Who is the wife of Odysseus?

Penelope is the wife of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey.

She is queen of Ithaca and the mother of Telemachus. Odysseus is away for twenty years—ten fighting in the Trojan War and ten trying to return home—while Penelope faces pressure from more than 100 suitors.

Her most famous delaying tactic involves weaving a burial shroud for Laertes, Odysseus’s father. She promises to choose a husband when it is finished, but secretly unweaves part of the cloth each night. The deception lasts until a servant reveals it.

When Odysseus finally returns disguised as a beggar, Penelope does not immediately accept him. She tests his identity through the secret of their marriage bed, whose construction around a living olive tree only the real Odysseus would know. Andromache, Clytemnestra, and Helen are also figures from Greek myth, but none is Odysseus’s wife in the Odyssey.