Penelope’s Web, and the Man Called Mentor

The cleverest delaying tactic in literature is a piece of cloth. For years, while Odysseus is missing, the young nobles of Ithaca have been camped in his house, eating his livestock and demanding that his wife Penelope marry one of them. She agrees, on one condition: first she must finish weaving a burial shroud for her father-in-law, the old hero Laertes, so that no woman of the island can say he was buried without one. The suitors accept. Penelope weaves at her great loom all day — and every night, by torchlight, she unpicks what she has woven.

The trick works for three years. Then one of her maids gives her away, the suitors catch her unweaving, and she is forced to finish. The story is told three times in the Odyssey: by a furious suitor in Book 2, by Penelope herself in Book 19, and by a ghost in the underworld in Book 24. Homer clearly liked it.

The phrase

English turned the shroud into an idiom. Penelope’s web is a task that is never finished, especially one kept unfinished on purpose. A committee report that is always “nearly ready” is a Penelope’s web; so is any project whose secret purpose is delay. In older English, a faithful wife could be called “a Penelope,” a usage that has mostly faded. The web stays.

A duck or a thread?

Her name has two competing explanations, and the ancient sources disagree. One tradition, preserved in later Greek commentaries, connects it with pēnelops, a kind of duck: the infant Penelope, the story goes, was thrown into the sea and rescued by ducks, and was named after them. A second explanation, favoured by some modern scholars, sees in it the word pēnē, the thread on a weaver’s bobbin, which would make her “the woman of the thread” — suspiciously perfect for the most famous weaver in Homer. Neither theory is proven. Pick your favourite: a waterbird or a spool.

Zoologists, meanwhile, made her a bird outright. Penelope is the scientific name of a genus of guans, large, long-tailed birds of the forests of Central and South America. The naturalist who named them left no note explaining the choice, so it is anyone’s guess whether he was thinking of the duck story.

The man called Mentor

Now to the most widely used word ever to come out of Penelope’s house. When Odysseus left for Troy, he put his household in the care of an old friend called Mentor. In Book 2 of the Odyssey, the goddess Athena takes Mentor’s shape to advise Odysseus’s son Telemachus, encourage him and sail with him in search of news of his father. So when Telemachus is being guided, it is really a goddess wearing a friend’s face.

For centuries, Mentor was just a minor name. The change came with François Fénelon, a French archbishop and royal tutor, whose novel Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699) expanded the voyage of Telemachus into a long lesson in wise government, with Mentor as the patient, morally serious teacher at the young man’s side. The book was a European bestseller for more than a century, and in its wake mentor became an ordinary noun in French and English: an experienced, trusted adviser. Today it is a verb as well. We mentor, we are mentored, and we sign up for mentorship programs, every one of them carrying a little of Athena in disguise.

One household, then: a phrase for endless delay, a word for wise guidance and a family of tropical birds. Penelope, who spent twenty years waiting, has outlasted nearly everyone who tried to hurry her.

Notes and sources

1. Homer, Odyssey 2.85–110, 19.137–156 and 24.125–150; Mentor and Athena at 2.225–295; trans. Samuel Butler (1900) and A. T. Murray (1919), via Perseus.
2. François Fénelon, Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699), available through Project Gutenberg.
3. The derivations of Penelope’s name remain disputed; we give both traditions.