Penelope, although she is a woman and is considered an inferior being or object because of this, is intelligent and astute. As a woman, her role in the household would have been to care for the servants and help weave the cloth used in the household. She lulled the suitors into a false sense of security: "My lords, my suitors, now that the noble Odysseus is dead, restrain your ardor, do not insist on this marriage until I have done this work, so that the sons that I have spun perhaps not quite wasted” (p. 17), promising that once the shroud was finalized, she would choose a suitor to marry, however, she never intended to complete a such a shroud. The wise queen worked on it tirelessly for hours each day, but under the cover of night, the threads she had woven came unraveled. At the end of the epic, his ruse rears its head again. She hatches a plot to put an end to the suitor's advances: '. . . Whoever draws the bow most easily and shoots an arrow through each of these twelve axes, I will go with that man...' (p. 278) knowing full well that her husband was the only one known to perform such a heroic act . She waits with an enduring heart for a husband who may never come