize the living nature of his love for Pēnelópeia, so he throws a massive tantrum at the idea of anyone daring to move it; that's the last sign Pēnelópeia's waiting for to prove that it's really him (and possibly also an intentional reminder to both of them of the strength of their love?), and she finally welcomes him home with open arms.
Fine, I guess you can sleep in the hall or whatever, thanks for all the arrows
Of course, things get weird later, when Odysseús' children with other women that he conceived while gone all those years start showing up and Telemachus ends up marrying Circe, who used to try to bang his dad; and later writers sometimes confuse Pēnelópeia with another mythological Pēnelópeia, this one an Arcadian nymph and lover of Hermes, by whom she bore the god Pan. Writers found the similar names vastly confusing, especially since one Penelope is all about refusing to look at anyone but Odysseús and the other one is giving birth to rustic goat-gods in the fields, and a few odd little spin-off myths, including one where Pan is the result of Pēnelópeia sleeping with all the suitors at once, were created to try to explain the discrepancy.
Later versions and reinterpretations of the story, especially Roman ones, tend to spend all their time focusing on Pēnelópeia's wifely chastity and refusal to sleep with anyone as her best quality, but I think we can all agree that this is wilfully ignoring her incredible hardcore powers of intelligence, trickery, and power politics. Pēnelópeia is a fantastic example of a female mythological hero who triumphs without the go-to "masculine" powers of strength of arms or prowess in battle, and all the more awesome because of her demonstration that those powers cannot oppose her, not even when they come from Odysseús, the greatest warrior in the kingdom.
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