Penelope e le altre: le madri in Omero

The main point of this paper is that in the Homeric world a mother looks at her motherhood not as a dual relationship between herself and her child but as a wider relationship in which the whole community (the family, the house, the city) is involved. In the view of a Homeric mother her child is not someone that she alone has the right to love, but someone that she must share (so to say) with many other people. I try to show this by looking at the behaviour of the “great mothers” of the Homeric poems, Penelope, Hecuba and Anticleia.