ate, that "the unwearied fidelity of Penelope,
awaiting through the long revolving years the return of her
storm-tossed husband," presents, as Lecky declares (II., 279), and as
is commonly supposed, a picture of perennial beauty "which Rome and
Christendom, chivalry and modern civilization, have neither eclipsed
nor transcended?"

We have seen that the fine words of Achilles regarding his "love" of
Briseis are, when confronted with his actions, reduced to empty
verbiage. The same result is reached in the case of Penelope, if we
subject her actions and motives to a searching critical analysis.
Ostensibly, indeed, she is set up as a model of that feminine
constancy which men at all times have insisted on while they
themselves preferred to be models of inconstancy. As usual in such
cases, the feminine model is painted with touches of almost grotesque
exaggeration. After the return of Odysseus Penelope informed her nurse
(XXIII., 18) that she has not slept soundly all this time--twenty
years! Such phrases, too, are used as "longing for Odysseus, I waste
my heart away," or "May I go to my dread grave seeing Odysseus still,
and never gladden heart of meaner husband." But they are mere phrases.
The truth about her attitude and her-feelings is told frankly in
several places by three different persons--the goddess of wisdom,
Telemachus, and Penelope herself. Athene urges Telemachus to make
haste that he may find his blameless mother still at home instead of
the bride of one of the suitors.

"But let her not against your will take treasure from your
home. You know a woman's way; she strives to enrich his
house who marries her, while of her former children and the
husband of her youth, when he is dead she thinks not, and
she talks of him no more" (XV., 15-23).

In the next book (73-77) Telemachus says to the swineherd:

"Moreover my mother's feeling wavers, whether to bide beside
me here and keep the house, and thus revere her husband's
bed and _heed the public voice_, or finally to follow some
chief of the Achaians who woos her in the hall with largest
gifts."

And a little later (126) he exclaims, "She neither declines the hated
suit nor has she power to end it, while they with feasting impoverish
my home."

These words of Telcinachus are endorsed in full by Penelope herself,
whose remarks (XIX., 524-35) to the disguised Odysseus give us the key
to the whole situation an