Homer's The Odyssey: themes and analysis

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, following the Latin spelling - Homer created a figure who is marked both by outstanding wisdom and oratorical skills as well as personal courage and the ability to endure hardships that would defeat most humans. 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 assembly that it is Penelope who is in the wrong rather than themselves. Much of the action of the second book is taken up with the suitors' defending their position and Telemachus, with only a few allies, trying to defend Penelope. But Penelope, we learn, does not in fact need a man to defend her - either her husband nor Telemachus. Her responses to them reveal to us the fundamental goodness and strength of her character as she reveals the ways in which she has for 20 years outsmarted the men who would take both her fortune and her independence, as we see in Book II.

She [Penelope] set up a great tambour frame in her room, and began to work on an enormous piece of fine needlework. 'Sweet hearts,' said she, 'Ulysses is indeed dead, still do not press me to marry again immediately, wait -- for I would not have skill in needlework perish unrecorded -- till I have completed a pall for the hero Laertes, to be in readiness against the time when death shall take him. He is very rich, and the women of the place will talk if he is laid out without a pall.'

We see, in her responses to the suitors as well as in Homer's direct and indirect descriptions of the social milieu in which Penelope has spent her life, that Penelope has had the harder task, for she has had to sit and wait while waging a defensive war while Odysseus has had the advantage of being able to take the offensive in his own life. Still, she has never lost her love for him, as she tells us repeatedly, as she says in Book I: "So dear a head do I long for in constant memory, namely, that man whose fame is noised abroad from Hellas to mid Argos" and again in Book IV, "For erewhile I lost my noble lord of the lion heart, adorned with all perfection among the Danaans, my good lord, whose fame is noised abroad from Hellas to mid Argos."

But Penelope is the main focus of this story as well as its heroine not simply for her loyalty; while she is not (by her gender) allowed as active a life as is afforded to Odysseus, she takes the initiative whenever possible. Because she is both constrained and yet determined to overcome those constraints (while Odysseus is heroic, he does not face the same obstacles that Penelope does in this patriarchal world). The suitors revile her for the fact that she has used her intelligence against them and in a way that they do not consider feminine: