Penelope and Famous Odysseus: From Indo-European to Homer and Beyond (abstract)

by Edwin D. Floyd

An association of κλέος "fame" with Penelope and Odysseus is obvious in passages such as Odyssey 1.337-344, 18.251-155, and 24.192-202. Against an Indo-European background (reconstructible from the Rig-Veda) and also from considering the later Greek usage of the word, the particular nature of this dimension of κλέος in the Odyssey can be better understood.


Note that a problem with the internet, which has not yet been fully solved, is the representation of Greek and other non-Latin scripts. Unicode is one way of doing this, and the preceding abstract uses this method of encoding the Greek word kléos "fame". Unicode, though, still produces some unexpected results. You should not be too alarmed, then, if kléos, which appears twice in the above abstract, is not adequately represented by your browser.

If you are not familiar with the use of Unicode in connection with Greek, a good place to start is Sean Redmond's Greek Font to Unicode Converter.