"Oh mother," Telemachus reproached her,
"cruel mother, you with your hard heart!
Why do you spurn my father so – why don’t you
sit beside him, engage him, ask him questions?
What other wife could have a spirit so unbending?
Holding back from her husband, home at last for her
after bearing twenty years of brutal struggle –
your heart was always harder than a rock."
– Homer
The Odyssey, Book 23, lines 110-117. With Penelope uncertain that the "huddled mass of rags" is really her husband, Telemachus rebukes her for what he feels is her cruelty. Young and with no experience of marriage, Telemachus cannot understand why Penelope will not embrace the beggar claiming to be husband who has suddenly returned after being absent twenty years. His statement about his mother’s heart being always hard suggests some historic tension between mother and son.