Periphrôn Pênelopeia

Abstract

A fine marble torso of a seated woman was found in the ruins of the palace at Persepolis that was burned down by Alexander the Great’s army in 331 BCE. The statue, now in Teheran, has aroused considerable interest as a unique example of a work of High Classical Greek art that ended up at the Persian court. From comparison with fifth-century terracotta reliefs and vases, as well as Roman copies that must go back to a second, nearly identical, and now lost statue, the woman holding her head in a melancholy pose can be identified as Homer’s Penelope. A recent study by Hölscher has proposed an intriguing scenario, in which one of the two statues would have accompanied Kallias, as a diplomatic gift, when he went to negotiate a peace treaty with the Great King in 449, while the other stood on the Athenian Akropolis as Perikles’s monument to that peace. In both instances, the figure of Penelope would have symbolized the longing for peace of women, whether Greek or Persian, who waited fearfully for their husbands and sons to come home. This interpretation raises the question of the reception of Penelope in fifth-century Athens: What was she most remembered for? Was it mainly as the wife longing for her husband away at war? Did Athenian society, as Hölscher claims, increasingly see the burden of war as falling on women as the fifth century wore on? The chapter explores these questions through a combination of literary and iconographical evidence.