Penelope
IF HELEN OF SPARTA WAS SO DANGEROUSLY DESIRABLE THAT MEN travelled across Greece to bid to be her husband, and the loss of her was enough to start a war, can we imagine any woman who could stand beside her and not be found wanting, at least in the male gaze? What of the one man who travelled to Sparta to woo Helen, but somehow found himself doing a deal to marry someone else?
Odysseus was no different from any other Greek king when it came to a potential marriage to Helen. He travelled from his home island of Ithaca to the palace of Tyndareus in Sparta, as did men from across the Greek world. Each hoped to claim Helen as his bride. But when Odysseus arrived in Sparta, and saw the situation for himself – the number of suitors, the likelihood of arguments and fights – he removed himself from the contest and came up with one of his many ostensibly bright ideas. According to Pseudo-Apollodorus,1 it was Odysseus who proposed that all the suitors should swear an oath to fight for the return of Helen to her future husband, if she were ever to be abducted. As far as it went, of course, this oath was an excellent plan: no Greek was prepared to risk all-out war with so many other Greeks, so none of them abducted her. Paris – a non-Greek – was a small glitch which neither Odysseus nor anyone else had foreseen. Odysseus was not a man to let a good idea go to waste, and he offered his suggestion to Helen’s stepfather, Tyndareus, in exchange for the latter’s assistance in helping him win the hand of Penelope. Helen’s semi-divine beauty was so astonishing that wars were fought over her. But one man, seeing Helen in all her magnificence, preferred someone else: the daughter of Icarius.
Penelope was not as keenly sought as Helen, who could boast the king of the gods as her father. But, at least according to Pausanias in his Description of Greece,2 she was the object of many men’s desire: Icarius apparently set up a foot race for her suitors, which Odysseus won. Perhaps Tyndareus helped him to cheat in exchange for the suggestion about Helen’s suitors. It would certainly be in keeping with Odysseus’ character for him to use subterfuge to achieve his desired outcome. Pausanias mentions another fascinating detail:3 Icarius did not want to lose Penelope after her marriage. First, he tried to persuade Odysseus to stay in Sparta instead of taking his bride home to Ithaca. When that failed, he tried to persuade Penelope to stay by following the chariot in which she and Odysseus travelled. This is a very strange scene: the bride’s father pursuing her and her new husband, and begging them not to leave him. Odysseus seems to have tolerated it for a while, and then asked his wife to choose whether she travelled with him or stayed behind with her father. In the first of a series of opaque manoeuvres which we must try to interpret, Penelope says nothing, but veils her face. Her response may be wordless, but Icarius understands her perfectly, concluding that she wants to leave with Odysseus but will not express that desire for fear of seeming immodest. He allows her to leave with her husband and sets up a statue to Modesty to commemorate this moment in his daughter’s life. Penelope, we can see, is more than a match for her father. And she seems to have found the right husband in Odysseus, whether he won her by speed of foot or speed of thought. He chooses her, and then she chooses him.
The happy couple have one child, a son named Telemachus, who is only a baby when Paris and Helen elope to Troy. Although Odysseus had withdrawn from the contest for Helen’s hand, he does still seem to have been bound by the oath sworn by her suitors, because he is dragooned into leaving Ithaca and fighting for Helen’s return. Again, Pseudo-Apollodorus is our source:4 he tells us that, when the Greeks arrived to take him, Odysseus pretended to be mad in order to avoid going to war. It almost worked, but Palamedes, another crafty Greek, suspected the deceit and made to attack the infant Telemachus. At this point, Odysseus had to give up the pretence of lunacy to defend his son. But even these few stories about Odysseus and Penelope’s early relationship seem to tell us they are well-matched. They both want the same things, and they both tend to use subtlety to achieve them. Neither of them embraces directness if there is a roundabout route to take instead. It’s hard to imagine them quarrelling, and easy to imagine them laughing together at the folly of others.
The reason we have so few stories about Odysseus and Penelope together is not because poems, plays and pottery have been lost, as is so often the case. Rather, it is because the majority of Penelope and Odysseus’ marriage is spent apart: Telemachus is only a baby when Odysseus has to leave to fight at Troy. He besieges the city for ten years, and then spends another decade trying to get home to Ithaca. In literature and art, Penelope has been idealized for millennia for her patience, endurance and loyalty during the twenty-year period while her husband is away. She raises their child alone, she does her best to maintain his kingdom and she doesn’t remarry, even when everyone thinks he must be dead.