A Naiad nymph married to Icarius, and by him the mother of five sons and of Penelope, whom Odysseus married — the spring-born mother through whom the Spartan house reaches Ithaca.1
Apollodorus alone names her. Icarius, brother of Tyndareus in the Laconian line, married Periboea, a Naiad nymph, and by her had five sons — Thoas, Damasippus, Imeusimus, Aletes, and Perileos — and one daughter, Penelope. The water-nymph's union with the Spartan prince is set down without comment, a single clause grafting a daughter of the springs onto the royal stem.2
Her name endures for the daughter she bore. That Penelope, Apollodorus records, was the woman Odysseus married — and so through Periboea the blood of a Naiad passes into the most famous of marriages and out to Ithaca.3
Beyond this catalogue entry she has no deed of her own. She belongs to the kind of figure the genealogists keep but the poets let slip: a mother named once, for the children she gives a great house, and then released back into the silence of the water from which a Naiad is supposed to come.4
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story