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The dog who waited for Odysseus: Argos reflects…

News · July 26, 2026 · The Conversation · 6 min

The bonds between humans and animals are richly represented in both literature and visual arts throughout ancient Greek culture.

<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/susanna-phillippo-2740611">Susanna Phillippo</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/newcastle-university-906">Newcastle University</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/sally-waite-2741352">Sally Waite</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/newcastle-university-906">Newcastle University</a>

Homer’s Odyssey, with its fabulous monsters and intense tale of human endurance, was a natural candidate for Christopher Nolan’s latest Hollywood blockbuster. But amid all the fantasy and heroic human drama, there are two far more homely scenes in the poem which remain among the epic’s most memorable. Both involve animals.

One is the touching, tragically brief reunion of the hero (played in the film by Matt Damon) with his faithful dog Argos. It’s a deceptively low-key episode which reflects powerfully on <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/the-odyssey-58932">the epic’s</a> themes of patience, loyalty and loss.

The other is the man-eating cyclops’s sudden display of a softer side. He addresses his favourite ram as Pepon, a term of endearment elsewhere applied to close friends and relatives. The cyclops wonders aloud if the ram is grieving for his master’s lost eye, or sharing his desire for revenge.

Both episodes demonstrate <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/homer-9309">Homer’s</a> remarkable capacity to ground the heroic world in the whole range of human experience, and to stress the essential links between humans and the natural world. The wide-ranging world of Homeric heroes involves not just fantastic beasts, powerful divinities and aristocrats, but ordinary men, women and creatures.

<h2>Human-animal bonds in ancient Greek poetry</h2>

The bonds between humans and animals, whether working or otherwise, are richly represented in both literature and visual arts throughout ancient Greek culture.

Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, has <a href="https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/penelopes-geese/">pet geese</a> which she describes as “warming her heart” when she sees them. Penelope weeps for them when, in a dream, they are killed by an eagle.

<figure> <iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4LY2LJyd9aU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe> <figcaption>Argos is reunited with Odysseus in the 2024 film, The Return.</figcaption> </figure>

In Homer’s other epic poem, <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/the-iliad-30917">the Iliad</a>, Hector calls on his chariot horses to remember the <a href="https://scaife.perseus.org/reader/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-eng4:8.249-8.253/?right=perseus-eng4">sweet mash his wife used to feed them</a>, even before she attended to her husband. And <a href="https://www.theoi.com/Text/HomerIliad17.html">Achilles’s horses weep</a> when his friend Patroclus is killed – they are frozen in mourning “like a pillar on a man or woman’s tomb”.

In later Greek literature, there is a <a href="https://www.academia.edu/106311369/Do_Not_Laugh_I_Beg_of_You_for_This_Is_a_Dogs_Grave_The_Human_Canine_Bond_in_the_Ancient_Greek_World">well-established corpus of epitaphs</a> memorialising dogs. The 6th-5th BC poet Simonides is sometimes attributed as the author of this <a href="https://www.loebclassics.com/display/simonides-fragments/1991/pb_LCL476.581.xml?print=&print=&readMode=reader&result=1&rskey=2AOinw&print">vivid tribute</a> inscribed on the gravestone of a female hunting dog:

<blockquote> Although you are dead, huntress Lycas, I fancy that the beasts still tremble at your white bones in this tomb: your valour is known to high Pelion and far-seen Ossa and the peaks of Cithaeron with their lonely pastures. </blockquote>

<h2>Human-animal bonds in ancient Greek art</h2>

<a href="https://www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress/DMS/9AD440C3FDDA4FD9AA67CB007DEF66A9/9781803279978-sample.pdf">Extensive research</a> documents the widespread depiction of both working dogs and lapdogs in vase painting and sculpture. The <a href="https://www.carc.ox.ac.uk/carc/Home">Beazley Archive pottery database</a> in Oxford lists well over 1,400 examples of dogs in vase paintings from 700-200BC – and examples survive from earlier still.

<figure class="align-center zoomable"> <a aria-label="Zoomable image" href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/749768/original/file-20260723-64-zp079z.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="On one side of the bowl is a scene of man on left restraining a dog (?) on a leash with each hand, to the left is a bull, painted in outline filled with spots, facing towards the right but with its head turned to the left." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/749768/original/file-20260723-64-zp079z.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/749768/original/file-20260723-64-zp079z.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/749768/original/file-20260723-64-zp079z.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/749768/original/file-20260723-64-zp079z.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/749768/original/file-20260723-64-zp079z.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/749768/original/file-20260723-64-zp079z.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/749768/original/file-20260723-64-zp079z.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a> <figcaption> The bell-krater bowl from the British Museum collection. <a class="source" href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/862269001">The Trustees of the British Museum</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a> </figcaption> </figure>

The British Museum collection includes <a href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/G_1899-1229-135">a bowl from the Mycenaean period</a> (1750 to 1050BC) in which the Homeric epics are set. It depicts a man struggling to control two rather frisky small dogs on leads.

Although there is only sparse evidence of the Greeks using dogs in warfare, vase paintings showing warriors bidding their family farewell frequently include a dog. The latter may be <a href="https://www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress/DMS/9AD440C3FDDA4FD9AA67CB007DEF66A9/9781803279978-sample.pdf">interpreted</a> either as accompanying the warrior or being left behind.

In a more domestic context, dogs positioned beneath the couches of men at a symposia enjoying wine (and other bodily pleasures) are a recurring visual theme, as in a <a href="https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010268234">well-known example</a> from Corinth (600–590 BC).

<figure class="align-left zoomable"> <a aria-label="Zoomable image" href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/749777/original/file-20260723-63-3bbk2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Grave monument for a young girl named Euchalia, depicting her with her parents, grandmother and a small dog poised on its hind legs and pawing at her knees" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/749777/original/file-20260723-63-3bbk2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/749777/original/file-20260723-63-3bbk2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/749777/original/file-20260723-63-3bbk2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/749777/original/file-20260723-63-3bbk2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/749777/original/file-20260723-63-3bbk2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/749777/original/file-20260723-63-3bbk2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/749777/original/file-20260723-63-3bbk2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a> <figcaption> The grave monument for a young girl named Euchalia. <a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Grave_Stele_of_Eukoline_(4th_cent._B.C.)_at_the_Archaeological_Museum_of_Kerameikos_on_27_June_2018.jpg">Kerameikos Museum</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a> </figcaption> </figure>

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