Laertes And Penelope In Homer's Odyssey

With Odysseus’s departure twenty years prior, Ithaca has descended into chaos, by a swarm of suitors, who plague the palace, and pursue Odysseus’s wife and queen, Penelope. Odysseus father, Laertes, and Penelope, his wife and queen, are the two individuals who truly test him— he returns the favour—, as personifications of Ithaca, they act as stepping stones in his reinstitution as head of his household and kingdom.

Laertes’ “mental anguish has rendered him immobile and ineffective” in comparison to Penelope

During Odysseus’s absence, both Laertes and Penelope have suffered, physically and mentally. Considering in both homecoming scenes, in particular of his fathers’ in which Laertes in described to be “worn out by age and with deep sorrow in his heart”(24.)

Whereas Penelope, in rather in extended scene is both are noted to have suffered, though are

In her returned state of beauty, from Athena’s assistance, Penelope graciously receives Odysseus as her husband.

However, Laertes and Penelope are two of many characters who have known to grieve for Odysseus, which is mentioned frequently throughout the epic. In the underworld, Odysseus’s deceased mother, Anticleia who perished from her “longing”(11.201) for him, informs him
Perhaps this reason being, is Laertes’s “thirteen pear-trees and ten apple-trees and forty figs…fifty rows of vine, ”(24. 341-2) and Penelope’s rooted marital bed which Odysseus from a “olive tree…fashion[ed] a bed-post” are in themselves, interchangeable extensions of the land and their keepers; through the plants and olive tree, Odysseus metaphorically and physically connects to