What happens if we take that chastity away from her? In the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus, in his final passage on the Trojan War, he considers some alternative versions of Penelope’s story and Odysseus’ homecoming: it’s said by some sources, he says, that she was seduced by Antinous, and sent back to her father by Odysseus because of this. In Arcadia, she was seduced by the god Hermes and gave birth to another god, Pan. Or Odysseus killed her when he found she had been seduced by another of the suitors, Amphinomus. Penelope’s chastity is vital to the value men place on her, but there are versions of her where she is different: less perfect, less chaste. We just tend to forget about them because the versions of her story which have been preferred through history are the ones in which she never wavers.
There is a second element to Agamemnon’s praise of Penelope, of course. We are witnessing a misogynist tradition which dates back millennia: praise one woman in order to criticize another. Penelope is a model of virtue against which other women fall short. For Agamemnon she is the ultimate good wife, everything his own wife was not. By lauding Penelope, he has found a new route by which he can reach his desired goal: to complain about Clytemnestra. Praising Penelope for qualities he can only know by repute is not insincere or inaccurate, but it is also not particularly relevant to who Penelope is.
For more detailed imaginings of Penelope, we can turn to two authors in particular: one ancient, one modern. Ovid composed a letter from Penelope to Ulysses （the Latin version of Odysseus’ name） in his Heroides. This Penelope is not an opaque creation, defined only by the way men value her chastity and apparent lack of murderous instinct. She begins her letter to her long-absent husband by explaining that she doesn’t want him to reply, but rather, to return. She is wildly unimpressed by the heroics he displayed in the Iliad, referencing Book Ten, where Odysseus and his friend Diomedes attacked the Thracian camp at night. She accuses him of forgetting about her and Telemachus25 when he embarked on these dangerous excursions. And even though the war is long over, for me, she says, Troy still stands.26 She makes no secret of her impatience, her anxiety and the pressures being exerted on her by her father to remarry. She complains about the suitors and Odysseus’ servants conspiring with them to eat up all their livestock. She reminds him that his son needs a father if he is to grow into manhood. Finally, she concludes with a damning pair of lines. When you left, I was just a girl, she says. If you came back right now, you would see an old woman.
She is – as women imagined by Ovid so often are – a highly nuanced character. She displays real human emotions of a woman in her position: anger, fear, worry, impatience, self-pity. It’s harder to imagine Agamemnon demanding the gods create a poem about this version of Penelope, because she is not merely a cypher of good wifely behaviour, but a woman with complicated feelings and demands of her own: come home, Ulysses, I need you.
A similar instinct – to create a three-dimensional Penelope we can see clearly, rather than the veiled enigma of Homer – is at play in Margaret Atwood’s wonderful short novel, The Penelopiad, published in 2005. The title is a clear nod to ancient epic poems which take the names of men or cities as their focus: the Iliad, the Aeneid. This is a slender epic about a woman, and told by her too. Like Agamemnon and Amphimedon in the final book of the Odyssey, this Penelope tells her story from the Underworld. And like Ovid’s Penelope before her, she does so in the first person, so we can hear this hidden woman speak out. The book retells the story of the Odyssey: of the suitors, the weaving, the drawn-out recognition between husband and wife. The chapter titles alone reveal Penelope’s amused, self-centred, caustic world view: ‘Helen Ruins My Life’， ‘The Suitors Stuff Their Faces’， ‘Home Life in Hades’。 This is the woman we have longed to meet, who isn’t at all saintly, but is quietly watching and judging the behaviour of those who surround her. No matter how tart she now is with the dead suitors, however, Penelope is haunted even after her own death by the murder of her slave girls. This moment – commemorated on Marian Maguire’s fireplace sculpture too – has always haunted Atwood, according to her author’s note.27 Perhaps, rather than call it a retelling of Homer, I would do better to describe her novel as a necessary addition to Homer, who spends well over four hundred lines describing the killing of the suitors. Once they are all dead, the slave-women are forced to carry the bodies of these men outside, before cleaning their blood from the furniture. The women are then hanged by Telemachus: it takes Homer only ten lines to describe their deaths.