Argos is the first to recognise Odysseus upon his return to Ithaca—and then dies.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Why does being ghosted hurt so much? Homer and the Mahabharata point to a timeless answer, hidden in the faithfulness of two dogs.
The reunion of Odysseus and Argos occupies barely forty lines, yet it is one of the most moving episodes in Homer’s Odyssey.
After twenty years away, Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar. Outside the palace lies his old hunting dog, Argos, blind, flea-ridden, and abandoned on a dung heap. Recognising his master, the dog lifts his head, gives a final wag of his tail—and dies.
Christopher Nolan greatly expanded Argos’ role in his film adaptation, showing the dog ageing under the neglect and abuse of the suitors. Many cinema-goers, myself included, found the brief reunion between dog and master to be the film’s most moving scene. Nolan has said that Argos was one of the elements that drew him to the project, even describing the epic as the ‘ultimate dog movie’.
Why does this scene move us so deeply? There are many reasons. But one of the deepest is that Argos fulfils one of our most fundamental human longings: the longing to be recognised. Long before we seek fame or deeds, we seek to be known. Friends delight in being understood without explanation. Lovers hope to be recognised beneath the depredations of time. One of the quietest forms of suffering is not to be hated, but to be overlooked—to become as if invisible.
That is why being ghosted can be so painful. It is not merely rejection, but the withdrawal of recognition: the feeling that someone who once knew you now behaves as though you no longer existed. Argos does the opposite.
After twenty years of disguises and transformations, he alone recognises the man who once gave his name as ‘Nobody’. The old dog sees beyond age and suffering—and Athena’s best work—to the man he has always known. Odysseus weeps for the dog, but he weeps also for himself. For twenty years, he has been all things to all men. Then, for one fleeting moment, someone recognises the one man beneath all the disguises.
Homer was not alone in seeing something profound in a dog’s fidelity. The Mahabharata, along with the Ramayana, is one of India’s two great epics. At the end of the Mahabharata, after the great war has been fought and every earthly hope has been shattered, the five Pandava brothers journey to Mount Meru, followed only by a stray dog. One by one, they fall on the ascent, leaving only the eldest, King Yudhisthira, to arrive at the gates of heaven. The god Indra invites Yudhisthira into heaven, but refuses to admit the dog. Yudhisthira turns away, explaining that he cannot bring himself to abandon his faithful companion. At this, the dog reveals himself as none other than Dharma (cosmic order, duty, right way of living), and Yudhisthira is reunited with his brothers in Heaven. Like Argos, the dog embodies something much greater than himself. By remaining faithful to faithfulness, Yudhisthira proves himself worthy of Heaven and saves his clan.
The two stories mirror one another. In Homer, it is the dog who remains faithful to a man. In the Mahabharata, it is just as much the man. Yet both honour the same virtue. Homer and the authors of the Mahabharata independently arrived at the same intuition, namely, that the fidelity of a dog is not merely an animal instinct. It is a revelation.
The irony, certainly in Homer, is that Argos remembers better than we do—better even than Penelope. Anyone who has ever ghosted, or been ghosted, may find themselves asking: are we better than dogs?
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If this essay has left you wondering why certain stories continue to speak across centuries, you may enjoy The Meaning of Myth—an exploration of how myths become enduring sources of meaning, shaping not only our imagination but the civilisations we inherit.
Home is not merely where we return, but where we are recognised.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
The Odyssey is usually described as the story of a man trying to get home. But this is only half the story. The real journey is not geographical but psychological and moral. Odysseus is trying not merely to return to Ithaca, but to become the kind of man who can return.
This is why, after almost three thousand years, the Odyssey continues to speak to us. We are all trying to find our way home—not simply to a place, but to a life that feels genuinely like our own.
Every encounter presents Odysseus with a different temptation. The Lotus-Eaters invite him to forget who he is. Circe seeks to trap him into surrendering his humanity. The Sirens tempt him with endless fascination. Even after escaping the Cyclops Polyphemus, Odysseus succumbs to the temptation of pride. By revealing his true name, he forgets his true purpose and risks undoing all that he has achieved. Again and again, Homer asks the same question in different forms: what must we refuse if we are to remain true to ourselves?
The greatest temptation of all comes from Calypso. She offers Odysseus what human beings have always desired: immortality, together with eternal youth and freedom from suffering. Yet he refuses. He chooses instead to return to his ageing wife, his uncertain kingdom, and his mortal life. In doing so, Homer suggests that to become fully human is not to escape our condition, but to embrace it. Only by accepting the limits of human existence can Odysseus finally become himself.
From one perspective, it is a baffling decision. Why exchange paradise for hardship? Like the modern philosopher Bernard Williams, Homer intuits that a life derives its meaning not from its length but from being truly our own. We would rather live a finite life that belongs to us than an endless life that does not.
At last, Odysseus reaches Ithaca. But instead of returning as a conquering hero, he enters his own home disguised as a beggar. His wife does not recognise him. His servants do not recognise him. His kingdom does not recognise him. But one creature does.
Outside the palace gates lies Argos, the hunting dog that Odysseus had raised before leaving for Troy. Once magnificent, Argos has been left to grow old on a dung heap. Yet the moment Odysseus approaches, the dog recognises him. Disguised though he is, stripped of every outward sign of rank and identity, his faithful companion sees through it all. Argos wags his tail, lays back his ears, and, having seen his master one last time, quietly dies. In Homer, true recognition has nothing to do with appearances. We are recognised not for what we possess or the roles we play, but for who we truly are.
It is one of the most moving scenes in all of literature because it speaks to one of our deepest longings. We want our lives to amount to something. But we also want to be known and loved for who we are, beneath all our roles, titles, and disguises. Home is not merely where we return. It is where someone knows who we are—and remembers.
Before Odysseus can reclaim his kingdom, he must first reclaim his story. At the court of the Phaeacians, he recounts everything that has happened to him since leaving Troy. By weaving his adventures into a coherent narrative, he recovers not only his past but himself. We make sense of our own lives in much the same way: not merely by living them, but by telling them. There’s a lovely irony here. At the very heart of the Odyssey, Homer hands the poem over to Odysseus himself. Odysseus quite literally rises into the narrator of his own life, before finally heading home.
Perhaps that is why the Odyssey still feels so modern. We, too, leave home, lose our bearings, and become distracted by ambitions, comforts, fears, and false identities. We, too, sometimes wonder how we ended up living the lives we are living.
The Odyssey endures because Homer understood that the longest journey any of us will ever undertake is not outward across the seas, but inward into our hearts.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Models, monsters, or victims? From Pandora and Medusa to Penelope, discover what Greek myth really says about women.
Greek mythology has captivated the Western imagination for almost three thousand years. Its stories of gods and heroes, monsters and marvels continue to inspire novels, films, paintings, and psychological and cultural theories. Yet, for all the reverence, modern readers are often struck by another recurring theme. Women seem repeatedly silenced or blamed, if not outright punished, pursued, or abducted.
The ancient Greeks undoubtedly lived in a patriarchal society. Political power, military glory, and public life belonged overwhelmingly to men, and many myths reflect the assumptions of the society that produced them. But Greek mythology is far too rich and varied to be reduced to a single attitude towards women. Some women serve as models of virtue, others as warnings against vice or excess; some are victims of gods and men, while others possess a power that rivals or even surpasses that of their male counterparts.
The women of Greek myth are queens and captives, wives and mothers, maidens and sorceresses, heroines and monsters. Together, they reflect the full spectrum of the Greek imagination. To understand what these stories are really saying about women—and about the civilisation that created them—we need to return to the myths themselves.
Prometheus had stolen fire from the gods and given it, in a fennel stalk, to mankind. Not content with punishing Prometheus, Zeus set about also to punish mankind. He ordered Hephaestus to mould the first woman out of earth and water, and each of the other gods to endow her with a ‘seductive gift’. He named this living snare Pandora [Greek, ‘All-gifted’] and sent her off to Epimetheus with a jar of evils in dowry.
Prometheus had forewarned his slow-witted brother not to accept any gift from Zeus, but Epimetheus took Pandora in and soon married her. After the wedding, Pandora remembered the jar. Although she had been told not to open it, her curiosity got the better of her. As she unsealed the lid, she released every evil into the world, bringing man’s golden age to its close. Aghast, she hastened to replace the lid, but all the contents of the jar had already escaped—all, that is, except for hope.
Like Eve in Genesis, Pandora carries the blame for the fallen world in which we live. Like Eve, she is overwhelmed by the urge to do the very thing that had been forbidden to her. But whereas Eve succumbs to temptation, Pandora is herself the temptation. She is created not as a helpmeet, but as a punishment. As Hesiod puts it, in the simplest, most direct Greek, she is kalon kakon, ‘a beautiful evil’.
Nor is Pandora alone. Helen’s beauty launches a thousand ships and destroys a city. Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon upon his return from Troy. Phaedra’s forbidden desire destroys Hippolytus. Again and again, women appear as the catalysts of male suffering.
If these were the only women in Greek mythology, the charge of misogyny would be difficult to deny. But, of course, they are not.
Penelope: The Faithful Wife
Penelope embodies the ancient ideal of womanhood. For twenty years, while Odysseus wanders the seas, she waits for him in Ithaca. Besieged by over a hundred suitors who assume her husband to be dead, she preserves both her marriage and the kingdom through patience, intelligence, and deception. By day she weaves a funeral shroud for her father-in-law Laertes; by night she unpicks her work, delaying the choice of a new husband until Odysseus finally returns to slay the suitors.
Unlike Helen, Clytemnestra, and Phaedra, Penelope preserves rather than destroys her household. Unlike Pandora, who unleashes chaos, Penelope restores order. She is not merely faithful but resourceful, matching Odysseus’ own cunning with a quieter, domestic intelligence.
Although an archetype, Penelope is not an exception. We might also think of Nausicaa, Alcestis, and Antigone. When King Alcinous offers Odysseus his daughter’s hand in marriage, Odysseus, thinking of Penelope, politely declines. Nausicaa graciously accepts his refusal, asking only that he remember her as the one who saved his life.
In Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus contrasts the chicanery of Orpheus in seeking to cheat death to be reunited with Eurydice with the willingness of Alcestis to lay down her life for her husband Admetus when not even his elderly parents would do so. Alcestis was allowed to return alive from Hades, a rare reward indeed, whereas Orpheus returned empty-handed to be torn apart by women.
The goddesses, too, command profound respect. Athena, the goddess of wisdom and strategic intelligence, defies Zeus to champion Achilles; Artemis fiercely guards her independence; while Demeter’s grief at the loss of Persephone brings famine upon the earth. Male gods may rule Olympus, but they do not always have the final word.
Medusa: Monster or Victim?
No figure better illustrates the changing fortunes of women in Greek myth than Medusa. According to Ovid, when still a fair maiden, she was violated by Poseidon in a temple dedicated to Athena, who punished not Poseidon but Medusa, by turning her beautiful braids into snakes. Henceforth, anyone who met Medusa’s gaze would be turned into stone.
The treatment of Medusa by the Olympian gods is an epitome of rape culture: assaulted by Poseidon, who thought he had every right, and then blamed and punished for it by Athena in a case of one woman turning upon another to get in with the patriarchy. In fact, Athena and Medusa are not so different. Both represent a pole or extreme of how to deal with the threat of female autonomy, authority, and sexuality. A woman can be either a virgin or a mother, and if she is neither, she must be a whore or a monster.
Ovid’s origin story for Medusa is almost certainly a later elaboration of the original myth, which sits in the Perseus cycle—in which Medusa is presented as one of the three Gorgon sisters. Nonetheless, it captures the modern imagination: suddenly Medusa becomes another victim, and Perseus’ triumph acquires an unsettling moral ambiguity. Is this the defeat of an evil monster—or the final destruction of a blameless victim?
Medusa is both monster and victim. In this ambiguity or ambivalence, she is not alone. Helen oscillates between seductress and pawn, while Medea is at once a betrayed wife and an avenging murderess. Circe begins as a terrifying enchantress, before turning into Odysseus’s advisor and benefactor.
Philomela: The Silenced Voice
Ovid’s Metamorphoses reads almost as a catalogue of sexual assaults on women. Medusa, Daphne, Philomela, Io, Europa, Callisto…
Under the spell of Eros, Apollo fell head over heels for Daphne, and relentlessly pursued the sworn virgin. As he was about to catch up with her, she cried out, and her river god father Peneus turned her into a laurel tree. From then on, Apollo took to wearing laurel in his hair, whence the laurel wreath and our word ‘laureate’, as in, ‘Nobel Prize laureate’.
King Tereus raped his wife’s sister Philomela and then cut out her tongue. Unable to speak, she wove her ordeal into a tapestry and sent it to Procne, who in revenge killed her son by Tereus, cooked the boy, and served him up to his father. The sisters then presented Tereus with the boy’s severed head. As he pursued them with an axe, they prayed to be turned into birds: Philomela became the nightingale, and Procne the swallow.
Ovid’s pages are populated not only by dangerous women, but by women in danger. This growing sympathy may reflect Ovid’s own sensibilities, the influence of Greek tragedy, or changing attitudes over the centuries. Whatever the case, these women emerge not merely as symbols or warnings, but as fully human figures, capable of inspiring both horror and compassion.
The Greeks and Their Myths
Women in Ancient Egypt enjoyed many more rights than in classical Athens, for instance, the right to initiate divorce or dispose of property. In the art of the period, women are often depicted supporting or clasping their husband, and husband and wife referred to each other as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’, suggesting a relationship of near equality. In contrast, in classical Athens, women were regarded as chattel and were, in some respects, worse off than slaves. Aristotle, whose influence remains unsurpassed, regarded women as ‘deformed’ or ‘deficient’ males who lacked the deliberative capacity to rule. He even claimed that women had fewer teeth than men—when he could simply have looked into the mouth of Pythias, his wife (or perhaps his daughter; both bore the same name).
It would be surprising if the myths of the Greeks did not reflect their assumptions. Myth, however, is neither history nor ideology. It is less concerned with recording events or prescribing conduct than with exploring a culture’s deepest hopes, fears, and contradictions. Pandora expresses a fear of female autonomy and agency. Penelope embodies an ideal of fidelity and resourcefulness. Medusa explores the uneasy boundary between monster and victim. Philomela confronts the reality of violence and gives voice to the silenced victim. Athena, Artemis, and Demeter exercise an authority that surpasses even that of Agamemnon or Achilles. Rather than presenting a single image of womanhood, Greek mythology unfolds an entire panoply of female archetypes.
Caravaggio’s Young Sick Bacchus (in fact, a self-portrait) — To the Greeks, wine was not merely a drink but an affirmation of life in the face of death.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Would you turn the other cheek? Not that cheek. Discover the last and most unusual of the Olympian gods.
Dionysus was the god of wine, regeneration, fertility, ritual madness, ecstasy, theatre, and pleasure, among others. In certain times and places, or among certain people, he was the most important god—more important, even, than Zeus. Owing to his hold on the imagination, there is much mythical material surrounding him.
Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Semele, one of the four daughters of Cadmus. When Semele was pregnant with Dionysus, a jealous Hera persuaded her to ask Zeus to reveal himself to her ‘as he does to his wife’. Zeus reluctantly obliged, leading Semele to die from one of his thunderbolts. Zeus succeeded in saving his son from her womb, and stitched him into his thigh (probably a euphemism for his testicle)—whence the Dionysian epithet dimētōr, ‘of two mothers’, ‘twice-born’.
Following this second birth, Hermes placed Dionysus into the care of his aunt Ino and her husband Athamas, asking them to bring him up as a girl. Even in this guise, Hera recognised him and inflicted madness upon Ino and Athamas, who killed their children before killing themselves. To protect him, Zeus turned Dionysus into a kid, which Hermes spirited to the satyr Silenus and the mænads of Mount Nysa. Silenus became his tutor, and the centaur Chiron completed his education.
After the young Dionysus discovered the magical vine, Hera drove him mad. He roamed the world to escape from her while teaching mortals the secrets of winemaking. He travelled to Egypt and Syria, and even led a campaign into India. According to the historian Diodorus Siculus (d. 30 BCE), Dionysus taught all the known world how to make wine—except for Britain and Æthiopia. In Phrygia, he met the mother goddess Cybele, who taught him the mysteries and, by channelling it, cured him of his madness. He then established his cult and rites, inspired by those of Cybele.
While in Phrygia, Silenus wandered off drunk and was carried to King Midas. When Dionysus came to collect him, he offered Midas any wish. Midas asked for the power to turn whatever he touched into gold. Before dinner, he had turned every bush in his famed rose garden to gold. But he was horrified when his food and wine also turned to gold. His daughter tried to comfort him, but she too suffered the same fate. When Midas begged to be rescued, Dionysus told him to bathe in the River Pactolus, the golden sands of which later became the source of Croesus’ fabulous wealth.
Dionysus returned to Greece in a triumphal procession of satyrs and mænads. However, his wild and alien cult met with resistance. In Thrace, King Lycurgus captured his followers and drove Dionysus into the sea. Dionysus visited madness on Lycurgus—leading him to kill his wife and son and chop off his own legs in the belief that they were vines.
In his own city of Thebes, Dionysus was opposed by his cousin Pentheus, the son of Agave. The seer Tiresias urged Pentheus to embrace Dionysus, warning him, ‘Your blood [will be] poured out and defile the woods and your mother and sisters…’ But Pentheus forbade his worship, after which the women of Thebes lost their minds and left their homes to cavort in a frenzy on Mount Cithæron. Pentheus hid in a tree to spy on them, but the daughters of Cadmus found him and tore him apart from limb to limb. Agave tore off his head, put it on a pike, and took it to Cadmus—before realising what she had done.
Some time later, Dionysus chartered a ship manned by Tyrrhenian mercenaries. Believing him to be the son of a rich man, they sailed towards Asia with the intention of ransoming him. When they bound him to the mast, the bonds simply fell away. The helmsman Acoetes warned that this was no ordinary man, but the captain failed to change course. Dionysus filled the vessel with ivy and flute song, leading the mercenaries to lose their minds and leap into the sea. He then turned them into dolphins, sparing only Acoetes, who bore witness to his divinity.
On Naxos, Dionysus found Ariadne, who had been abandoned there by Theseus. Dionysus had countless lovers, both male and female, but married only Ariadne, giving her a crown and fixing it into the heavens as the constellation Corona. He then travelled to Hades to bring back his mother Semele, and all three ascended to Olympus.
The Meaning of Dionysus
Dionysus’ origins are shrouded in the mists of time, and it may be that he is a composite of a number of similar gods from far-flung times and places. His name is first attested on tablets recovered from Mycenæan Pylos, although its etymology is uncertain. The Greeks had many other names or epithets for him, including Androgynos, Bromios [Thunderer], Eleuthereus [Liberator], and Tauros [Bull].
Whatever his origins, Dionysus came to symbolise the impulsive, the chaotic, and everything that escapes human reason and control—and, by extension, nature and its vitality. Like nature, he is both creation and destruction, representing on the one hand growth and fertility and on the other wine and dissolution. He dissolves the boundaries between reason and instinct, civilisation and nature, life and death, the human and the divine. As twice-born and returned from Hades, he crosses and re-crosses the boundary between life and death. He reminds us, as does the hero, that life is at its fullest in the jaws of death.
Much of his mythology is about establishing himself as a god, suggesting that he may in part be rooted in a historical figure. Although the Greeks, especially Greek men, resisted his alien and anarchic cult, he rose to become one of the principal Olympian gods.
Dionysus was the last of the twelve Olympian gods to arrive, and the only one with a mortal parent—embodying, like wine itself, the duality between the human and the divine.
He rode in a chariot drawn by big cats and accompanied by an ecstatic retinue, or thíasos, of erect satyrs and frenzied mænads. Under the influence of the god and his wine, satyrs and mænads tore apart sacrificial animals and ate them raw. The Greeks honoured Dionysus in several annual festivals, including the City Dionysia, which became the premier competition for playwrights in Athens. The thíasos, especially the triumphal procession on Dionysus’ return to Greece, served as a model for later Dionysian processions and, according to Pliny the Elder, even the Roman Triumph.
Dionysus appears in early Greek art as a bearded man, but later evolves into an alluring and androgynous youth. His attributes include the thyrsus, a fennel staff tipped with a pinecone; the kantharos, a drinking cup with high handles; the vine and ivy; the snake; and the bull.
For Sigmund Freud, Dionysus and his thíasos symbolised the id, the deep, primitive, and instinctual part of the mind. Freud requested that his ashes be preserved in an Ancient Greek krater painted with Dionysian scenes—where they remain to this day.
To Dionysus, the most important individual in his train was Silenus, the wisest and, not coincidentally, the most drunken of his followers. The Midas myth has become famous the world over and is a powerful way of making the point that the true wealth of life resides in life itself. Assuming we have a modest amount, it is not generally a lack of funds but a lack of soul, or lack of love, that keeps us from living.
Silenus is also associated with the bleak teaching that the best thing for human beings is never to have been born, and the next best to die as soon as possible. Plato alludes to this ‘Wisdom of Silenus’ but thinks it dangerous and refrains from spelling it out too clearly. In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades compares Socrates to Silenus for being ugly outside but beautiful inside.
In his earliest work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche popularised a dichotomy between Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian stands for light, reason, order, and individuation, whereas the Dionysian is all about darkness, irrationality, chaos, and dissociation. The Dionysian impulse, similar to Freud’s concept of the id or Jung’s concept of the shadow, is a primal force that demands to be acknowledged and integrated.
Dionysus himself lost his mind until he mastered the mysteries, after which he became a model of sanity or even hypersanity and established his cult. If too much of the Dionysian is destructive, too much of the Apollonian is stultifying, whereas a balance of the two unleashes the best of both.
Nietzsche argued that the Ancient Greeks achieved that rare balance of the Apollonian and Dionysian, notably in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, which, by providing a paradigm of existential suffering, enabled people to experience a profound sense of release and escape. But owing to the influence of rationalists such as Socrates and Plato, the Apollonian took over, and European culture came to lack passion and vitality.
The dichotomy between Apollo and Dionysus is, however, a modern one. The Greeks, if anything, tended to assimilate them: Like Apollo, Dionysus was said to have the gift of prophecy, and even to inhabit the Temple of Apollo at Delphi during Apollo’s winter absence.
The Dionysian Mysteries were related to the Orphic and Osirian Mysteries. Orphics held the ‘first Dionysus’, or Zagreus, to have been torn apart and eaten by the Titans before being reborn through Semele. They worshipped Dionysus as a chthonic aspect of Zeus and connected him with the reincarnation and immortality which they sought for themselves.
Dionysus also has much in common with Jesus Christ: a divine father, a mortal mother, and a rebirth or resurrection. Both carried a revolutionary message of salvation, sought to establish a following on earth before ascending to heaven, and roamed about performing miracles. Still today, followers of Jesus ritually eat his flesh and drink his blood in the bread and wine of the eucharist.
Of course, Dionysus was never likely to turn the other cheek—or, at least, not that cheek—but he was, unusually among the Olympian gods, a good friend to humankind.
If Prometheus gave us fire, Dionysus gave us wine, the inner fire which frees the mind and dissolves the ego along with all of its problems. Wine brings us together, helps us be together, and be inventive together, as in the Greek symposia and Roman convivia, in which measured drinking could lead to expansive elation and creative association and the voicing of disruptive ideas and perspectives.
It can be no coincidence that, on all four sides, in all four corners, the borders of the Roman Empire stopped where wine could no longer be made.
Life without wine would be a pale shadow of itself. I raise my glass to Dionysus.
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