Prime
Wife who had no bed-mate for 20 years
Prof Timothy Wangusa
What you need to know:
- The story will go down through the annals of posterity, of how the Greek army besieging Troy finally pretends to have fled the city, leaving behind a curious wooden horse.
Her name is Penelope. And her husband’s name is Odysseus, but some people call him Ulysses. This is the man who never comes near his ravishingly beautiful wife for 20 full years! And in his weird absence from his Penelope, endless gallant men come up, one after another, each vying to be the one to qualify to romantically fill the vacuum created by Odysseus in his marital bed. So, which gallant wooer makes it into Penelope’s bedroom?
To find out, I invite you to come with me on this next trans-chronometric flight of the intellect – to a series of scenes in a country still in the making around 1,250 BC.
That country is Greece/Achaia, and our first scene is the small kingdom of Ithaca, whose king is Odysseus. All of a sudden, Odysseus abandons his wife and their infant son and only child Telemachus – in order to go and fight, in solidarity with the king Menelaus of the neighbouring kingdom of Sparta, in an abrupt war declared by the latter against a foreign enemy.
Unimaginable to Penelope and Odysseus is the fact the he will not get back home for 20 years.
And how does Menelaus happen to contract the foreign enemy that he has to confront in an abrupt war?
That enemy is none other than a prince, by the name of Paris, from another Mediterranean country whose capital city is Troy (on the ruins of which would arise, in the very distant future, Istanbul city, capital of Turkey w.e.f. 1930 AD.)
In utter abuse of the hospitality accorded to him as a royal visitor by Menelaus and his wife Helen – famed to be the most beautiful woman in the whole world – Paris romantically sweeps Helen off her feet and elopes with her back to Troy!
Menelaus’s manhood is most embarrassingly humiliated, and the pride of Greece rudely insulted by this spectacular sexual act of a presumed foreign savage.
War is immediately declared against Troy, and all the kings of the Greek peninsular rally their support behind Menelaus. A formidable fleet of warships is hastily put together, with thousands of fighters on board – and they head for Troy, to give that city a bloody nose, bring Helen back, and so restore the injured pride of Greece.
Set sail for Troy they self-assuredly do, but it is 10 good years before the Greek army eventually tricks its way into the barricaded city.
The story will go down through the annals of posterity, of how the Greek army besieging Troy finally pretends to have fled the city, leaving behind a curious wooden horse.
The curious Trojans take the horse into the city – only for unsuspected Greek warriors to emerge from the horse, and open the gates to the Greek army, who slaughter the inhabitants, retrieve their Helen, and set the city on fire!
Meanwhile, back in Ithaca, scores of suitors have been pestering Penelope for her love, telling her that the Trojan War will never end and that Odysseus must have already died.
Their wishful thinking is strengthened when, after 10 years, the Greek survivors of the war return without Odysseus. For another 10 years Odysseus is ill-fated to dangerously wander around the Mediterranean Sea, before heroically returning to Ithaca.
But Penelope does not lose hope. She famously keeps the lecherous suitors at bay by telling them that she has a shroud that she is weaving; and that the suitor who turns up the day she finishes her shroud will win her love – but at night she undoes the weaving she has done that day!
Twenty years on, Odysseus turns up, disguised as a beggar. But after he kills the rowdy suitors in a contest, and describes his bedroom to her, Penelope confirms that the tattered ‘beggar’ is Odysseus her husband. And that is Penelope – the classical symbol of chastity.
Prof Timothy Wangusa is a poet and novelist. [email protected]
