Draupadï is the shared wife of the five Pāṇḍava brothers, the heroes of the Sanskrit Great Epic (the Mahābhārata). In 1954 Gabriel Germain proposed a comparison between this princess and Homer’s Penelope – both were the brides in a « marriage by concourse » (even if for Penelope it was less a marriage than a remarriage). He suggested that the two epic figures descended from a proto-figure of great antiquity, probably proto-Indo-European. The present paper supports Germain’s rapprochement, putting forward additional evidence and going somewhat further. Penelope and Draupadī are cognate figures not merely in their role as wives who are acquired or reacquired in a marriage by concourse, but also as subjects of an epic biography.