Imagine this: You’ve gone away from home for a while.

Now, as we all know, time is a relative thing. For some people, a long time away might be a day trip into the city, or a weekend on the coast.

For the more adventurous, maybe it’s a week long cruise.

For some young people, it might be a semester abroad.

Perhaps work demands you go away for over a calendar year; this is the life of foreign diplomats or deployed military members.

But most of us don’t measure time away from home in decades, though there are exceptions; people incarcerated, prisoners of war, people trapped in political exile.

In the case of this story, imagine you were drafted into a war that took ten years to end, and then spent ten years struggling to get home.

You are presumed Missing In Action, and most likely dead.

Would you expect your partner to have waited for you, or even remember you should you return?

What of the new born child that you had to leave behind, now a young adult?

What of your most loyal companion? Wouldn’t they recognize you?

In the case of Odysseus, the eponymous hero of the Odyssey, the answer is three strikes. Granted, he is disguised as a beggar, but still, Penelope, his faithful wife, doesn’t see through this disguise. His son, Telemachus, can’t be blamed since he never knew his father. And Eumaeus, the swineherd who Odysseus was practically raised with, and who is now a surrogate father figure to Telemachus has grown jaded of stories of Odysseus’ return, especially after having already been deceived by an imposter.

None of the people Odysseus was returning home for can recognize him. While Eumaeus gives him food and shelter, it is out of the Greek religious tradition of Xenia, hospitality towards strangers (you may have heard a related word, xenophobia, used as a fear of strangers (i.e. foreigners)). He pays little thought to the the singular beggar as his attention is directed towards the thuggish behavior of the Suitors who have “invited” themselves into Odysseus’ palace to woo Penelope. He also bears a grudge against the palace servants, who he feels have made a mockery of their duties since the presumed death of their master.

One glaring example: the treatment of Odysseus’ loyal companion, his watch/hunting dog Argos, who lies abandoned on a dung heap, old and immobile, infested with ticks.

While Odysseus never had a chance to go hunting with Argos due to being sent off to the Trojan War, he had raised him as a puppy. Indeed, Argos’ name has two meanings: “shiny white/brilliant”, and “quick/agile”, the second of which is alluded to by the name of Jason’s ship, the Argo (hence Jason and the Argonauts).

Alas, like Odysseus himself, Argos has been written of as dead, paralyzed on a dung heap, infested by vermin.

No one recognizes Odysseus, save one precious soul.

On hearing his master’s voice, Argos, already near his end, perks up. He drops his ears, and wags his tail. Odysseus, unable to reveal his identity, can not reciprocate; however, for the first time in the narrative, we as the audience see Odysseus openly (if silently weep). As Odysseus and Eumaeus proceed to the palace for the final conflict, Argos moves on to the Undiscovered Country, Death, and Homer’s text uses language fit for the passage of a noble warrior.

To misquote a famous misquote, Alas, poor Argos! We hardly knew you…

*

The section dealing with Argos is short, just a few passages in Book 17 of the Odyssey. In fact, it’s direct cultural impact in Greek and Roman societies, if gauged by their choice of artistic representations, is practically non-existent. However, this changed in the 18th and 19th centuries, and continues to this day. To this point: Christopher Nolan, director of the 2016 Odyssey film adaptation, has called it “the ultimate dog story” (Cinema Express. May 5, 2026).

So here is an actual excerpt, from the Stanley Lombardo translation:

As soon as Argos saw Odysseus approaching, he dropped his ears and wagged his tail, but he could not rise to greet his master. When Odysseus saw the dog on the other side of the yard, he wiped tears from his eyes and said:

‘Eumaeus, what a noble hound is that is over yonder on the manure heap: his build is splendid; is he as fine a fellow as he looks, or is he only one of those dogs that come begging about a table, and are kept merely for show?’

‘This dog,’ answered Eumaeus, ‘belonged to him who has died in a far country. If he were what he was when Odysseus left for Troy, he would soon show you what he could do.

There was not a wild beast in the forest that could get away from him when he was once on its tracks. But now he has fallen on evil times, for his master is dead and gone, and the women take no care of him.

Servants never do their work when their master’s hand is no longer over them, for Zeus takes half the goodness out of a man when he makes a slave of him.’

So, saying he entered the well-built mansion and made straight for the riotous pretenders in the hall. But Argos passed into the darkness of death, now that he had fulfilled his destiny of faith and seen his master once more after twenty years.

Odyssey, Stanley lombardo trans.

*

So what’s the take away?

Is Odysseus cunning? Yes. Ask the Trojans; they might have a used horse statue for sale.

Is his rage disproportionate? Well, ask the Palace servant/slave girls who were used for sexual gratification by the suitors…well, you couldn’t, because Odysseus orders them executed after slaying their abusers. Yes, that is probably disproportionate.

Did he meander on the way back? Maybe his time with Circe was justified, but even Nolan had to muddy the proverbial narrative waters in shades of blue lotus to allow for the time he spent with Calypso. So maybe he wasn’t in that much of a rush to get home…

So what does it take to humanize our hero whose many choices are often morally ambiguous? By the way, this is not just a modernist reading of the text; the Romans fancied themselves descendants of Aeneas of Troy, so you can imagine their opinion of Odysseus (Roman: Ulysses) was less than stellar.

The answer is simple: it takes a dog to show us that Odysseus, the man of “many twists and turns” (from the opening of the Odyssey), is human after all.

Perhaps Nolan is right: the Odyssey might just be the “ultimate dog story”.