Historicity of this figure
Belongs to poetic or mythological construction rather than to history. This page describes a figure of a literary and mythological tradition. Where the tradition disagrees with itself, the disagreement is set out rather than resolved.
In the Odyssey
She appears once, in Book 11, among the dead. Odysseus does not know she has died; he left her alive when he sailed for Troy.
She comes to the trench of blood and he does not let her drink until Tiresias has spoken — a detail readers find hard, and which the poem records without comment. When she does speak she gives him the state of his house: Telemachus is managing, Penelope waits and weeps, Laertes has withdrawn to the country and sleeps in the ashes. And she says how she died: not by illness, and not by the arrows of Artemis, but of longing for him.
He tries three times to take her in his arms, and three times she goes through them like a shadow or a dream. He asks whether she is a phantom sent by Persephone. She explains the nature of the dead: the sinews no longer hold flesh and bone, the fire consumes them, and the spirit flies away like a dream.
Why the scene matters
This is the poem's definition of death, given by a mother to her son in the course of a conversation about domestic arrangements. Homeric afterlife is not punishment or reward for most people; it is diminishment — the shade retains identity and loses substance.
The three failed embraces are among the oldest images in European literature of the specific frustration of grief: presence without contact.
Other ancient traditions
A later tradition, quite separate from Homer and hostile to Odysseus, made Sisyphus his true father by seduction of Anticleia before her marriage to Laertes — a genealogy designed to attribute his cunning to the archetypal trickster. It appears in the tragedians and in later mythography. Homer knows nothing of it, and this platform does not blend the two.
Later reception
The failed embrace became a set piece. Virgil reuses it twice in the Aeneid — Aeneas with Creusa and with Anchises — in lines that are close to Homer's, and Dante takes it up again.
In modern adaptation
The underworld sequence is usually retained for spectacle and usually loses the mother, because the scene has no plot function: she tells him nothing he acts on. Its work is entirely emotional.
What this page does not claim
No historical claim is made.