Odyssey 2.99 · Book 2, lines 99–102
A shroud for Laertes
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Λαέρτῃ ἥρωι ταφήιον, εἰς ὅτε κέν μιν μοῖρʼ ὀλοὴ καθέλῃσι τανηλεγέος θανάτοιο, μή τίς μοι κατὰ δῆμον Ἀχαιϊάδων νεμεσήσῃ. αἴ κεν ἄτερ σπείρου κεῖται πολλὰ κτεατίσσας.
a shroud for the hero Laertes, against the time when the deadly doom of death that lays men low shall bring him down — lest some Achaean woman throughout the land reproach me, if he should lie without a winding-sheet, he who had won so much.
Word by word
The setting
Penelope names the purpose of her weaving: a burial shroud for Laertes, Odysseus's aged father, ready for the day death takes him. She invokes the shame that would fall on her if such a lord were buried unhonored — the perfect cover for endless delay.
A note on this passage
The web is given its unanswerable reason: it is Laertes' burial cloth. Penelope appeals to the honor code directly — a great man must not be buried without a proper shroud, and the woman of his house is answerable for it. The fear of other women's reproach is real social machinery, and she wields it precisely.
The undercurrent is the doubling of death. She is weaving a shroud against Laertes' dying while she postpones her own remarriage, which the household treats as a kind of dying too. The cloth she never finishes is a burial that never comes — a fitting emblem for a house frozen between a husband presumed dead and a father not yet gone.
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