Penelope

Besieged by a hundred suitors devouring her husband’s house, Penelope held them off three years with the shroud she wove for old Laertes and secretly unraveled each night — and when the trick failed, with delays, dreams, and at last the contest of the bow that armed her disguised husband. Homer matches her cunning to Odysseus’s own: her final test of the stranger — the secret of the immovable bed — outwits the great deceiver himself into proof.