Odyssey 2.103 · Book 2, lines 103–105
By day she wove, by night unwove
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ὣς ἔφαθʼ, ἡμῖν δʼ αὖτʼ ἐπεπείθετο θυμὸς ἀγήνωρ. ἔνθα καὶ ἠματίη μὲν ὑφαίνεσκεν μέγαν ἱστόν, νύκτας δʼ ἀλλύεσκεν ἐπεὶ δαΐδας παραθεῖτο.
So she spoke, and our proud hearts were won over in turn. Then by day she would weave the great web, but by night she would unravel it, once she had torches set beside her.
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The setting
Antinous resumes his own narration. The suitors, he admits, believed her and agreed. Then he reveals the mechanism of the trick: what she wove in daylight she picked apart every night by torchlight, so the web could never be finished.
A note on this passage
Here the famous image lands: the loom worked forward by day and undone by night. Antinous confesses the suitors were fooled — their ‘proud hearts’ persuaded by a grieving woman's decorum. The iterative verbs (‘would weave… would unravel’) turn the trick into a nightly ritual.
The undercurrent is that Penelope's cunning rhymes with her husband's. Odysseus is the man of δόλος, and here his wife runs a δόλος of her own, patient and nocturnal, undoing her day's work in secret. The marriage that holds the poem together is a match of minds: two weavers of schemes, faithful to each other across the whole sea.
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