Penelope

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In the Divina Commedia Penelope is evoked solely through a memory of Ulysses. The verse Inferno XXVI 96 recalls her with the form Penelopè as the one who should have been made glad by the hero's return, in a passage in which Ulysses recalls the reasons that drove him to leave Circe's island to undertake the mad voyage beyond the Pillars of Hercules. The name is uttered by Ulysses himself within his long narration inserted into the canto, without the figure being present on the scene or being otherwise described in the poem. The authorized notes to canto XXVI document the Ovidian framework in which Dante reinterprets the episode of Ulysses and Circe and clarify that the Dantean account sets out precisely from that segment of tradition, thus offering the only critical foothold allowed for understanding the reference to Penelope. No further biographical data, attributes, or roles of the character emerge from the verses, nor from the notes.