Penelope

She wove a shroud for Laertes by day and unraveled it by night for three years, telling the suitors she would choose a husband when the cloth was finished. She gave them maybe. She gave them just enough to keep them from burning the house down. She wept at night and kept the household together by day. She buried the hunger to believe. Twenty years of men coming with stories, claims, lies, disguises, all promising tomorrow would be different. She learned to be careful with her hope. [SPOILER: When her own handmaiden Melantho sells the loom secret she sets the bow contest, the impossible test only her husband could pass. When the slaughter is done and Eurycleia comes shaking her awake, she does not run downstairs. She sits on a stone bench across the room from the man covered in blood and looks at him for a long time. She tests him with a trick about their bed, the one built around a living olive tree rooted in the floor beneath. Only he could pass it. She had earned the right to not believe.]