Penelope's Odyssey to ninth-century Ireland.
Penelope might be considered Homer's forgotten heroine. Despite her being the focus of the epic saga, the Odyssey, the unachievable goal of over one hundred suitors and the irreplaceable prize for the hero, Odysseus, she is now generally considered to be the merely faithful wife. Interestingly, words like faithful and loyal do not appear in Homer's descriptions of his heroine. His words relate to her intelligence and her 'like-mindedness' to her husband renown for his cunning. My thesis which hopes to explore these other aspects of Homer's Penelope as she progresses through history in Latin texts has led to the scouring of various medieval works all in the hope of finding the name Penelope. Thankfully, until the sixteenth-century in England when it appears to have become a more popular common name, all mentions of Penelope in the medieval period do appear to relate to the Homeric heroine.
The two texts with which I am interested today were written in ninth-century Ireland. Both were commentaries on Donatus' Ars Maior, a ?th work that does not contain any reference to Penelope. The texts are grammars, designed to teach Latin. This suggests a couple of questions. First, how was Penelope, a character more associated with epic saga, used in the teaching of grammar? Second, how did she travel from Greece two millenia prior (around 1200 BCE, the supposed time of the Trojan War) to Ireland?
The two works I am presenting are consistent in their placement of Penelope in their texts.
One of the implicit factors in the use of an exemplum is its iconic nature. An exemplum should not need to be explained. Her use in such a situation tends to suggest a familiarity, at least within a literate population, despite the loss of Homer's works. This paper will suggest present a possible path through intervening Latin texts from Classical Rome, to Christian Rome and then on to Ireland.