Penelope

Penelope, daughter of Ikarios, heard his song from her room upstairs, and came down by the great staircase, not alone, but attended by two of her handmaids.

I will embolden him to call the Achaeans in assembly, and speak out to the suitors of his mother Penelope, who persist in eating up any number of his sheep and oxen;

for the chiefs from all our islands, Dulichium, Same, and the woodland island of Zacynthus, as also all the principal men of Ithaca itself, are eating up my house under the pretext of paying their court to my mother, who will neither point blank say that she will not marry, nor yet bring matters to an end;

And on this account the youth of the Cephallenians turned to the wooing of Penelope and the plundering of his goods.

but not even Penelope, though she was good and conversed very kindly with him and had learned about her husband — not even she, he says, gave him a cloak as he sat naked beside her, but only promised, if it should appear that he spoke truly about Odysseus,

or else to depart in the same rags from the prudent and good daughter of Icarius, the queen.

Penelope comes to her prayer;

And she, having washed herself, having clean garments on her flesh,

No, for the soul of the philosopher would not reason as others do, and would not think it right that philosophy should set it free, and that then when set free it should give itself again into bondage to pleasure and pain and engage in futile toil, like Penelope unweaving the web she wove.

Why do you inquire whether Penelope was chaste, whether she deceived her own age?