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Penelope and the Poetics of Remembering
- Arethusa
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 40, Number 3, Fall 2007
- pp. 337-362
- 10.1353/are.2007.0023
- Article
- Additional Information
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Penelope's memory is celebrated within the Odyssey as the source of her fame and her husband's reputation, but it has failed to attract much scholarly attention. In this article, I examine Penelope's claim that she will remember her husband's house (19.581, 21.79) in the context of other statements (in the Odyssey and elsewhere) about female memory. I conclude that Penelope's remembering takes on monumental and epigrammatic qualities, making it not just worthy of epic kleos but also the secure foundation for a tradition of female memory, traces of which can be found in texts as diverse as Herodotus's Histories and Xenophon's Oikonomikos.