Why did Penelope unravel her weaving every night?

A promise with a catch

Odysseus has been gone for many years, and the young lords of Ithaca and the islands nearby have settled into his palace, eating his herds and pressing his wife to marry one of them. Penelope has no army, and her son is barely grown. Refusing outright would change nothing; they would only eat faster. So she agrees, with one condition. First she must finish a burial cloth for Laertes, her husband’s father, so that the old man will not be laid out without one when his time comes; otherwise, she says, the women of Ithaca would talk. It is a pious request. The suitors cannot decently say no.

In her own words

Homer tells the trick three times, from three angles. Here is Penelope telling it to a ragged stranger by the fire, not yet knowing he is her husband:

I used to keep working at my great web all day long, but at night I would unpick the stitches again by torch light. I fooled them in this way for three years without their finding it out

The other two tellers are her enemies. In book 2, Antinous, the suitors’ leader, complains about it to the island’s assembly. In book 24, the ghost of a dead suitor tells it again in the underworld, and adds that the finished robe, once washed, shone like the sun or the moon. Butler calls the cloth a pall; the usual English word is shroud. Either way, it was meant to be finished only on the day Penelope chose.

Betrayed in the fourth year

Three years is a long time to keep a secret in a house full of servants. In the fourth, Antinous says, one of the maids who knew told the suitors, and they caught Penelope undoing her work; Penelope herself blames her maids in the plural. Forced to finish the cloth, she lost her best delay. Antinous’s complaint turns into a compliment, paid by a man who hates her: “We never yet heard of such a woman.” The famous heroines of old, he grumbles, were nothing to her.

The loom as a weapon

Weaving was what a Greek queen was expected to do, which is why the trick worked. Nobody watches a woman at her loom. Penelope turned the most ordinary work in the house into her only weapon, and Homer’s usual word for her, periphron, thoughtful or circumspect, fits it exactly. There is a neat echo in the Greek: histos, the word for her loom, also means a ship’s mast, the very thing her husband was tied to as he passed the Sirens. When the web ran out, she found another way to stall: a contest with her husband’s bow.

Penelope’s web

The trick left a phrase in several languages. In French, la toile de Pénélope is a job that never gets done, because what is made by day is undone by night, and Portuguese says teia de Penélope in the same sense. In English, Penelope’s web can mean endless work or a clever delay. Painters loved the scene; Joseph Wright of Derby showed her unpicking by lamplight in a picture of 1783–84, now at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.