Penelope Coloring Pages
Everyone remembers Odysseus as the clever one, but his wife Penelope was every bit as sharp. While he spent twenty years fighting a war and finding his way home, she held their kingdom together with nothing but patience and some very crafty tricks.
Jump to: Young Queen | Twenty Years of Waiting | The Contest of the Bow | The Olive Tree Bed
The Young Queen of Ithaca
Penelope was a princess from Sparta and a cousin of the famous Helen of Troy. She married Odysseus, king of the small rocky island of Ithaca, and they had a baby boy named Telemachus. When the call came for Odysseus to go to war everything changed.
Twenty Years of Waiting
Years went by and Odysseus didn't come home. Everyone said he must be dead, and 108 men moved into the palace, eating Penelope's food and pestering her to marry one of them so they could become king. Penelope had a plan. She told them she'd choose a husband as soon as she finished weaving a burial cloth for Odysseus' old father. Every day she wove, and every night she secretly unpicked it all again. She kept that trick going for three whole years before one of her maids gave her away!
Meanwhile the baby she'd been holding when Odysseus left grew into a young man. Telemachus wanted to protect his mother and chase the suitors away, but there were far too many of them. Penelope still dreamed of her husband coming home.
The Contest of the Bow
When she couldn't hold the suitors off any longer, Penelope set them a test. Whoever could string Odysseus' great bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axe heads in a row could marry her. She knew it was nearly impossible. One by one, the suitors tried and failed. Then a ragged old beggar asked for a turn. He strung the bow easily and sent the arrow straight through. The beggar was Odysseus, home at last in disguise.
The Secret of the Olive Tree Bed
Even after the suitors were gone, Penelope wasn't about to believe this stranger was her husband just because he said so. Twenty years is a long time! So she tested him. She told a maid to move their bed out of the bedroom. Odysseus got upset, because that bed couldn't be moved. He'd built it himself around the trunk of a living olive tree, and only he and Penelope knew that. When he said it, she knew it was really him.
Penelope in Epic: The Musical
Penelope gets her own songs in the Ithaca Saga of Epic: The Musical, where she sets the contest of the bow and tests Odysseus with the secret of their bed. If you're a fan, our song-by-song guide matches each part of the story with coloring pages.
About Penelope
Penelope comes from Homer's Odyssey, one of the oldest stories in the world. Homer often calls her "wise" or "thoughtful," and she's the perfect match for Odysseus: just as clever, just as stubborn and every bit as good at keeping a secret. For thousands of years people have held her up as a symbol of loyalty, but don't forget she was also a queen who outsmarted 108 pushy suitors all on her own.
Coloring Penelope
Ancient Greek women wore long flowing dresses called a chiton or peplos, usually pinned at the shoulders and belted at the waist. Ordinary people wore plain white or natural wool colors, but a queen could show off. Saffron yellow, deep red, sea blue and even royal purple were all colors the Greeks knew how to make. Try adding a border along the hem with a Greek key pattern, the squared-off zigzag you see on old Greek pottery.
Penelope is usually shown with dark hair pinned up and sometimes a light veil over it. If you want to add a background, try her loom with its hanging threads, the olive tree bedroom or the sea outside the palace walls where she watched for Odysseus' ship.