Penelope and the Return of Odysseus

Also called: Return of Odysseus, Penelope’s web, Slaying of the suitors

A legend handed down over the centuries.

A Greek myth told in Books 13–24 of the Odyssey. Returning to Ithaca after twenty years, Odysseus enters his house disguised as a beggar, strings his own bow in the contest set by his wife Penelope, defeats the suitors and is reunited with her.

This Greek myth is told in Books 13–24 of Homer’s Odyssey. Brought home to Ithaca by a Phaeacian ship after twenty years, Odysseus was disguised by Athena as an old beggar and met his son Telemachus at the hut of the swineherd Eumaeus. Meanwhile more than a hundred suitors had crowded into his house, wasting his property and pressing Penelope to remarry. Penelope held them off for three years by promising to choose once she had finished weaving a shroud for her father-in-law, and unravelling each night what she had woven by day. When Odysseus entered his house, his old dog Argos recognised him and died.

Penelope announced she would marry the man who could string Odysseus’ bow and shoot through twelve axe heads. None of the suitors could even string it, but the beggar did so at once, and with his son he slew the suitors (Books 21–22). Penelope tested him with the secret of their bed, built on the stump of an olive tree (Book 23), and the story ends as Athena stops the fighting with the suitors’ families. Whether Homer’s Ithaca is the modern Greek island of Ithaki has been debated since antiquity.