To enchant us mere mortals, the actions of men and gods “Phemios, you know about so many other charms Modulating the formulaic opening typical of powerful speech among males, she begins in the initial sentence of her mythos – a speech act with persuasive intent – to address the singer with honorific expressions of praise and appreciation. In her first appearance, Penelope stands at the entrance to the room where the singer Phemios captivates his audience. It is both representational (descriptive or evocative) expression and narrative (semantically pertinent to the narrative moment), signaling both a general trait that typifies the character throughout and a situational portrayal of that character directly relevant to the particular scene in which it appears. She is, both characteristically (in her typical response to the world around her) and descriptively (at this particular narrative moment), “deep in thought.” Contrary to Vivante (1982) and others, I suggest that Homer’s use of the epithet, here and throughout the epic narrative, is strategic and connotatively loaded. She deeply and viscerally deliberates over them ( phron, from phren and phroneo, and implying phrenes, the “locus or agency of thinking, feeling, and willing”) and regards them “all around” ( peri-) from every angle (Felson-Rubin, 1994, 16 Barnouw, 2004, 73). She turns things over and over in her mind. Felson-Rubin aptly translates periphron as “thinking all around,” which is certainly more to the point than its frequent translation as “wise” or “prudent.” In short, Penelope is a thorough thinker. Penelope’s initial appearance is coupled from the beginning with her most prevalent epithet: periphron. Understanding Penelope’s character is critically based on the recognition of her capacity for deep thought, which is closely intertwined with her sense of wonder. As Felson-Rubin (1994) rightly suggests, the audience (and reader) must “concoct” the sense of Penelope’s fullness and depth out of spare narrative cues. Her appearance and sudden withdrawal from the scene is described with economy, yet in a mere forty lines, Homer constructs a compellingly vivid and complex portrait of Penelope. Penelope first appears in the Odyssey in a moment of plaintive vulnerability, belying the depth of thought and her resistance to the mythos of masculinity that shape her character as the epic unfolds.
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