Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Anticleia.
The gallery
Anticlea in the Underworld
Unknown, 19th century
A nineteenth-century illustration returns to Odyssey 11: Anticleia among the shades — Odysseus' mother, dead of longing, speaking to her living son at the trench of blood.
On screen
Ulysses
Mario Camerini
Camerini's epic keeps the Nekyia among Odysseus' trials — Anticleia's underworld greeting as the cost of the long return.
The Odyssey
Andrei Konchalovsky
Konchalovsky's miniseries restages the meeting with the dead — Anticleia among the shades who tell Odysseus what Ithaca has become.
In play
Odyssey
Homer
In the Nekyia Anticleia drinks the blood and names herself: daughter of Autolycus, wife of Laertes, mother who died waiting — the softest and sharpest grief in Book 11.
Anticlea
Mother of Odysseus and wife of Laertes — the shade who greets her son in the Underworld before he has reached home.