The Epic Penelope: Wife, Mother, and … Master of the House

Penelope’s self-representation in Heroides 1 draws primarily on Homer’s Odyssey, which apparently portrays her as a chaste and faithful wife, as well as a protective mother, thus inaugurating a long literary tradition.¹ Other Greek sources, however, show more ambivalent representations of Penelope as an unreliable and sometimes degenerated woman, relating, for example, that she has sexual intercourse with one or more suitors, or an affair with Hermes.² Psychoanalytical and feminist readings since the 1990s have challenged unidimensional views of Penelope as a unequivocal model for feminine virtue and protective motherhood, demonstrating how even the Homeric Penelope is a multifaceted character. By providing a less binary and stereotypical interpretation of the Odyssean Penelope, these readings uncover new angles of Penelope’s role as a wife and mother, as well as master of the house. Accordingly, the archetype of faithfulness and stability that Penelope provides may appear more suitable to a male model of virtue, rather than a female.³ This aspect of Penelope emerges, for instance, from the similes Ulysses addresses to his wife during their first meeting at Odyssey 19.108–114 and 23.233–240: Penelope is, respectively, compared to a just king having ruled over his realm wisely and to a shipwrecked sailor finally approaching his homeland. These similes find their counterbalance in Odyssey 8.523–531, where Ulysses’s weeping is linked to female mourning, and Odyssey 16.216–218, where Telemachus and Ulysses are said to lament at their reunion more than sea-eagles having lost their chicks.⁴ As Helene Foley argues, these kinds of similes generate a gender role reversal: Penelope’s stability and strength in resisting the suitors can be considered a trial equally as demanding and challenging as the troubles and misfortunes Ulysses experienced during his journey.⁵ Therefore, Penelope is placed at the same level as her husband, both with respect to the actual role each holds within the household and in terms of intellectual cunning and wisdom.⁶

Moreover, Penelope’s resolution to finally remarry, after long hesitation, which occurs at the exact moment of Ulysses’s return to Ithaca disguised as a beggar, can be seen as another example of her cunningness, after the more famous trick of the shroud (Od. 2.104–109), and before that of the marriage bed (Od. 23.174–180):⁷ having recognized her husband, Penelope may be preparing the ground for his successful revenge. Whether Penelope is aware of her husband’s plans or not, in the aforementioned readings her cunning has been emphasized to a much greater degree than what is openly stated in the Odyssey, to the point that some scholars see her as the actual trickster of the poem, as well as a perfect female counterpart of Ulysses.⁸ These interpretations anticipate the complexity of the Ovidian Penelope and pave the way to understanding her attitude toward her son in Heroides 1, where certain features of the Homeric Penelope are either amplified or reshaped.

At the beginning of the Odyssey, we find that, because of Ulysses’s prolonged absence, Penelope is having a hard time dealing with her suitors and taking care of both the household and the realm. One of her main concerns is to protect her son from the suitors’ claims to power, and from their subsequent attempt to murder him (Od. 4.817–823). Telemachus still appears to Penelope as a little boy, a νήπιος (Od. 4.818), who is unprotected and inexperienced because of his father’s absence. In spite (or because) of Penelope’s protective attitude, Telemachus behaves quite rudely toward his mother from the very beginning of the poem. In Odyssey 1.345–359, he rebukes Penelope for having complained about Phemius’s song; he tells her to go back to her own work, namely, spinning, and to refrain from interacting with the men who are banqueting, since speech (μῦθος) is something that pertains only to men (358–359).⁹

An expression of the gendered spaces and roles within the Odyssey, this speech is also the most patent example of Telemachus’s disrespectful attitude toward his mother.¹¹ Other examples include Telemachus’s failure to notify his mother of his journey to Sparta and Pylos,¹² and his irreverent answer when Penelope announces she is willing to remarry and will set a bow contest to decree who is going to be her new husband (Od. 21.68–117).¹³ Telemachus’s indignation at Penelope’s potential remarriage contrasts with his previous statement that he had neither dissuaded his mother from marrying again nor forced her to do so (Od. 2.129–145, 20.339–344). Telemachus’s final reproach to Penelope, after Ulysses’s identity is revealed, is for not having welcomed Ulysses sooner (Od. 23.96–103).

This resentful attitude of Telemachus toward Penelope may be reconsidered vis-à-vis power and leadership dynamics within Ulysses’s household. Ulysses’s son must be aware of the role played by his mother to protect him. However, Telemachus’s rudeness toward Penelope is a signal that he is ready to take control, not only of his own life but also of the household and realm, while Penelope continues to refer to him as a νήπιος (“child”). In Telemachus’s view, Penelope has thus suddenly become a hindrance to his self-development, rather than a supporter. Drawing on psychological and anthropological maturation models, Nancy Felson-Rubin has read Telemachus’s hostility as a consequence of his progress from adolescence to adulthood: attacking his mother and making himself independent from her agency is part of Telemachus’s rite de passage.¹⁴ On Penelope’s side, by contrast, Telemachus’s maturity may represent, rather paradoxically, a threat to her authority and power within the house, since it would lead to her losing the unexpected control (and independence) that she has gained since Ulysses’s departure.¹⁵

This veiled hostility is much more than a mother-son relationship issue. Telemachus seems to be aware of the fact that, as long as Ulysses is absent from Ithaca, his mother may represent an obstacle to his taking possession of his inheritance, since she has, by necessity, taken on a (male) role of command within the house and sees him as still too young to make decisions.¹⁶ At the same time, if Penelope remarried one of the suitors, the person chosen would replace Ulysses as a king and master of the house. Thereby, Telemachus would entirely lose his right to Ulysses’s inheritance and would no longer be able to assume his role as a king (basileus) of Ithaca.¹⁷ This complex political and familial background posits an impasse to Telemachus and explains his fluctuating attitude in encouraging or hindering his mother’s authority, power, and particularly her (un)willingness to remarry.

Telemachus is thus prevented from performing his role as an adult male and accordingly master of his house, as well as king, not only by the claims of the suitors but also by Penelope’s attitude. But what role does the Heroidean Penelope play in this intricate political, social, and familial game? What kind of (im)balance does she find between her duties as a wife and her responsibilities as a master of the house? How does she depict and perceive her role within the quasi-subjective narrative of Heroides 1? In the Odyssey, Penelope’s maternal protection is something to be explicitly overcome by Telemachus, who would thus fulfill a generic requirement of the epic hero (see Il. 22.79–130, where Hector rejects Hecuba’s attempts to dissuade him from fighting Achilles). While motherhood is an implicit source of power for the Homeric Penelope, the idea of motherhood as a means of self-empowerment is brought out more explicitly in her Ovidian version. Penelope’s struggle to find her space in a highly male-based world and society articulates her complexity as an Ovidian character and a fictional author of her epistle.

The Ovidian Penelope: Between Web and Pen

On a surface-level reading, Heroides 1 stages Penelope as a pale imitation of her Homeric counterpart: an abandoned lover and a powerless woman who is unable to take care of herself in the absence of her husband.¹⁸ A close analysis of the epistle reveals that the Ovidian heroine enters into conversation with her epic counterpart, as well as other traditional or more ambivalent depictions of Penelope that can be found in Latin authors, thus creating a new, subversive version of herself as a self-empowered character and narrator of her own story.¹⁹ This new Penelope does not merely play the stereotypical role of the abandoned lover, as the subjective discourse intrinsic to the Heroides also allows the heroine to present herself as a renewed elegiac figure and to articulate her perspective on the narrative.²⁰ Penelope’s recasting of her persona through gender role reversals, the enhancement of her status as a writer, and the departures from the Homeric model anticipate and at the same time substantiate the reinterpretation of her role as a mother.

To begin with, in the opening of her letter, Penelope refers to Ulysses as lentus (“hanc tua Penelope lento tibi mittit, Ulixe,” Penelope sends this letter to you, Ulysses—you, who are slow in returning; Her. 1.1),²¹ an adjective that in the elegiac genre is often applied to the puella who is not willing or eager to engage in a relationship with a lover.²² The choice of such a word articulates, and forecasts, the gender role reversal that takes place in the epistle, since the programmatic role of the elegiac puella is here attributed to Ulysses, the male epic hero, instead of Penelope. This overlap of genders and literary genres is further denoted by certain elegiac occurrences of the adjective languidus, which is a synonym of lentus (see OLD, s.v. “languidus,” 3). The use of languidus to qualify the unfaithful elegiac poet in Propertius 1.3.38 and Amores 3.7.3 and 66 (see also 3.7.27) confirms Penelope’s “elegization” of Ulysses, along with the reduction of his heroic and epic status. Moreover, the preexisting elegiac association of the faithful puella with Penelopean weaving (see Prop. 1.3.35–46; Tib. 1.3.83–92) facilitates Ovid’s (partial) transformation of the Homeric Penelope into an elegiac heroine. Building on the personal subjectivity and domestic authority that the elegiac tradition bestowed upon the puella (and therefore upon Penelope as an elegiac puella),²³ Ovid has Penelope appropriate an independent agency within her letter. By including Ulysses in the elegiac universe and sharing with him the traditional attributes of the puella, Penelope distorts the boundaries between her status as an elegiac (male) poet and her portrayal as a traditional elegiac mistress.

The ambiguity of Penelope’s role and discourse also emerges at lines 9–10, where the heroine makes an extremely brief reference to her spinning by maintaining that she is accustomed to passing (fallere, 9) the long hours of the night (spatiosam … noctem, 9) working at the loom (pendula tela, “hanging web,” 10) in which she exercises her viduas … manus (“widowed hands,” 10).

The use of the adjective viduus in conjunction with manus is particularly ambiguous in this instance, since it suggests that not only her hands, but also Penelope herself is vidua of her husband. The choice of the verb fallo and the reference to the tela hint at the famous web trick, which is mentioned very briefly and only in this distich throughout the epistle.²⁵ As Penelope’s trick is at the core of her characterization in the Odyssey, the fact that the Ovidian heroine mentions the shroud only in these lines is very peculiar. What is the reason for such a significant difference?

Since the web trick is the best expression of the epic Penelope’s cunning, the lack of emphasis on this element in Heroides 1 seems to reduce the complexity, as well as the agency, of the elegiac version of this character.²⁶ By contrast, the lack of stress on this topos articulates Penelope’s strategy of self-representation within the epistle, as well as her willingness to depart from a characteristically epic motif. In the Odyssey, the web trick equated Penelope to Ulysses in terms of cunning and initiative, thus bestowing on her a quasi-active role. The lack of emphasis on the weaving trick in the letter may be read as Penelope’s reaction to Ulysses not revealing his identity to her as soon as he arrives, but only after having slain the suitors. As Heroides 1 is imagined to be addressed to Ulysses, Penelope’s short, unmarked mention of the weaving trick suggests to knowledgeable readers that the heroine is concealing her own plans from her husband.²⁷ This lack of specificity serves as a sort of contrapasso for not having been informed of Ulysses’s plans and disguise. Accordingly, it articulates Penelope’s shift from her epic Doppelgängerin’s strategy to a more subtle technique, which is dictated by the increase of her subjective agency within the epistle. The lack of a more detailed mention of the weaving trick enhances, instead of undermining, Penelope’s status as a female trickster and counterpart to Ulysses, thereby stressing her center-stage position within the elegiac universe of Heroides 1.²⁸

Penelope’s acquisition of a more central role also resonates from the perspective of the potential female readership of the Heroides. Aristocratic Roman women were less likely to participate in literary activities and constitute literary circles than were their male equivalents (namely, Roman men belonging to the aristocracy who took part in public life). However, there is evidence of learned and well-educated women who were familiar with literary works, and even actively engaged with literary production by authoring poems themselves, particularly during the early imperial period.²⁹ A learned woman reading Penelope’s epistle would have appreciated her ability to rework the previous literary tradition in an original way.³⁰ By marginalizing a distinctive element of her narrative in the Odyssey (the web trick), Penelope gains increased agency as a writer. In Heroides 1, the spinning, the “distaff side,” is replaced by writing: the creation of a web by the literary creation of a poem; ultimately, a very traditional female task (see Od. 1.345–359, above) by an activity usually attributed to men. Indeed, the expression viduas pendula tela manus is recalled at line 30, “narrantis coniunx pendet ab ore viri” (The wife hangs on the tale that falls from her husband’s mouth): Penelope’s “hanging” text(ure) is a kind of inversion of the image of the wife “hanging on” her husband’s epic narrative. This substitution of writing for weaving may also articulate a substitution of elegiac-epistolary writing for (oral) epic narrative. As a genre that opens up space for doubt, contestation, and questions, epistolarity allows Penelope to reject the closure informing epic narratives, and accordingly to rewrite her story.

Thus, the result of Penelope’s creativity is no longer the web but the poem itself, Heroides 1. By playing with the widespread metaphor of writing as weaving, Ovid has Penelope replace the distaff with her letter, thereby transforming metaphorical artistic creation with actual poetry.³¹ It is through writing, not weaving, that the Ovidian Penelope expresses her male “(pro)creative capacity,” that is, her ability to create just as a (male) poet would be expected to do.³² Furthermore, in Heroides 1 (letter) writing becomes a privileged means of expression for Penelope, who in the epic poem (Od. 1.345–359) was prevented from speaking by her own son, Telemachus, as we have seen. Elegiac and epistolary writing allows the Ovidian heroine to amend the lack of speech and free expression that her epic counterpart experiences, and to overcome the prohibition thrust upon her by Telemachus, who might be read as a hypostasis of androcentric norms and limitations.

Penelope’s creative potential proliferates and produces a large number of letters, which, as Penelope herself claims, are given to travelers stopping in Ithaca with the hope that they will somehow be able to deliver these letters to her husband (59–62).³³ The epic Penelope’s continuous creation (and destruction) of the web becomes the Heroidean Penelope’s continuous creation of writing.³⁴ The epistolary genre, which reflects the awareness of an absence “whilst simultaneously working to eliminate it,”³⁵ allows Penelope to create a sort of fictional bridge between herself and her husband. Through her creative, literary work, Penelope manages to communicate in absentia with Ulysses, at least in the fictional suspension generated by letter writing.³⁶ By contrast, it seems as though she fails to clearly communicate and interact with her son, Telemachus, in praesentia, as we will see in the next section of this chapter. In Heroides 1, Penelope’s poetic composition, which was traditionally performed by male authors in the ancient world,³⁷ thus functions as a substitute for her spinning—a female task—denoting an instability of stereotypical gender roles.

In the following lines of the poem, Penelope continues to shape her subjective version of the story: she reports her fear upon hearing about the Trojan war from others (11–22) and gives her own view of the accounts concerning events taking place in other households (23–36).³⁸ Penelope’s perspective on the Trojan narrative contrasts with the (alleged) scarcity of news she receives about her husband from other people, such as Nestor, who does not speak with her directly, but rather with Telemachus (37–38): Penelope is thus the third in line to receive news about Ulysses. Ulysses’s deeds in the Trojan war are reported with a high degree of emphasis on his heroism. Reworking and condensing the so-called Doloneia (Il. 10.332–539), the report (39–46) is so excessively exaggerated as to appear sarcastic.³⁹

In these lines, Penelope appears to describe Ulysses’s actions with a high degree of pathos, but she emphasizes their deceptive nature (nocturno … dolo, 42) and uses the verb macto to mean “to kill (men)” (viros, 43). As this verb is used regularly to indicate the killing of unarmed animal victims during sacrifices, not of human warriors, it sounds sarcastic and therefore highly inappropriate for an epic context.⁴⁰ In this passage, rather than simply focusing on Ulysses’s actions, Penelope’s irony seems to be directed precisely against the one reporting these actions so enthusiastically, Telemachus.⁴¹ These lines suggest that Penelope ventriloquizes (and mocks) Telemachus’s speech, pointing out his naivete in believing that his father is among the greatest warriors of the Trojan war, when in fact he is not. In other words, Penelope questions the image of Ulysses that Telemachus created for himself as a result of the projection of his own identity in a sort of superego, represented by the father he has never met.⁴² While supporting this fictional construction, Penelope is simultaneously trying to demolish it by replacing the un/heroic Ulysses with her own active agency within her storytelling.

Penelope’s agency also emerges in lines 63–65, where the heroine states that she sent her son, Telemachus, to Nestor in Pylos, and to Sparta in search of Ulysses. This is one of the most significant differences between the account of the Odyssey (where Penelope is unaware of her son’s travels: see Od. 2.373) and Heroides 1, and is proof of the more active role that Ovid’s Penelope plays in the story.⁴³ The ambiguity concerning the degree of Penelope’s involvement in Telemachus’s mission is also clear from the rest of the passage, as shown by lines 64–65 (“incerta est fama remissa Pylo,” The rumor brought back from Pylos was not sure; 64; “Sparte quoque nescia veri,” Sparta also could tell us nothing about the truth; 65).⁴⁴ In both cases, the vagueness surrounding Ulysses’s destiny is emphasized, but the statements do not correspond to the story told in the Odyssey, particularly concerning the journey to Sparta, where Menelaus informs Telemachus that his father was kept by Calypso (Od. 4.555–558), and Telemachus subsequently tells Penelope what he learned (Od. 17.142–146).⁴⁵ The ambiguity and “correction” of the Homeric model implied in these lines anticipate Penelope’s development in the following sections of the epistle, where she accomplishes other gender role reversals, as well as her own self-empowerment, through an instrumental use of her motherhood.

As a fictional author of her epistle, as well as a skilled elegiac poet, Penelope merges the previous literary accounts (particularly her Homeric version) with a subjective (re)interpretation of her story, thus reshaping it. Through her ironic discourse, Penelope plays with the literary tradition by pretending to align herself with it, while in fact undermining and disavowing its main patterns. While Penelope’s attitude superficially appears to express her simplicity and unidimensionality as a character, this naivete is part of her sophisticated use of previous sources, which are filtered through her perspective on the story. In other words, the heroine builds a new persona, who subverts the stereotypical role of the abandoned lover and doubtful female character precisely by pretending to perform and endorse it. As we shall see in the next section, this subversion is particularly evident from line 81 until the end of the epistle, where Penelope focuses on her role within the house, as well as her relationship with the members of her familia, including her son, Telemachus.

Mother or Matrona: Roman Motherhood Revisited

The section of Heroides 1 focusing on Penelope’s motherhood also includes broader references to her household and family, which articulate the heroine’s ironic attitude toward her familial and social role. First, Penelope mentions her father, Icarius, who is prompting her to quit her marital home, presumably to make her remarry:⁴⁶ “me pater Icarius viduo discedere lecto / cogit et immensas increpat usque moras” (As for me, my father Icarius urges me to quit my widowed bed, and even rebukes me for my measureless delay; 81–82).⁴⁷ The adjective viduus, which we saw linked to manus at line 10, here refers to the lectus (“bed”) and emphasizes Penelope’s abandonment. Some passages from the Odyssey (see 1.274–278, 2.50–54, 14.138–141) hint at the role that Icarius would possibly play in a new marriage for Penelope but do not appear to delineate a consistent and clear picture. Given the Roman context of Heroides 1, the dialectic between Penelope and her pater Icarius may be re-situated and (re)interpreted in light of the developments in family law that occurred under Augustus at the time Ovid was presumably writing the Heroides.⁴⁸

“Father Icarius” may embody a Roman paterfamilias, who could have benefited from his daughter’s divortium (“divorce”) if she had married sine manu, that is, remaining in patria potestate (“under the authority of her father”).⁴⁹ According to Roman law, if a woman divorced in agreement with and under the potestas of her father, this separation entitled the father to receive the dowry back.⁵⁰ In this hypothetical Roman divortium, Icarius would thus function as the paterfamilias asking for a repudium of his daughter’s partner on the basis of Ulysses’s absence, since long physical separation between husband and wife may have been enough to justify a divorce.⁵¹ Trained in Roman law (see Tr. 4.10.15–40), Ovid, it is argued, frequently plays with contemporary legal discourse in his poetry.⁵² By having Penelope mention Icarius’s insistence on her divorce, Ovid may therefore be alluding to the current legal (Roman) practice.

However, Penelope’s legal discourse is as ambiguous as many other passages of Heroides 1. In stating her willingness to remain faithful to Ulysses (“Penelope coniunx semper Ulixis ero,” I, Penelope, will always be Ulysses’s wife; 84), Penelope opposes both her father and the decision to remarry that she eventually seems to make in the Odyssey (Od. 18.250–280). This inconsistency raises questions on the reliability of her utterance (that she will forever be Ulysses’s coniunx), which seems an ironic provocation to knowledgeable readers, rather than a convincing assertion.⁵³ The Ovidian heroine does not simply perform the role of elegiac lover but also mocks the topos of the faithful wife that she embodies in the Homeric epos through her rhetorical exaggeration. It is her very role as Ulysses’s wife that has enabled her to write, just as her role as mother of a puer empowers her to become guardian of the oikos(“house”). At the same time, Penelope expresses a sort of independence from her father by showing her dissent. This attitude conforms to the Roman ideal of the univira (“a woman who has had only one husband”) and to the development of Roman legal practices, according to which the daughter’s consent, for both marriage and divorce, started to become necessary from the late Republic or early Principate onward.⁵⁴ Concurrently, the Ovidian Penelope’s refusal to remarry conflicts with new rules and conventions implemented during the Augustan period, where remaining a widow (or unmarried) was strongly discouraged.⁵⁵ By playing with the contemporary legal context, and its intrinsic contradictions, Ovid’s Penelope appears to taunt the new legislation concerning marriages and parenthood brought forth by Augustus, who was certainly not pleased with divorce, the changing of partners, or adultery.⁵⁶

Penelope’s independence and agency emerge more clearly from the final part of her epistle (97–116), which mainly focuses on her son, Telemachus.

The expression sine viribus is usually linked to the word uxor to balance the tricolon (sine viribus uxor/Laertesque senex/Telemachusque puer; “a powerless wife; Laertes, an old man; Telemachus, a boy”; 97–98), and may also have a sexual nuance, implying, through the verbal pun viribus/viris, that Penelope lacks a male partner.⁵⁷ Highly hyperbolical, the phrase sine viribus uxor contributes to increasing the pathos and at the same time the ironic inflection of these lines. This ironic exaggeration is also implied in the emphasis of Laertes as a senex, which is juxtaposed to the reference to Telemachus as a puer, while he would have been almost twenty at the time of Penelope’s writing.⁵⁸ The choice of the word puer, which is reminiscent of the corresponding Greek form, νήπιος, in Odyssey 4.818 (see above), is an indication of Penelope’s desire to maintain control over her young son. Telemachus’s puerilitas suggests that Ulysses’s absence has hindered his passage into adulthood, which in Roman society was sanctioned by the achievement of the toga virilis.⁵⁹ If read in this way, Penelope’s manipulation and recontextualization of her epic Doppelgängerin’s emphasis on Telemachus’s boyhood (and Laertes’s old age) may be seen as a means of underlining her role as the sole master of the house. This insistence also diminishes Telemachus’s agency and status, so long as Ulysses remains absent. Despite referring to herself as “a powerless wife,” Penelope has proved herself capable of managing the household and the realm during Ulysses’s long absence.

Telemachus’s boyhood is what grants the heroine her power, but as soon as her son is recognized as an adult, Penelope will no longer be able to claim her position within the household. The acknowledgment of Telemachus’s adulthood, moreover, would make him independent, thus reducing the significance of Penelope’s role as a mother. Being the mother of a puer is for Penelope necessary to have her motherhood acknowledged tout court. In other words, only as the mother of a son who still remains a puer is she allowed to exercise her power over the household and the realm. Motherhood is thus a key element of Penelope’s prominent role but is determined by her being the mother of someone who still relies on and is dependent upon her. About two thousand years later, Adrienne Rich also stresses how the power of a woman, as well as the construction of her subjectivity, is affected by the way she projects her own aspirations onto her son, who embodies the mother’s desire to actively participate in the world:

She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son… . Giving birth to sons has been one means through which a woman could leave “her” mark on the world.⁶⁰

This reading of Penelope’s motherhood would explain why Penelope uses the word puer in reference to Telemachus, why she is aware (and seems to be the principal actor) of his mission (see lines 63–65, above), and ultimately why she depicts him as being in danger (99–100): in brief, the heroine wishes her son to remain a small boy in need of his mother. The vacuum produced by Ulysses’s absence (and filled by Penelope’s active agency) emerges clearly at lines 107–108, where Penelope again refers to Telemachus. By wishing for him to be able to attain a fortior aetas (“a more capable stage of life”), she implies that he has not yet reached his adulthood, or at least not from her point of view.⁶¹ Ulysses’s support is here depicted as necessary not only to ensure that Telemachus will stay safe and alive (and protected from the suitors), but particularly for Telemachus’s development toward adulthood: “nunc erat auxiliis illa tuenda patris” (108).⁶² The gerundive tuenda recalls the technical, and juridical, word tutela (tueor and tutela are etymologically related) and may have a legal connotation, hinting at the Roman norm of the tutela impuberum (“care of the young”).⁶³ In the absence of the father, the tutela impuberum was usually taken on by the adgnatus proximus (i.e., the closest male relative) or, alternatively, by whoever was named by means of the tutela testamentaria (a person associated with the family).⁶⁴ While women normally were not supposed to be eligible to assume the tutela impuberum, Roman legal sources show that, in fact, several widows acted as tutors for their children.⁶⁵ By etymologically alluding to the tutela, (Ovid’s) Penelope may therefore imply that this tutela impuberum, pertaining to the father but not undertaken by Ulysses (111–112) or any other male relative, has been taken on by someone else—namely, the mother, Penelope herself—since she appears to exercise control over Telemachus, thereby occupying a very active (and somewhat “male”) role within the household.⁶⁶

These lines articulate Telemachus’s problematic, precarious manhood.⁶⁷ Ulysses’s absence has frozen him in a perennial childhood, which is deliberately enhanced, and instrumentalized, by Penelope: this combination hinders his passage into adulthood.⁶⁸ It can be said that Telemachus has built his personality, and particularly what we can call in Freudian terms the “superego,” on a constructed image of his father. However, it would appear difficult to see Ulysses, who has been physically absent for his son’s entire life, as the person responsible for the construction of Telemachus’s superego. Telemachus has grown up with a singular parental figure, his mother. This circumstance has determined a peculiar outcome in Penelope’s perception of her motherhood, as well as in their mother-son relationship, where Telemachus’s independence appears to be denied.

The depiction of a helpless Telemachus is further developed in lines 111–112,⁶⁹ where he is depicted once more as an unarmed and unprotected child in need of his father’s help: “mollibus annis / in patrias artes erudiendus erat” (111–112).⁷⁰ The adjective patrius enhances the legal framing of the passage by hinting at the patria potestas and also alludes to the actual patria (in its meaning as “pertaining to the fatherland”).⁷¹ Even if in this particular context it is clear that in patrias artes refers to something “pertaining to the father” (not the fatherland),⁷² the overlap between pater and patria is not incidental. As Ulysses is the king of Ithaca, and Ithaca represents the realm over which Telemachus would potentially rule at some point in his life, having not been educated in patrias artes may also allude to the fact that Telemachus is not ready, or even able, to rule over his (father)land, patria. This expression is thus another highly effective way for Penelope to point out Telemachus’s immaturity and lack of experience, and consequently to underscore her own dominant role.

Penelope’s emphasis on her central role goes hand in hand with the development of her persona as well as her subjective voice, which culminates in the last two lines of her epistle: “certe ego, quae fueram te discedente puella, / protinus ut venias, facta videbor anus” (115–116). By establishing a contrast between puella and anus, with both terms at the very end of each line, this couplet represents Penelope’s last rejection of another elegiac pattern.⁷³ Penelope’s challenge to the stereotypical portrayal of the elegiac puella is particularly evident if we read Heroides 1.115–116 vis-à-vis Propertius 2.9, where the poet praises Penelope’s patience in waiting for Ulysses until she has become old: “visuram et quamvis numquam speraret Ulixem, / illum exspectando facta remansit anus” (And, although she would have never hoped to see Ulysses, she endured, becoming an old woman waiting for him; 7–8). By drawing on and at the same time manipulating and reinterpreting the Propertian passage, the Ovidian heroine claims that she has changed from what she was and what she was supposed to be—something between the conventional good wife/mother of the epic tradition and the abandoned lover of Ovidian elegiac poetry—into an anus, that is, an old woman. The substantive anus identifies what Penelope has become throughout her twenty-year journey, and conveys a higher degree of realism and materiality to her self-depiction. Such concreteness is antithetical to the stereotypical, abstract, and depersonalized depiction of the traditional scripta puella.⁷⁴

In this respect, the fact that Ulysses is twice qualified with the adjective lentus (1, 66), while Penelope’s self-development appears to be emphasized, points toward a form of reversal in the opposition between female immobility and male mobility that features within the Heroides.⁷⁵ Arguably, attributing the concept of immobility to Ulysses, who has wandered for almost twenty years, may appear questionable, just as it may be questionable to attribute mobility to Penelope, who has fixedly remained in Ithaca. The im/mobility I refer to, however, is not physical but rather a psychological attitude. Penelope’s letter thus articulates her evolution and depicts her as a more “real” and multidimensional character; (Penelope’s) Ulysses, by contrast, is fixed in his timeless absence, vacuum, and remoteness.

Penelope’s self-development toward a more active and self-conscious version of her own character is a result of the (re)interpretation of her motherhood, whose meaning is reshaped and subverted throughout her epistle. Heroides 1 may be thus said to articulate an ur-form of écriture féminine, which finds in the use of metaphorical writing a way to subvert polarities and deconstruct preexisting concepts.⁷⁶ Hélène Cixous defines female writing as an endeavor to “write the other”:

“Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling-place of the other” …, and the feminine writer is “the enchanted womb, the woman pregnant with all the love” whose flesh allows “strangeness to come streaming through.” … Écriture féminine is … “a writing … without you, without I, without law.”⁷⁷

Such a definition can be transhistorically applied to the writing of Penelope, who seems to deconstruct and demolish herself by continuously pointing out her weakness, only to re-create a new self-image through the manipulation of her motherhood. Penelope’s strategic handling of her maternal role allows the “other” to enter her writing, and hence increases her subversive reconceptualization of familial and social norms. Although being or becoming a mother has been seen—throughout time and across different cultures—as a condition that intensifies the separation between gender roles in society by limiting woman’s space to mere procreation and the care of children,⁷⁸ Penelope’s motherhood nonetheless appears to place her in a position of predominance. This predominance would derive from the peculiar situation in which Penelope finds herself: having been left in Ithaca by Ulysses, she is responsible not only for Telemachus but also for other members of the household (e.g., Laertes), her servants, and the entire realm. It is motherhood that has made Penelope master of her house and sovereign of her people; Penelope is the person whom each of the suitors intends to marry, and to whom they refer to gain a quasi-legitimate rule (Her. 1.87–96).

Penelope’s insistence on Telemachus’s immaturity, as well as her allusions to the fact that she alone has brought him up and taken care of his education, complicates familial dynamics. Kristeva describes maternity as a circumstance that can break the rules of temporality and place women within a more cosmic cyclical time, making them experience the jouissance of interrupting everyday obligations and tasks.⁷⁹ Because of Ulysses’s sudden departure shortly after she gave birth, Penelope subverts the unwritten rule of maternal experience, as she is projected toward prominent participation in historical time, in which it is normally only men who play a dominant role.⁸⁰ On the one hand, motherhood leads Penelope to break the conventions of what Kristeva describes as the “temporal symbolic order”;⁸¹ on the other hand, the heroine pervasively intervenes in the historical time (of men) by appropriating “masculine” tasks through the exploitation of her maternal role.

In the linguistic realm of letter writing, Penelope thus fights against the patriarchal symbolic language by pretending to endorse it, although she eventually changes its meaning: by casting and rewriting her maternal role, the heroine overcomes the exclusion of women from the spoken language as a social and historical expression,⁸² and (re)positions herself as the main actor within her story. The results of, and evidence for, the subversion that occurs in Penelope’s epistle can be found in the constant references to her son, particularly in the final lines of her letter (Her. 1.97–116): the existence of Telemachus or, more specifically, of Telemachus as a puer, a (young) son, is what legitimates Penelope’s power. This power, however, generates a deep conflict between the two parties involved—namely, Penelope as a mother and Telemachus as a son—which is articulated by Penelope underlining Telemachus’s weakness. At the same time, this conflict also produces some more hidden psychological outcomes at the level of the mother-son relationship.

The tension between Penelope and Telemachus develops as a consequence of the instability of intrafamilial, as well as gender, roles evident in Heroides 1. As we have seen, the abrupt departure of Ulysses causes a sort of break in the traditional tasks that Penelope’s role as a mother would require her to perform. Having initially represented a projection into another “self” of Penelope’s own masculinity, Telemachus has also become a guarantee of, and at the same time a threat to, her power in more actual terms: his boyhood is what safeguards her dominant role, but his achievement of maturity and adulthood would cause her to lose this prominent position. In the epic tradition, Telemachus tried to get his status—and independence—acknowledged, not only by the suitors but primarily by his mother. To this attempt should be attributed his travels in search of his father, as well as the rudeness toward his mother that we see in the Odyssey. In Heroides 1, however, Telemachus’s mission seems to have been undertaken under Penelope’s control, or even her orders (63–65), while his personality and feelings appear to be ignored or trivialized by his mother, who markedly refers to him as a puer, unarmed or in need of protection (97, 99–100, 107–112).

Penelope thus becomes a sort of Janus figure with respect to Telemachus, a mother and anti-mother at the same time.⁸³ From her perspective, Telemachus is not only a part of herself, one she gave birth to, but also a contender for predominance.⁸⁴ To Telemachus, his mother represents not only his earliest contact with the world and the person who has protected him, but also a rival, “the Father” he has to kill (to put it in Freudian terms), since she has taken on the role that would normally have belonged to Ulysses. In other words, from a psychoanalytical point of view, Telemachus has identified himself with his mother, instead of the other parental (male) figure of his family, and he is ready to fight against her both to rule the realm and to develop himself. Penelope may be said to be the “first love object” that Telemachus loses and, then, encounters again as the hypostasis of the authority he fails to overcome, or even imitate.⁸⁵

The implied disrespect and ironic tone that Penelope uses to refer to Ulysses’s deeds in lines 41–46 intend to undermine the fictional paternal, heroic figure Telemachus has created for himself. At the same time, this subtle irony emphasizes the heroine’s prominent position within the family, which has been created with readiness and effectiveness, in opposition to her lacking, absent, and lentus counterpart, Ulysses. Telemachus’s conflict with “the Mother” can also be attributed to his attempt to mythologize “the Father,” whom he has never met in person. In Heroides 1, this tension is illuminated from Penelope’s perspective, who stages a two-level discourse: while superficially depicting herself as a traditional wife and elegiac abandoned heroine, she blurs the contours of expected (binary) family roles and accomplishes her self-empowerment. As a part of her strategy, Penelope consistently degrades Ulysses’s heroic status, and “elegizes” him. In the next chapter, we shall see how, in a similar way, Deianira transforms Hercules from a tragic and epic hero into an elegiac lover.

1. Jacobson 1974, 243; Barchiesi 1992, 53; Knox 1995, 86; also Baca 1969, 9–10. For more complete references to Penelope as a mythological figure, see Wüst in RE XIX 467–493, s.v. “Penelope.”

2. From this liaison with Hermes, Penelope allegedly generates Pan (note the assonance between Pan and Penelope, which, in turn, comes from the Greek word πηνέλοψ, “duck”): see Pind. fr. 100 Snell; Cic. Nat. D. 3.56; Hyg. Fab. 224. For further sources questioning Penelope’s (good) reputation, see Duris of Samos (FGrH 76F21 Jacoby); Lyc. 771–773, 789–792; Apollod. Epit. 7.35–39.

3. Zeitlin 1995, 19–32.

4. Zeitlin 1995, 50–52; Morrison 2005, 79–83.

5. Foley 1978, 7–26; Morrison 2005, 79; see also Foley 1995, 93–115, on Penelope as a moral authority.

6. For Penelope’s consistency and memory as expressions of male kleos (see Agamemnon’s praise at Od. 24.192–202), see Mueller 2007, 337–362.

7. See Hölscher 1996, 136–137; de Jong 2001, 450n12; Nünlist 2015, 2–3. For the weaving trick as “female resistance to the mores of a social patriarchy,” see Shoichet 2007, 24; see also Bergren 1993, 10–17; on Penelope as a “weaver” of her plot, see Felson-Rubin 1994, 15–42.

8. Penelope is often depicted in terms of extraordinary mental abilities, which link and equate her to Ulysses: the word kleos, “glory,” is used to refer to both Ulysses (Od. 1.344, 9.20, 16.241) and Penelope (24.196–197); the adjective empedos, “steadfast,” usually attributed to men, is used for Ulysses (Od. 11.152, 12.161), Penelope (11.178), and the marital bed, a symbol of fidelity (23.203). This affinity is exemplified in the kind of marriage Ulysses wishes for Nausicaa (Od. 6.181–185), based on homophrosyne; see Foley 1995, 95–96.

9. On the episode, see Clark 2001, 335–354; also Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth 1988, 119–121; Heitman 2005, 34–35.

10. The text and translation (with changes) are from Murray (see Dimock 1919).

11. Doherty 1992, 165–167.

12. This is an important difference between the Odyssey and Ovid’s epistle (see Jacobson 1974, 265): while in Her. 1 Penelope herself sends Telemachus to Sparta and Pylos in search of his father (63–65) and thereby shows her active agency, in Od. 1.280–305 Athena advises to him to go—with Penelope unaware of the journey.

13. Felson-Rubin 1994, 75–86, 88.

14. Felson-Rubin 1994, 67–91.

15. “When compared with the position of a mistress of a normal oikos, Penelope’s position is admittedly irregular” (Doherty 1992, 166; see also Schein 1995, 24–25). Particularly during the bow contest, it seems as though Penelope fluctuates between her desire to protect Telemachus and a sort of contest with her son to take on the role of master of the house; see Hoffer 1995, 517.

16. Clark 2001, 339.

17. See, in this respect, the dialogue among Telemachus, Antinous, and Eurymachus in Od. 1.381–420; see Scodel 2001, 307–327.

18. As per Lindheim 2003, 43: “The heroine of Heroides 1 chooses to emphasize her own lack, helplessness, and marginality.”

19. For references to Penelope as an ideal of modesty and temperance within Latin lyric and elegiac poetry, see Hor. Carm. 3.10.11; Prop. 2.6.23–24; also Ov. Tr. 1.6.22 and 5.14.35–36. In Ars am. 1.477 (“Penelopen ipsam, persta modo, tempore vinces,” Now insist: with some time, you will overcome Penelope herself!), Ovid exploits the stereotype of a chaste Penelope only to undermine it with the ironic tone of seduction in which the Ars amatoria is immersed. As we shall see, Ovid has Penelope play with her Propertian representation (2.9.7–8) later in her letter.

20. See Kennedy 1984, 421; Lindheim 2003, 41, 43; Spentzou 2003, 19–24.

21. Knox 1995 prints haec instead of hanc following Palmer’s correction (see also Goold 1977, 10), and implies verba instead of epistulam, which he defines as an “awkward ellipse” (87). Following the argument made by Barchiesi (1992, 65–66), I choose to keep hanc here: although the omission of either epistulam or salutem may appear odd, hanc is suggestive as the first word of the collection, since it alludes to the concrete materiality of the letter as well as letter writing itself.

22. See, e.g., Prop. 1.15.4, 3.8.20; Tib. 2.6.36; also, programmatically, Ov. Am. 3.11.30; Her. 2.23, with Knox 1995, 88.

23. For female subjectivity, and its connection to poetic agency, in Roman elegy, see Wyke 1994, 110–128; Wyke 2002, 155–191; James 2010, 314, with bibliography.

24. For the variant reading iassaret (vs. lassaret), see Goold 1977, 10.

25. Baca 1969, 9–10.

26. See Lindheim 2003, 46.

27. On the ironic potential and interpretative possibilities of Penelope’s letter, see Kennedy 1984, 413–422; Casali (2017, 175–198) further underscores Penelope’s manipulation of previous models.

28. The epic Ulysses chooses to not reveal his identity to his wife, whose knowledge could jeopardize his plans (see Athena’s warning at Od. 13.333–338); see Murnaghan 1986, 103–115. Conversely, in Her. 1 Penelope’s actions may be jeopardized by a premature discovery of her web trick. Thus, Ovid’s Penelope cautiously does not confess, whether to the internal reader (presumably Ulysses disguised as a beggar) or the external reader/audience, what she is doing with the shroud, making just a vague reference to the pendula … tela (10).

29. Hemelrijk 1999; Stevenson 2007, 31–58.

30. On the omission of a more specific reference to the web trick as a marker of Ovid’s originality in Her. 1, see Baca 1969, 9–10; Barchiesi 1992, 70.

31. Weaving is traditionally associated with poetic composition, from Homeric poetry onward: see, e.g., the etymology of the word ῥαψῳδός; Ovid’s use of the spinning-related verb deduco to indicate the composition of his carmen at Met. 1.4.

32. Bergren 1993, 13.

33. On the circumstances of (potential) delivery for Penelope’s epistle, and likewise the epistles of other heroines, see Kennedy 1984, 417–419; Kennedy 2002, 220–222.

34. See Drinkwater 2007, 370–373.

35. Kennedy 2002, 221.

36. “Epistolary language is preoccupied with immediacy, with presence, because it is a product of absence” (Altman 1982, 135).

37. Hemelrijk 1999, 172.

38. On Penelope’s imagination and reconstruction of reality, see Stroh 2007, 206–208; for some examples of Penelope’s “correction” of the Homeric narrative, see Casali 2017, 175–198.

39. Jacobson 1974, 256–257; for a discussion of textual issues in these lines, see Barchiesi 1992, 79–82; Knox 1995, 97–98; Bessone 2000, 139–153.

40. See Bulhart in TLL online, VIII 0, 21–23, s.v. “macto”; Barchiesi 1992, 82; Knox 1995, 98.

41. See Drinkwater 2022, 45–46.

42. For a similar point with respect to the Homeric Telemachus, see Felson-Rubin 1994, 72–73.

43. Drinkwater 2022, 40.

44. Bentley read vestri instead of veri (see Goold 1977, 14; Barchiesi 1992, 89).

45. See Casali 2017, 175–198.

46. Barchiesi 1992, 92.

47. For other references to Icarius as Penelope’s father within Latin literature, see Prop. 3.13.10; Cul. 265; Ov. Ib. 391; more often, Icarius appears as Erigone’s father (see Heeg. in RE IX 1.973–977, s.v. “Ikarios”).

48. See the introduction.

49. Treggiari 1991, 328–330, 441–446; Mastrorosa 2002, 171; see, e.g., Paulus, Sent. 5.6.15; Cod. Iust. 5.17.3, 7; 5.18.

50. See Cod. Iust. 5.18; Dig. 24.3.66.2, 24.3.38; Gai. Inst. 1.137; Ulp. 6.6, with Evans Grubbs 2002, 191–192. For the relation between Ulysses’s estate, Telemachus’s inheritance, and the claims of the suitors of Penelope in the Odyssey, see Heitman 2005, 39–43.

51. See Cod. Iust. 5.17.7; Dig. 24.1.32.13, with Treggiari 1991, 451.

52. For a survey of legal discourse within Ovid’s poetry, see Ziogas 2021; also Ziogas 2016, 213–237.

53. For an example of a daughter’s refusal to break up her marriage by the order of her father, see, e.g., Sen. Controv. 2.2, with Mastrorosa 2002, 165–190.

54.Dig. 24.3.34; Ulp. 5.2.

55. See Treggiari 1991, 499–502; Evans Grubbs 2002, 220–236.

56. For other examples of a similar interplay with the contemporary legal contexts within the Heroides, see Her. 4.34 (turpis adulter), 123–124, on which see Martorana, forthcoming; Her. 12 (passim), with Alekou 2018, 311–334.

57. Jacobson 1974, 270–271; Stroh 2007, 204.

58. See Knox 1995, 109; for Telemachus’s lack of maturity and weakness within the Odyssey, see Heitman 2005, 50–62.

59. For the toga virilis, see, e.g., Treggiari 1991, 398; Davies 2005, 121–130. Although there was a certain fluidity in terms of stages of life in Roman culture and society, it seems that, for males, the passage from childhood to adulthood (that is, from the bulla to the toga virilis) occurred at the age of seventeen, as remarked, for instance, in Gell. NA 10.28: see Laurence 2000, 443–450; Harlow and Laurence 2002, 67–78.

60. Rich 1977, 186, 193; see also 210–211: “What do we want for our sons? Women who have begun to challenge the values of patriarchy are haunted by this question. We want them to remain, in the deepest sense, sons of the mother, yet also to grow into themselves, to discover new ways of being men even as we are discovering new ways of being women.”

61. For a discussion on the sequence of lines 107–108, see Barchiesi 1992, 101.

62. For an overview of family relations and tasks in the Roman world, see Dixon 1988, 13–40; for children, see Rawson 1986a, 170–200.

63. Vaan 2008, 632–633.

64. Treggiari 1991, 383–386; Evans Grubbs 2002, 236–248.

65. See Dig. 26.1.18, 26.2.26, 38.17.2.46, 46.3.88, with Evans Grubbs 2002, 242–248.

66. Vuolanto 2002, 212–214.

67. For the contemporary sociological and psychological concept of precarious manhood, see Bosson et al. 2008, 1325–1339; Walsh 2010.

68. For the idea of liminality concerning rites of passage from childhood to adulthood, see Turner 1969, 94–130; for an application of anthropological theories of development to the Homeric Telemachus, see Felson-Rubin 1994, 67–91.

69. Together with 113–114, these lines were considered spurious by Bentley; see Goold 1977, 18–19.

70. For another occurrence of erudio in a more ironic, but also programmatic, context, see Ars am. 3.48: “haec quoque pars monitis erudienda tuis” (This part too must be instructed by your advice); see also Daedalus and Icarus in Ars am. 2.65–66: “dum monet, aptat opus puero, monstratque moveri, / erudit infirmas ut sua mater aves” (While he counsels, he fits his handiwork on the boy, and shows him how to move, as their mother instructs the tender fledglings).

71. See Sil. 11.422; Stat. Theb. 6.770; Tac. Ann. 12.44.3; also Ov. Fast. 1.571, 2.508; see Teßmer in TLL online, X 1, 757–772, s.v. “patrius.”

72. Goold 1977, 19.

73. For a similar use of anus in reference to a grown-up puella, see Ars am. 3.70. According to Boyd (2017, 191), this couplet exemplifies the “tension between the genres” (epic and elegiac) that characterizes Heroides 1. Building upon some occurrences of the so-called puella anus, Gardner (2013, 181–218) shows how the eternal, atemporal qualities of the traditional elegiac mistress can eventually succumb to the deteriorative effects of time.

74. Wyke 1987, 47–61.

75. Spentzou (2003, 97–98, 100) suggests that this sort of immobility of the heroines is determined by the restraints dictated by the Lacanian law of the Father. For some remarks on the dichotomy between female mobility and immobility across Greek mythology, see Konstantinou 2018, who, in fact, concludes that female mobility (when it exists) “seems to confirm male authority,” as well as existing gender roles (153).

76. Cixous 1976, 875–893.

77. As quoted and paraphrased in Sellers 1991, 141–142.

78. Rich 1977, 42. The patriarchal imposition of the so-called law of the Father (see Lacan 1989, 74, 207–221, and passim) intended for women to assume most of the burden of perpetuation and care of the species.

79. See Moi 1986, 152–156.

80. Kristeva (1981, 13–35) posits a difference between female time, characterized by repetition (cyclical time) and eternity (monumental time), and male time, characterized by an intervention in history and linearity.

81. See Moi 1986, 154.

82. Kristeva 1980, 237–243.

83. See Rich 1977, 191.

84. For the corporeal relationship between the mother’s body and child, see Kristeva 1985, 133–152.

85. This situation recalls an avant la lettre (distorted) Oedipal complex; see Freud 1919, 139–187.