Ἀντίνοος δέ μιν οἶος ἀμειβόμενος προσέειπε·
"Τηλέμαχʼ ὑψαγόρη, μένος ἄσχετε, ποῖον ἔειπες85
ἡμέας αἰσχύνων· ἐθέλοις δέ κε μῶμον ἀνάψαι.
σοὶ δʼ οὔ τι μνηστῆρες Ἀχαιῶν αἴτιοί εἰσιν,
ἀλλὰ φίλη μήτηρ, ἥ τοι περὶ κέρδεα οἶδεν.
ἤδη γὰρ τρίτον ἐστὶν ἔτος, τάχα δʼ εἶσι τέταρτον,
ἐξ οὗ ἀτέμβει θυμὸν ἐνὶ στήθεσσιν Ἀχαιῶν.90
πάντας μὲν ἔλπει καὶ ὑπίσχεται ἀνδρὶ ἑκάστῳ
ἀγγελίας προϊεῖσα, νόος δέ οἱ ἄλλα μενοινᾷ.
ἡ δὲ δόλον τόνδʼ ἄλλον ἐνὶ φρεσὶ μερμήριξε·
στησαμένη μέγαν ἱστὸν ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν ὕφαινε,
λεπτὸν καὶ περίμετρον· ἄφαρ δʼ ἡμῖν μετέειπε·95
'κοῦροι ἐμοὶ μνηστῆρες, ἐπεὶ θάνε δῖος Ὀδυσσεύς,
μίμνετʼ ἐπειγόμενοι τὸν ἐμὸν γάμον, εἰς ὅ κε φᾶρος
ἐκτελέσω, μή μοι μεταμώνια νήματʼ ὄληται,
Λαέρτῃ ἥρωι ταφήιον, εἰς ὅτε κέν μιν
μοῖρʼ ὀλοὴ καθέλῃσι τανηλεγέος θανάτοιο,100
μή τίς μοι κατὰ δῆμον Ἀχαιϊάδων νεμεσήσῃ,
αἴ κεν ἄτερ σπείρου κεῖται πολλὰ κτεατίσσας.'
ὣς ἔφαθʼ, ἡμῖν δʼ αὖτʼ ἐπεπείθετο θυμὸς ἀγήνωρ.
ἔνθα καὶ ἠματίη μὲν ὑφαίνεσκεν μέγαν ἱστόν,
νύκτας δʼ ἀλλύεσκεν, ἐπεὶ δαΐδας παραθεῖτο.105
ὣς τρίετες μὲν ἔληθε δόλῳ καὶ ἔπειθεν Ἀχαιούς·
ἀλλʼ ὅτε τέτρατον ἦλθεν ἔτος καὶ ἐπήλυθον ὧραι,
καὶ τότε δή τις ἔειπε γυναικῶν, ἣ σάφα ᾔδη,
καὶ τήν γʼ ἀλλύουσαν ἐφεύρομεν ἀγλαὸν ἱστόν.
ὣς τὸ μὲν ἐξετέλεσσε καὶ οὐκ ἐθέλουσʼ ὑπʼ ἀνάγκης·110
σοὶ δʼ ὧδε μνηστῆρες ὑποκρίνονται, ἵνʼ εἰδῇς
αὐτὸς σῷ θυμῷ, εἰδῶσι δὲ πάντες Ἀχαιοί·
μητέρα σὴν ἀπόπεμψον, ἄνωχθι δέ μιν γαμέεσθαι
τῷ ὅτεῴ τε πατὴρ κέλεται καὶ ἁνδάνει αὐτῇ.
εἰ δʼ ἔτʼ ἀνιήσει γε πολὺν χρόνον υἷας Ἀχαιῶν,115
τὰ φρονέουσʼ ἀνὰ θυμόν, ἅ οἱ πέρι δῶκεν Ἀθήνη,
ἔργα τʼ ἐπίστασθαι περικαλλέα καὶ φρένας ἐσθλὰς
κέρδεά θʼ, οἷʼ οὔ πώ τινʼ ἀκούομεν οὐδὲ παλαιῶν,
τάων αἳ πάρος ἦσαν ἐυπλοκαμῖδες Ἀχαιαί,
Τυρώ τʼ Ἀλκμήνη τε ἐυστέφανός τε Μυκήνη·120
τάων οὔ τις ὁμοῖα νοήματα Πηνελοπείῃ
ᾔδη· ἀτὰρ μὲν τοῦτό γʼ ἐναίσιμον οὐκ ἐνόησε.
τόφρα γὰρ οὖν βίοτόν τε τεὸν καὶ κτήματʼ ἔδονται,
ὄφρα κε κείνη τοῦτον ἔχῃ νόον, ὅν τινά οἱ νῦν
ἐν στήθεσσι τιθεῖσι θεοί. μέγα μὲν κλέος αὐτῇ125
ποιεῖτʼ, αὐτὰρ σοί γε ποθὴν πολέος βιότοιο.
ἡμεῖς δʼ οὔτʼ ἐπὶ ἔργα πάρος γʼ ἴμεν οὔτε πῃ ἄλλῃ,
πρίν γʼ αὐτὴν γήμασθαι Ἀχαιῶν ᾧ κʼ ἐθέλῃσι."
notes
Once again, Antinous speaks first for the suitors: they are not to blame if they continue to wait for Penelope; she has been leading them on, sending secret messages to various suitors, holding out the prospect of marriage once she finishes weaving a funeral shroud for Laertes.
read full essay
This is the first of three descriptions of Penelope’s deception in the poem, the other two being by Penelope (19.138–63) and the ghost of Amphimedon (24.129–47), and much scholarly ink has been spilled over what the small differences between them might mean. None of these discrepancies alters the plot of the poem or our perception of Penelope. The basic form of the story appears in various folktales about an insistent lover put off by a trick. Penelope’s holding action makes tactical sense given her situation, but also represents a desire to stop—or step out of—time, an impulse reflected elsewhere in her behavior before she recognizes the beggar as Odysseus. She exists in a state of frozen grief, unwilling to listen to songs about her husband, seeking escape from her troubles in sleep or even death (18.201–5; 20.62–86; 23.15–19). Not until she questions the beggar in Book 19 and he says that he met Odysseus in Crete just before he set off for Troy does the ice begin to thaw:
ἴσκε ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγων ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα:
τῆς δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἀκουούσης ῥέε δάκρυα, τήκετο δὲ χρώς:
ὡς δὲ χιὼν κατατήκετ᾽ ἐν ἀκροπόλοισιν ὄρεσσιν,
ἥν τ᾽ Εὖρος κατέτηξεν, ἐπὴν Ζέφυρος καταχεύῃ:
τηκομένης δ᾽ ἄρα τῆς ποταμοὶ πλήθουσι ῥέοντες:
ὣς τῆς τήκετο καλὰ παρήϊα δάκρυ χεούσης,
κλαιούσης ἑὸν ἄνδρα παρήμενον. αὐτὰρ Ὀδυσσεὺς
He spoke, telling many lies that were like truth.
And as she listened, tears began to flow, softening her complexion.
As when snow melts on the peaks of the mountains,
snow that the West wind piles up and the East wind thaws,
and the rivers overflow with its melting.
So her lovely cheeks were softened with the running tears,
As she wept for her husband, who was sitting beside her.
Odyssey 19.203–9
The slow and tantalizing process by which Penelope reconnects with her husband, one of the glories of the poem, begins here. Underneath the beggar’s wrinkles, Odysseus reaches out to her, telling a false tale that seems “like truth.” With this simile, the poet suggests that he is getting through to her while maintaining his anonymity. That the growing closeness motivates her decision to tell him of her dream and eventually to hold the contest of the bow to choose a new husband, who will turn out to be Odysseus. The story of her web trick, retold three times through the poem, becomes the focus for our understanding of her subtle, inward nature, as she moves from passive to active, from powerless to powerful, from death to life.
Penelope’s holding action is only one part of the Odyssey’s complex representation of time, both human and divine. The nostos plot requires a fairytale kingdom, in which Odysseus’s triumphant return and restoration of right order in the poem can occur without any accommodation to the exigencies of time. In this view, twenty years have passed without any impact on his relationship to his wife, son, and father. It will all come seamlessly into synch once the suitors are gone. The perspective here reflects the timeless world of the gods, where no one grows old. Athena is the agent of this view in the poem, orchestrating people and events to achieve a predetermined outcome, as Zeus recognizes (see essays on Book 1, p.8):
‘τέκνον ἐμόν, ποῖόν σε ἔπος φύγεν ἕρκος ὀδόντων.
οὐ γὰρ δὴ τοῦτον μὲν ἐβούλευσας νόον αὐτή,
ὡς ἦ τοι κείνους Ὀδυσεὺς ἀποτίσεται ἐλθών;
Τηλέμαχον δὲ σὺ πέμψον ἐπισταμένως, δύνασαι γάρ,
ὥς κε μάλ᾽ ἀσκηθὴς ἣν πατρίδα γαῖαν ἵκηται,
μνηστῆρες δ᾽ ἐν νηὶ: παλιμπετὲς ἀπονέωνται.
My child, what word has escaped the barrier of your teeth?
Haven’t you yourself arranged this plan,
that Odysseus would return to punish these men?
Contrive to send Telemachus back—you can do it—
so he arrives safely in his own fatherland,
and the suitors struggle back to port.
Odyssey 5.22–27
Penelope’s resistance to the passage of time fits this perspective. Weaving and unweaving, she symbolically holds up the death of Laertes by never finishing the shroud. After four years, the suitors force her hand and begin the inexorable forward movement toward the poem’s dramatic climax in Book 22. Odysseus’s nostos, on the other hand, reflects an interplay of both circular and linear time in the poem. His journey from Troy is recursive, taking him back toward the home and family he left twenty years before. Within that journey, his linear progress toward Ithaka is articulated through a series of smaller circular movements. He arrives in various places as an anonymous stranger and holds onto that persona until it is safe for his identity to be revealed, by him or others, always a dramatic high point in the poem. This pattern of what we might call “existential time,” where Odysseus begins as “nobody” and works his way back to his heroic persona, rehearses the final, glorious moment when Penelope recognizes her husband after the slaughter of the suitors, and he is finally restored to his role as head of the household.
Telemachus’s story like his father’s, reflects the interplay of both circular and linear time in the poem. He too will have a miniature nostos when he returns from Sparta to stand beside his father against the suitors. But his evolution from boy to man is decidedly linear, as he moves toward his destined role in the household. The clash between his movement toward maturity and the return of his father as king, husband, father, and son, comes to a dramatic climax in the stringing of the bow, when he finally steps back to allow Odysseus to return to his position of primacy (21.150–224; see also essay on 1.1–43).
Further Reading
Amory, A. 1963. “The Reunion of Odysseus and Penelope.” In Essays on the Odyssey, ed. C. Taylor, 101. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
Murnaghan, S. 1987. Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey, 129–131. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Van Nortwick, T. 2008. The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer’s Odyssey, 107–110. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
84 Ἀντίνοος: the leader of the suitors, first introduced in 1.383.
85 ἄσχετε: vocative of ἄσχετος.
88 περί “above all others,” adverbial (περί Cunliffe sense 3, and LSJ Ε . ΙΙ ).
89 εἶσι: third singular present indicative from εἶμι. Stanford (1947) translates, “is about to go,” in the sense of "be completed." The implication is that the third year of the suitors' attention to Penelope has now passed and the fourth is nearing completion (Merry, Riddell, and Monro 1886), raising the question of why the suitors waited so long before accosting her. Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth (1988) summarize evidence for earlier versions in which Odysseus was absent for fewer than ten years after the end of the war (p. 51 N. 3).
90 ἐξ οὗ: = ἐξ οὗ χρόνου, “since” (Cunliffe under ὅς(2) at II.9.b, and LSJ under ἐκ at II.1).
91 μὲν ἔλπει: μέν scans long owing to the lost initial digamma at the start of ἔλπει (Monro 390).
91 ὑπίσχεται: from ὑπισχομαι "promise," here with the dative "she makes promises to each man" (so LSJ under ὑπισχνέομαι at 1.d).
92 οἱ: dative of possession.
93 μερμήριξε: Spondaic fifth feet are unusual in Homer, and are most often found in lines ending with a word of four or more syllables (Monro 366).
94 στησαμένη μέγαν ἱστόν: Merry, Riddell, and Monro (1886), followed by Stanford (1947) and Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth (1988) suggest that Penelope does not set up the loom itself, which would be a permanent fixture in her quarters, but rather the “warp,” that is, the threads hanging from the top of the loom’s frame through which the shuttle is passed when weaving (ἱστός has both meanings in Homer). στησαμένη can be thought of as “setting up the loom,” in the sense of preparing it for weaving (as when one “sets the table”).
94 ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν: the iota of ἐνί scans long; a short final vowel is allowed to a the long metrical value before μέγαρον (Monro 371).
95 περίμετρον: this adjective is only used of Penelope’s weaving in Homer.
97 ἐπειγόμενοι τὸν ἐμὸν γάμον: the participle is concessive (“though . . . ”) and in apposition to the subject of the second person imperative.
97 εἰς ὅ κε “until,” with subjunctive (Cunliffe under ὅς(2) II.9.a, and Smyth 2383 C.N ).
98 ἐκτελέσω: aorist subjunctive from ἐκτελέω.
98 μοι: dative of interest.
98 μεταμώνια: modifies νήματ(α), “lest it come to nothing,” (Cunliffe II.b under ὄλλυμι).
99 ταφήιον: in apposition to φᾶρος, adding specificity.
99 εἰς ὅτε κέν “against the time when” (Merry, Riddell, and Monro 1886). For the construction, see Smyth 2383 C.N .
102 αἴ κεν: = ἐάν, introducing the protasis of a future more vivid conditional (the apodosis of which is the negative purpose clause in the previous line).
102 κεῖται: subjunctive, a form that has been explained as a contraction of κεί-εται. Further discussion of this form at Monro 81.
103 ἡμῖν: dative of possession with θυμὸς ἀγήνωρ.
105 ἀλλύεσκεν: Homeric form of ἀναλύεσκεν fromn ἀναλύω. The –σκ– in this verb and in ὑφαίνεσκεν makes these verbs iterative imperfects (unaugmented), indicating repeated past action.
105 ἐπεὶ δαΐδας παραθεῖτο: παραθεῖτο is optative in a temporal clause describing a recurring event after a past tense converying repeated action (Monro 309(c), Smyth 2414 , LSJ ἐπεί A.III). Merry, Riddell, and Monro (1886) call this “the optative of recurring action.” The middle voice indicates that the action is done for the subject’s benefit: “she had torches placed beside her” (Cunliffe sense 1, and LSJ B under παρατίθημι ).
106 ἔληθε: third singular imperfect active from λήθω, a Homeric variant of λανθάνω.
108 ᾔδη: pluperfect from οἶδα.
109 τήν: Penelope.
110 τό: that is, τὸ φᾶρος.
113 ἀπόπεμψον: imperative.
113 ἄνωχθι: imperative from ἄνωγα, see under ἀνώγω in Cunliffe.
113 μητέρα σὴν ἀπόπεμψον, ἄνωχθι δέ μιν: the accusatives and imperatives form chiasmus (Smyth 3020).
113 γαμέεσθαι: the verb in the middle is used of the woman, “to give herself in marriage to” or “to wed,” with a dative (LSJ γαμέω II).
114 καὶ ἁνδάνει: the -αι of καί retains its long quantity before hiatus, unusual in the second half of a foot. When this does happen, it most commonly does so after the first foot, or (as here) after the fourth ("bucolic diaeresis").
115 εἰ δ᾽ ἔτ᾽ ἀνιήσει: the protasis of an “emotional future condition” (future most vivid), expressing an undesired situation (Smyth 2328 ), or a future more vivid condition with a short-vowel subjunctive and the omission of κε / ἄν (Smyth 2327 ). The verb is either future indicative or short-vowel subjunctive from ἀνιάω. There is no regular apodosis, making this an example of anacolouthon (Smyth 3004 ). The “virtual apodosis,” expressing what happens if the condition is fulfilled, is implied when the sentence is recast in line 123: βίοτόν τε τεὸν καὶ κτήματ᾽ ἔδονται. See Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth 1988 on this line.
116 τά: demonstrative, “these things.”
116 πέρι “above all others,” adverbial (περί Cunliffe sense 3, and LSJ Ε . ΙΙ ), with anastrophe, as often when used in this sense.
117 ἔργα τ᾽ ἐπίστασθαι περικαλλέα καὶ φρένας ἐσθλὰς / κέρδεά θ᾽: in apposition to τὰ . . . ἅ, enumerating the things Athena has given to Penelope.
118 οἷ᾽: οἷα
118 τιν᾽ ἀκούομεν: supply an infinitive (ἐπίστασθαι, line 117) to complete the accusative-infinitive construction of indirect discourse: “we hear that anyone knows (knew)…”
119 τάων αἳ πάρος ἦσαν ἐυπλοκαμῖδες Ἀχαιαί: the antecedent of αἳ is incorporated into the relative clause (Smyth 2538b ). A more regular construction would be: τάων εὐπλοκαμίδων Ἀχαιῶν αἳ πάρος ἦσαν.
120 Τυρώ τ᾽ Ἀλκμήνη τε ἐυστέφανός τε Μυκήνη: Tyro is the daughter of Salmoneus, king of Elis, and mother of Neleus, Pelias, and Aeson. Odysseus sees her in the Underworld (11.235). Alkmene is the wife of Amphitryon and the mother of Heracles, and also appears in the Underworld (11.266). Mycene is the daughter of Inachus, and was the eponymous heroine of Mycenae (Smith Dictionary Mycene).
121 ὁμοῖα νοήματα Πηνελοπείῃ: a compressed version of νοήματα ὁμοῖα νοήμασι Πηνελοπείης. An example of brachylogy (Smyth 3017).
124 ὄφρα κε . . . ἔχῃ : ὄφρα κε, “so long as,” with subjunctive (Monro 287(2)).
126 ποιεῖτ᾽: ποιεῖται.
126 πολέος: = πολλοῦ, genitive singular of πολύς.
127 ἔργα “(our) farms” (LSJ ἔργον I.3.a).
127 πάρος γ᾽ ἴμεν . . . πρίν γ᾽ αὐτὴν γήμασθαι: both πάρος and πρίν, “before,” take infinitives (Smyth 2453 and 2461). πάρος γ᾽ simply anticipates πρίν γ᾽, and can go untranslated, with the infinitive ἴμεν translated a first plural future indicative (“we will not go”). αὐτήν is the accusative subject of the infinitive γήμασθαι (Smyth 2453b).
128 Ἀχαιῶν ᾧ: the genitive depends on the relative pronoun: “to whomever of the Achaeans . . . ”