Why were there so many suitors waiting?

Odysseus was away from Ithaka for some 20 years. How did anybody know when he would return to his 'kingdom? It was much more probable that most would have thought he was dead. Any normal man would have returned almost immediately after a siege that lasted ten long years. Not Odysseus.

During Odysseus' long absence, 108 'unmarried young men' started courting Penelope, Odysseus wife or widow (whichever version they wanted to believe). Which is strange, because Penelope must have been at least 40 years old, so why would only young suitors be interested in her?

The suitors took up residence in Odysseus' home and vied for Penelope's hand in marriage. Rather than simply rejecting the suitors, Penelope devised a cunning plan to delay their courtship and told the suitors that she would make her choice known only after she had finished weaving a funeral shroud to present to Odysseus' father, Laertes. For three years, Penelope weaved the shroud during the day and unraveled it at night.

The story claims that it was simply a tactic to delay her decision, but it might well be a symbolic way of telling us that she was 'biding her time'. She was waiting. But for what?

If you think about it, it is a strange situation. Whichever island or peninsula you claim is Ithaka, it is just a smallish piece of land. Small means that it couldn't have had a large and continuous food and wine supply to feed all those suitors.

Don't expect the palace to have been that large either. So, where did these 108 'suitors' live and sleep? These were not suitors, they were young able men that formed a defensive force. They were awaiting an invasion.

Homer lets us believe that Odysseus came to his Ithaka alone and that he, assisted only by his son Telemachus, the elderly swineherd Eumaeus, and the cowherd Philoetius, managed to kill all suitors and some disloyal maidservants.

That's quite a massacre and seemingly without any real repercussions. Not from the relatives of the suitors on the nearby islands of Dulichium (which I equate with modern day Ithaka), Same (which I equate with Cephalonia), or Zakynthos.

So, what really happened? The most logical solution to this vexing question is that Odysseus must have been the leader of an invasive force that wanted to claim or reclaim (the territory of) Ithaka.

[Excerpt from Apollodorus, The Library Epitome Footnotes by J.G, Frazer]

This explanation curiously also supports a report by the Greek historian Duris of Samos (~350BC-after 281BC) who asserted that Penelope had sex with all 108 suitors in Odysseus' absence, and gave birth to Pan as a result. Sex with 180 suitors is not simply a case of being rather promiscuous but is better explained as a collective rape by enemy soldiers.

[Reaction from Odysseus Unbound] Although there might be some debate about the roles of the suitors and the explanation for their numbers, we would agree with the proposition suggesting that different names were assigned to the islands in the time of the epics: Doulichion in place of modern Ithaki, Sami instead of Eastern Kefalonia, and Ithaca in place of modern Paliki. Of course this would imply that Eastern Kefalonia and the Paliki peninsula were once separate islands - a hypothesis that we have been testing scientifically for some time and which is becoming less and less of a remote possibility as our work progresses.