Odysseus and Penelope

Few couples understand sacrifice quite like this Greek pair. After being torn apart, they wait twenty long years to be reunited. War takes Odysseus away shortly after his marriage to Penelope. Although she has little hope of his return, she resists the 108 suitors who are anxious to replace her husband. Odysseus is

equally devoted, refusing a beautiful sorceress's offer of everlasting love and eternal youth, so that he might return home to his wife and son. This Valentine's Day, take a cue from Homer, and remember that true love is worth waiting for.

In Homer's Odyssey, Penelope Πηνελόπεια, Pēnelópeia, or Πηνελόπη, Pēnelópē) is the faithful wife of Odysseus, who keeps her suitors at bay in his long absence and is eventually reunited with him.

Her name has traditionally been associated with marital faithfulness, and so it was with the Greeks and Romans, but some recent feminist readings offer a more ambiguous interpretation.

Penelope is the wife of the main character, the king of Ithaca, Odysseus (Ulysses in Roman mythology), and daughter of Icarius and his wife Periboea. She only has one son by Odysseus, Telemachus, who was born just before Odysseus was called to fight in the Trojan War. She waits twenty years for the final return of her husband during which she devises various strategies to delay marrying one of the 108 suitors (led by Antinous and including Agelaus, Amphinomus, Ctessippus, Demoptolemus, Elatus, Euryades, Eurymachus and Peisandros).

On Odysseus's return, disguised as an old beggar, he finds that Penelope has remained faithful. She has devised tricks to delay her suitors, one of which is to pretend to be weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus's elderly father Laertes and claiming that she will choose a suitor when she has finished. Every night for three years, she undoes part of the shroud, until Melantho, one of twelve unfaithful serving women, discovers her chicanery and reveals it to the suitors.

Because of her efforts to put off remarriage, Penelope is often seen as a symbol of connubial fidelity and we are reminded several times of her fidelity. But due to Athena's meddling, who wants her "to show herself to the wooers, that she might set their hearts a-flutter and win greater honor from her husband and her son than heretofore", Penelope does appear before the suitors (xviii.160–162).

The name has several variants: Olysseus (Ὀλυσσεύς), Oulixeus (Οὐλιξεύς), Oulixes (Οὐλίξης) and he was known as Ulyssēs in Latin or Ulixēs in Roman mythology. Hence, "there may originally have been two separate figures, one called something like Odysseus, the other something like Ulixes, who were combined into one complex personality."

The etymology of the name is unknown. Ancient authors linked the name to the Greek verbs odussomai (Greek: ὀδύσσομαι) 'to be wroth against, to hate', or to oduromai (ὀδύρομαι) 'to lament, bewail'. Homer in references and puns relates it to various forms of this verb. It has been also suggested that the name is of non-Greek origin, probably not even Indo-European, with an unknown etymology.

In Book 19 of the Odyssey, where Odysseus's early childhood is recounted, Euryclea asks Autolycus to name him. Euryclea tries to guide him to naming the boy Polyaretos, "for he has much been prayed for" (19.403f). Autolycus "apparently in a sardonic mood ... decided to give the child a name that would commemorate his own experience in life. 'Because I got odium upon myself before coming here ... from many ... let the child's name be Odysseus to signify this.' The pun was prophetic as well as commemorative." Odysseus often receives the patronymic epithet Laertiades (Λαερτιάδης), "son of Laërtes".