Who Is Penelope Cleverness In Homer's Odyssey

Penelope’s Cleverness in The Odyssey Homer’s age-old story, The Odyssey, bears many resemblances to an epic; the plot starts right in the thick of it, the setting is vast covering many countries, the story uses epithets for nearly every character, and divine intervention is a significant plot device, among other things. Another driving force in the epic is Penelope. Penelope is one of the main reasons why Odysseus wants to get back to Ithaca, even after all of the years he’s been gone. However, for Penelope to make time for Odysseus to get back, she has to be very clever. In Homer’s The Odyssey, Penelope shows how clever she is when she unravels the burial shroud, when she tricks the suitors into giving her gifts, and when she thinks of questions that only Odysseus could answer. …show more content…
It has already been several years since Odysseus should’ve been home by this point in the book, and Penelope is having to stall for time. Penelope decides to make a burial shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes, and the suitors allow her to stay unmarried until she finishes sewing the burial shroud. Unbeknownst to them, she unravels the shroud at night, doing this for three years, and, “Thus for three years she hid her craft and cheated the Achaeans” (12). She got away with it, until one of her unfaithful servants sold her out to the suitors, telling them of her plans to stall for time so she wouldn’t have to marry them. That was the first clever thing that Penelope did in Homer’s The

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