Character
Penelope
Queen of Ithaca · wife of Odysseus
Odysseus's wife, and his match in patience and cunning. For three years she held the suitors off by weaving a shroud for her father-in-law and picking the day's work out again every night, and when a maid betrayed the trick she went on stalling by other means. She is the one who proposes the contest of the bow, and the one who tests her husband when he finally stands in front of her — with a question about their bed that no impostor could answer.
Hers is the only recognition scene in the poem where the hero is the one being tested. She sets the trap about the bed; he walks into it.