Odysseus and Penelope, twenty years of waiting and an olive-wood bed

In the ancient imagination Odysseus and Penelope represent marriage as an alliance of two minds. He is the hero of many wiles, she the queen who for twenty years defends the house with weapons just as subtle. The Odyssey, the poem attributed to Homer and probably composed between the 8th and 7th centuries BC, is also the story of their slow reunion.

The waiting at Ithaca

Odysseus leaves for Troy when his son Telemachus is still in swaddling clothes. The war lasts ten years, the journey home another ten. Meanwhile at Ithaca the palace is invaded by the suitors, young nobles from the island and the neighbouring islands who want to marry Penelope and seize power. In the sixteenth book Telemachus counts one hundred and eight of them.

Penelope, daughter of Icarius and cousin of Helen, cannot reject them openly. So she devises a trick: she promises to choose a husband when she has finished weaving a shroud for her father-in-law Laertes. By day she weaves, by night she unravels the work by torchlight. The trick lasts three years, until a disloyal maid reveals it to the suitors.

The return of the beggar

Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised by Athena as an old beggar. The first to recognise him is the old dog Argos, who dies right after seeing him again. The nurse Eurycleia recognises him by a scar on his leg while washing his feet, but he orders her to keep silent. Penelope talks at length with the stranger without knowing who he is, or perhaps sensing it.

It is she who proposes the decisive test: she will marry whoever can string the bow of Odysseus and shoot an arrow through twelve axes set in a row. None of the suitors succeeds. The beggar takes the bow, accomplishes the feat and turns his arrows on the suitors, who are killed with the help of Telemachus and two loyal servants.

The secret of the bed

Even after the slaughter Penelope does not trust him. She orders the nurse to move the marriage bed out of the room, and Odysseus reacts with indignation: that bed cannot be moved, because he himself built it around the trunk of an olive tree rooted in the ground. Only the two of them knew that secret. Then Penelope runs to him weeping and embraces him.

Homer tells that on that night Athena held back the dawn over the ocean to lengthen their meeting. In the sixth book, speaking to the young Nausicaa, Odysseus had described the greatest good for a married couple with the Greek word homophrosyne, being of one mind. The olive-wood bed is its concrete image: a rooted marriage that cannot be moved.

An active faithfulness

In the last book of the Odyssey the shade of Agamemnon, killed by his wife Clytemnestra, praises Penelope as the opposite model. Ovid opened the Heroides with a letter from her to her absent husband. Some minor ancient traditions offered a different and less faithful portrait of her, but it was the Homeric image that prevailed. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Penelope was often cited in moral treatises as an example of married virtue, alongside figures such as Lucretia and Alcestis.

Penelope's faithfulness is not passive. She does not merely wait: she invents, buys time, tests and decides. That is why the couple of Ithaca remains the symbol of a love able to withstand distance not through mere patience, but through the intelligence and complicity of both. Their olive-wood bed, planted in the earth, is its most eloquent seal.