Penelope’s Shroud: The Web Trick (*Odyssey*)

Penelope’s Shroud: The Web Trick (Odyssey)

Catalogue ID: 04-trojan-cycle/155-penelope-shroud-web-odyssey

Cycle: Trojan — Odyssey / Ithaca during Odysseus’s absence

Version line: Homeric — shroud for Laertes; ruse told and exposed

Sources: Homer, *Odyssey* 2.93–110 (Antinous’s report); 19.137–156 (Penelope to the beggar); 24.129–148 (Amphimedon’s shade)

Source file: /workspace/greek-myth-catalogue/04-trojan-cycle/155-penelope-shroud-web-odyssey.md

Characters

Amphimedon’s shade — underworld narrator of the trick’s end
Antinous — public accuser of the ruse
Disloyal maid — exposes the night-unravelling (Homeric anonymous servant)
Suitors — deceived three years; force completion
Telemachus — weaves and unweaves the shroud

Places

Hades — Amphimedon’s report in Book 24
Mycenae — assembly where Antinous tells the tale
Odysseus’s palace — women’s quarters and loom

Themes

Narrative

Penelope promises the suitors she will choose a husband when she finishes a burial shroud for old Laertes. By day she weaves a great web; by night she unravels it. For three years the ruse holds; in the fourth a disloyal servant exposes her, and the suitors compel her to finish. Antinous cites the trick to blame her delay before the Ithacan assembly; Penelope herself recounts it to the disguised Odysseus; Amphimedon’s shade later tells Agamemnon in Hades how the finished shroud preceded the bow contest and their deaths. The web is the poem’s emblem of cunning matched to Odysseus’s own: time bought for nostos, undone by betrayal within the house.