The Perpetual Return: Fidelity in the ‘Odyssey’

Marriage as a perfectly imperfect institution

Ceiling fresco of "Ulysses's [Odysseus's] Return to Ithaca," circa 1814, by Gaspare Martellini for Ferdinand III. Pitti Palace, Florence, Italy. Cropped photograph by Diego Delso/CC BY-SA 4.0

What does it mean to return? What does it mean to come home? Home is where one belongs, the people and places that are ours while we are theirs. Yet that belonging comes to its fulness only through our actively choosing it and conforming to the restrictions placed on us by dedication to a people and a place. Such dedication requires constant choosing, reaffirming, and returning.

The “Odyssey” by Homer explores these notions of returning and belonging in great depth. “Nostos”—“return”—stands out as the signal word and concept in the poem, as Eva Brann tells us in her book “Homeric Moments.” But there are different kinds of returning. She writes: “It appears that Coming Home, Return, is not so simple as surviving the sea and retaking a palace; you may come home but not be there, you may return but not be you.” In the “Odyssey,” Homer sings to us of a deeper kind of return—the perpetual returning of true fidelity.

Fidelity to a Mortal

Steadfast in her fidelity to Odysseus, Penelope (L) sits forlorn at her tapestry loom while a handmaiden picks apples, representing the temptation that lurks around her. "Penelope," 1864, by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope. Oil on canvas. Private Collection. Public Domain

Though the theme of fidelity surfaces throughout the poem, it finds its deepest and most important expression in the marriage between Odysseus and his wife, Penelope.

In Western literature, Penelope is a paragon of fidelity. She waits 20 years for her husband to return, fighting off suitors who seek to usurp Odysseus’s crown and his bed. She holds on to hope and to her marriage vows when many lesser women would have given up on Odysseus and given in to the immense pressures to remarry.

Her steadfast heart never ceases longing for her husband. Time does not seem to heal the wound of loss for her—or to quite stifle hope. “All day long I indulge myself in sighs and tears,” she laments, as though Odysseus had left only the day before.

Odysseus is grief-stricken for his spouse, too. And though his fidelity doesn’t measure up to Penelope’s, it is remarkable nonetheless. The first time in the poem that we see “long-enduring” Odysseus—to use his most important Homeric epithet—he is pining away for Penelope while he is trapped on an island by the nymph Calypso, who craves him for a husband. Homer says that his heart is “set on his wife and his return.” In a poignant image, Homer depicts Odysseus on the island like this: “Off he sat on a headland, weeping there as always,/ wrenching his heart with sobs and groans and anguish,/ gazing out over the barren sea through blinding tears.”

Now, Odysseus may weep for Penelope, but in point of fact, he sleeps with other women during his journey home. Odysseus fails to stay true to Penelope with his body. Yet he proves his ultimate loyalty to her when he makes the pivotal decision to forsake not only Calypso, a minor goddess, but immortality itself, for Penelope’s sake.

Despite Calypso’s beauty, immortality, and luxury, Odysseus longed for his wife, so the Olympian gods finally allowed his freedom. "Hermes Ordering Calypso to Release Odysseus," 1665, by Gerard de Lairesse. Oil on canvas. Cleveland Museum of Art. Public Domain

This is how Calypso craftily tempts Odysseus to stay, even after Zeus has commanded her to let him go:

“Farewell!/ But if you only knew, down deep, what pains/ are fated to fill your cup before you reach that shore,/ you’d stay right here, preside in our house with me/ and be immortal. Much as you long to see your wife,/ the one you pine for all your days ... and yet/ I just might claim to be nothing less than she,/ neither in face nor figure. Hardly right, is it,/ for mortal woman to rival immortal goddess?/ How, in build? in beauty?”

But here is Odysseus’s luminous reply:

“Ah, great goddess,”/ worldly Odysseus answered, “don’t be angry with me,/ please. All that you say is true, how well I know./ Look at my wise Penelope. She falls far short of you,/ your beauty, stature. She is mortal after all/ and you, you never age or die./ Nevertheless I long—I pine, all my days—/ to travel home and see the dawn of my return.”

What makes the answer so superb is that Odysseus doesn’t deny the goddess’s point—she is more beautiful and impressive than Penelope. And she is immortal, unlike Odysseus’s wife, who is destined to age and die. Odysseus acknowledges all this, yet he chooses Penelope anyway.

Even with all her defects, no one can replace the unique soul Odysseus chose as his life companion all those years ago. And here we have a profound truth about marriage and fidelity. As Wendell Berry puts it in his essay “The Body and the Earth” from “The Unsettling of America”: “This is, in effect, a wedding ritual much like our own, in which Odysseus forsakes all others, in renouncing the immortal womanhood of the goddess, and renews his pledge to the mortal terms of his marriage.”

"The Meeting of Ulysses [Odysseus] and Penelope," 1788, by Francesco Bartolozzi, after John Francis Rigaud. Etching and dotted engraving on paper. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Public Domain

Something, indeed, must be sacrificed when we marry. Before marriage, we all carry a blueprint, an ideal of the person we hope to marry. In a way, men love womanhood and women love manhood in the abstract, as ideals. But when we fall in love and marry, that abstract ideal must become particular and concrete. We no longer love womanhood or manhood or some immortal, perfect specimen of these but rather this particular, wonderful, imperfect being, and only this one.

Homer shows us that true fidelity means forsaking all other potential partners—even and especially that “ideal” that exists in the abstract, “out there” somewhere, that goddess or god whom people may fool themselves into waiting for—in favor of a real, mortal being. The ideal must be sacrificed for the real person, the person one really has.

"Penelope Awakened by Euryclea With the News of Ulysses's Return," 18th century, by Angelica Kauffman. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Public Domain

And this person, though not a god or goddess, is in a mysterious way far superior to our idealized version of a mate, just as all readers know that Penelope is somehow far superior to the hollow goddess Calypso, who would try to displace her. The story of Odysseus dramatizes all this.

Marriage, A Rooted Institution

Penelope’s final testing of Odysseus in the matter of their marriage bed relates to whether he has returned in body only or in heart as well. Is he the same man? Is he loyal to her and their home? In his knowledge of the immovability of their bed (which is literally rooted in the earth), Odysseus shows himself to be unchanged. “The test he has passed now is one of identity in its literal meaning, self-sameness,” writes Brann. “He is still the manner of man he was before he went to Troy, her husband who has returned steadfast in his memory-laden, ineradicable love for his wife and his loyalty to the naturally rooted institution of marriage.”

"Minerva Removes the Doubts of Penelope," between 1632 and 1633, by Theodoor van Thulden after Francesco Primaticcio. Etching and engraving. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Public Domain

Fidelity requires a constant returning, a constant choosing, in spite of all the difficulties of land and sea. And if one is faithful, the joy will also return. Berry comments: “What marriage offers—and what fidelity is meant to protect—is the possibility of moments when what we have chosen and what we desire are the same.”

Ceiling fresco of "Ulysses's [Odysseus's] Return to Ithaca" with a frieze decorated at the corners showing allegories of Fidelity, Fortitude, Hercules, and Apollo, circa 1814, by Gaspare Martellini for Ferdinand III. Pitti Palace, Florence, Italy. Diego Delso/CC BY-SA 4.0