By |

Recognition, Memory, and the Need to Find Our Way Home

A candle burning in the dark

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Outside the palace gates lies an old, flea-ridden and forgotten dog.

His name is Argos. Once he had been the finest hunting dog in Ithaca, swift enough to pursue deer and wild goats across the hills. Now he lies upon a dung heap. His master has been away for twenty years. The servants neglect him. The household scarcely notices that he is still alive.

A beggar approaches the palace. No one recognises him. Not the servants who pass him by. Not the arrogant suitors who have consumed his wealth and overrun his home. Not even Penelope, though she has faithfully waited for him. Athena has disguised Odysseus as an old man, stooped and ragged, so that he may enter his own house without revealing himself.

But Argos knows. Though he cannot rise to greet his master, he pricks up his ears and wags his tail. Odysseus, in his disguise, can do no more than turn away and brush a tear from his eye. He cannot call the dog by name, kneel beside him, or reward twenty years of devotion. Then Argos dies.

The entire episode occupies barely forty lines of the Odyssey. Remove it, and the plot remains untouched—except that we have deprived the Odyssey of one of its most tender and memorable scenes.

Anyone who has loved a dog can immediately relate. Dogs care little for our achievements, our reputation, or our wealth. They remain indifferent to almost everything that preoccupies human beings, honour and disgrace, youth and old age. They ask only that we return.

The scene’s resonance was confirmed by Christopher Nolan’s 2026 film The Odyssey. Rather than treating Argos as a fleeting episode, Nolan wove the dog throughout the story, showing him ageing under the neglect and abuse of the suitors. 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’. Despite the spectacular battle scenes, monsters, and adventures, many cinema-goers found the simple reunion between Odysseus and Argos to be the most moving moment. Most tellingly, the film’s working title was Charlie’s Tale—a reference to Nolan’s own Labrador.

But there is something deeper here than affection for dogs. The irony is almost unbearable. Argos is the first creature in Ithaca to recognise Odysseus. The man who has outwitted the Cyclops, escaped the Sirens, and survived shipwreck after shipwreck at last returns to his home only to discover that he has become a stranger. His disguise deceives those who knew and loved him as much as those who seek to destroy him. Only the dying dog sees through it. Yet recognition can never become reunion. The dog receives only a glance before dying, his long vigil finally complete.

It is one of the great recognitions in literature. Aristotle, writing centuries later, would identify recognition—anagnorisis—as one of the central devices of tragedy. In the Poetics, he distinguishes several kinds of anagnorisis. He regards the finest as that which arises naturally from the action itself, transforming both the protagonist’s understanding and his emotions, as when Oedipus finds out who he is—his father’s son, and murderer.

The Odyssey contains many such moments: the old nurse Eurycleia recognising Odysseus by the scar on his thigh, Penelope recognising him only after he reveals the secret of their marriage bed, Laertes recognising him only after he names and numbers the trees in the orchard. Yet, the first recognition belongs not to a nurse, wife, or father. It belongs to a dog.

Recognition

Recognition is one of the deepest human needs. Long before we seek fame and deeds, we seek to be known. An infant turns instinctively towards a familiar face. 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 neglected, to become as if invisible.

Perhaps this is why Argos touches us so. His recognition is utterly disinterested. His body is broken. His life is at its end. He wants nothing from Odysseus, nor can he hope for anything in return.

Recognition begins in remembrance. ‘To recognise’ (Latin, recognoscere) means ‘to know again’. To recognise someone is to perceive beneath altered appearances the enduring existence of a person.

That is precisely what everyone else fails to do. The disguise woven by Athena is only the outward expression of a truth that Homer understands deeply. Twenty years change us all. Time alters our faces, our bodies, our fortunes, our place in the world. We acquire disappointments, infirmities, and disguises of our own. We become parents, widows, strangers, exiles, successes, failures. Sometimes we scarcely recognise ourselves, and shun mirrors.

But still we remain the same person.

Recognition is the gift of seeing through the disguise.

Dogs do not recognise us in quite the way that we recognise one another. They know scent, voice, movement, presence. They recognise by sense rather than conscious reflection. Homer seems to suggest that there is a form of knowledge more fundamental and more faithful than reason itself. For love sees what intelligence cannot.

Perhaps that is why Odysseus weeps. The tears are as much for himself as they are for Argos. For twenty years he has survived by pretending to be someone else. He has lied, concealed, disguised, adapted, endured. He has been warrior, sailor, beggar, castaway, prisoner, lover, storyteller. Then, for a brief moment, before he reclaims his kingdom, someone sees the man beneath all these transformations.

Home, perhaps, is not merely the place we come from. It is the place where we are recognised.

The Excellence of Dogs and Men

There is another reason we weep for Argos.

Argos has spent his whole life waiting. Day after day he has lain outside the palace, decaying along with Ithaca itself. His master never returned. His strength failed. The household neglected him. Fleas bred upon him. At last, he came to rest upon a dung heap, discarded as completely as the old order that Odysseus left behind. Yet he never ceased to belong to someone.

The Greeks had a word for excellence: aretē. We usually translate it as ‘virtue’, but it means something richer: the fulfilment of a thing’s nature, the attainment of its excellence. The excellence of a knife is to cut well. The excellence of a horse is to run well. Human excellence is a matter for philosophers. But the excellence of a dog is simpler.

To remain faithful.

To remember.

To recognise.

The ancient Indians, too, chose a dog to embody this virtue. At the end of the Mahabharata, after the great war has been fought and every earthly ambition broken, the 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. 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, the right way of living).

Separated by thousands of miles and many centuries, Homer and the authors of the Mahabharata arrived at the same intuition: the fidelity of a dog is not merely an animal instinct. It is a revelation.

The Memory of Civilisations

Why should such a small scene—Argos recognising Odysseus—bear so much weight?

Memory is not merely a faculty of mind. It is the thread from which identity is woven. We are the stories we can still tell. To lose a memory is not simply to lose information. It is to lose ourselves.

The Romans understood this as well as the Greeks. ‘To be ignorant of the past’ wrote Cicero, ‘is to be forever a child.’ ‘For what is the time of man, lest it be interwoven with that memory of ancient things of a superior age?’

The past is not the antithesis of progress, but the condition that makes progress possible. We become fully human not by beginning anew with every generation, but by entering a conversation that began long before we arrived.

That conversation is what we call civilisation, and it is at the bottom of who we are.

Long before history was written in books, it was preserved in stories. Homer did not simply entertain the Greeks. He taught them who they were, and, therefore, who they should be. His epics carried the memory of a people: their heroes, their gods, their fears, their longings, their understanding of honour, justice, courage, hospitality, and home. Socrates often began a debate with a Homeric commonplace. Aristotle gave Alexander a copy of the Iliad, which he carried with him into India. Homer became something much more than the greatest poet of the Greeks: he became their memory.

Nor was Greece unique. Every great civilisation possesses such works. For India, the Mahabharata and Ramayana met the same need, preserving not merely stories but an entire cosmology, psychology, and philosophy. Their verses, like those of the Iliad and Odyssey, were recited, interpreted, and debated for centuries. They became less books than living conversations, renewed by each generation that inherited them.

The Romans, in turn, revered the mos maiorum, the custom of the ancestors. They believed that the living owed a debt of remembrance to the dead. In guarding the sacred flame of Rome, the Vestal Virgins guarded something more than fire. They guarded continuity itself. A civilisation survives not because its monuments endure, but because its memory does—because the thread is never cut, the flame never extinguished, and the story never forgotten.

If the Renaissance was a rebirth, it was because Europeans suddenly regained their memory. Petrarch searched monastic libraries for forgotten manuscripts. Humanists copied ancient texts by hand. After centuries of oblivion, Plato, Cicero, and Lucretius returned to the conversation. Civilisation advanced not by burying the past, but by recovering it.

Today, we imagine progress rather differently. We celebrate novelty, innovation, and disruption. We have access to more information than any generation that went before, but so little memory that we have forgotten that civilisation is built by looking backwards as well as forwards.

Information accumulates facts. Memory accumulates substance and meaning. Perhaps this is why ancient stories continue to matter. They remind us that we are heirs before we are innovators.

None of us begins from nothing. We inherit a language we did not invent, customs we did not create, ideas we did not discover, institutions we did not build, stories we did not write. Even when we reject our inheritance, as Plato rejected Homer from his ideal city, we do so in conversation with it.

That’s why I’ve devoted so much of my work to the great currents of the past. Not because the past deserves our reverence, but because it illuminates who we are and who we might yet become.

Are We Better Than Dogs?

In Game of Thrones, Archmaester Ebrose tells a young Samwell Tarly:

‘In the Citadel, we lead different lives for different reasons. We are this world’s memory, Samwell Tarly. Without us, men would be little better than dogs.’

Later, during a war council, Bran Stark explains why the Night King seeks to destroy him. As the Three-Eyed Raven, Bran embodies the collective memory of mankind. ‘He wants to erase this world. And I am its memory.’ 

Samwell understands immediately: ‘That’s what death is, isn’t it? Forgetting, being forgotten. People forget where we’ve been and what we’ve done, we’re not men anymore, just animals…’

The idea is as old as civilisation itself. Without remembrance, we lose not only our past but ourselves.

Yet Homer quietly complicates the comparison. For the old dog remembers, even when no one else does.

Perhaps this is why Argos so touches us after nearly three thousand years. He reminds us that memory is not simply the recollection of facts. It is fidelity—to a person, a place, a people, a civilisation. It is the refusal to allow time, absence, or death to sever the bonds that make us who we are.

When Odysseus finally returns home, the first to recognise him is not his son, his queen, or even his father.

It is an old dog lying upon a heap of dung.

He pricks up his ears.

He wags his tail.

He remembers.

Are we better than dogs?

Continue Exploring

In The Meaning of Myth, I explore how myths preserve the memory of civilisations—and why they remain indispensable to understanding ourselves.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Odyssey essays

Explore all Mental Health essays

Explore all Relationships essays

By |

Odysseus, Homer, and the Story That Shaped the Western Imagination

Odysseus and Calypso
Arnold Böcklin, Odysseus and Calypso (1883). Offered eternity, Odysseus chooses home.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

‘Tell me, Muse, of the man of many twists and turns…’ Few openings in literature are more famous—or revealing. The Greek is simpler still: andra, ‘the man’. Not the warrior, nor the king, nor the conqueror. Simply the man. It is an extraordinary way to begin. Homer could have sung of the Wooden Horse, the sack of Troy, or the countless heroes who fought and fell beneath its walls. His earlier epic, the Iliad, opens on overpowering passion: ‘Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles…’ One poem begins with wrath; the other with a person. One asks how a hero should fight and die; the other how a human being should live. Perhaps that is why, after nearly three thousand years, the Odyssey still feels so astonishingly alive.

Homer himself never seems to tire of Odysseus. He gives him more epithets than any other character: ‘the man of many sorrows’ (polypenthes), ‘the man of many devices’ (polymetis), ‘the man of many twists and turns’ (polytropos), and a score more. No single description suffices. Odysseus is king and sailor, warrior and diplomat, husband and father, beggar and storyteller, trickster and survivor. The first epithet Homer picks out for him, polytropos, has defeated generations of eminent translators. It has been rendered, among others, as ‘much-wandering’, ‘complicated’, ‘resourceful’, ‘versatile’, and ‘of many twists and turns’. All capture something of Homer’s meaning, but none exhaust it. Whereas Achilles burns with a single, blinding excellence, Odysseus is of many parts. He changes with circumstance without ceasing to be himself.

Nowhere is this more delightfully illustrated than in the adventure with the Cyclops. Trapped inside the cave of Polyphemus, with no hope of overcoming the giant by force, Odysseus reaches for his greatest weapon: not his sword, but his wits. When asked his name, he replies, ‘Nobody.’ It is one of the oldest jokes in literature, and has scarcely aged. When the blinded Cyclops bellows that ‘Nobody’ has attacked him, his neighbours abandon him to his fate. Yet there are hidden depths to the comedy. Although Homer gives Odysseus more names than anyone else, the man’s greatest triumph comes from altogether surrendering his name. He survives by becoming Nobody. Only when his ship has safely put out to sea does he make the mistake of shouting his true name back across the waves. For one irresistible moment, the old heroic code reasserts itself—inviting Poseidon’s vengeance and prolonging the homeward journey by ten more years.

Here, perhaps, we arrive at the deepest difference between Homer’s two great heroes. Achilles is the supreme warrior, swift-footed and godlike, the embodiment of an aristocratic world in which honour is won on the battlefield and a glorious death is preferable to an obscure life. Faced with the choice between longevity and everlasting fame, he chooses fame without hesitation. Odysseus belongs to the same heroic age, yet already points beyond it. He fights not to die gloriously, but to live. His greatest victories are won not by brute strength but slippery guile. A civilisation founded upon Achilles would always risk being at war. A civilisation founded upon Odysseus might one day know peace and prosperity.

Again and again, Homer shows us what Odysseus longs for. Not glory. Not pleasure. Not even immortality. Home. When Calypso offers him eternal youth and everlasting life, he refuses. He knows that Penelope has grown older during his absence, and that she cannot offer him the eternal youth of an immortal goddess. Yet he pines for her all the same. He longs for Telemachus, for the columns of smoke rising above Ithaca, for the domestic life he left behind. Homer gives us one unforgettable image of the meaning of home. When Penelope, still testing the stranger before her, orders a servant to move their marriage bed, Odysseus protests that the bed cannot be displaced. For it was he who, long ago, fashioned it around the living trunk of an olive tree. Home, Homer suggests, is something like that, something living and deeply rooted, something that binds and shapes us. If Achilles seeks to transcend the human condition, Odysseus embraces it.

Perhaps that is why we feel so close to him. Homer never presents Odysseus as an invulnerable hero. He is brave, but he is also afraid; ingenious, yet capable of foolishness; resilient, yet often overwhelmed by grief. Indeed, the first time we meet him he is not fighting monsters but sitting alone on Calypso’s island, gazing across the sea towards Ithaca. Later he weeps again as the bard Demodocus sings of Troy, unable to hear his own story without reliving its pain. Homer never hides his hero’s tears, because he understands that strength and sorrow are not opposites but companions.

Perhaps this is also why Homer has a soft spot for him. We might admire Achilles, but we love Odysseus. Achilles may dazzle us, but he would also kill and dismember us, whereas Odysseus would sit down and tell us a story. Homer delights in his resourcefulness—which is, of course, a reflection of his own—but lingers just as tenderly over the moments of recognition that punctuate the poem. None is more moving than the meeting with Argos. Twenty years have passed since Odysseus sailed for Troy. The old hunting dog now lies neglected on a dung heap outside the palace, blind, flea-ridden, and too weak to stand. Yet as Odysseus approaches, disguised as a beggar, Argos lifts his head. He knows. His tail gives a final wag. Then he dies. Odysseus cannot embrace him. To reveal himself would be to risk everything. He can only turn away and brush a tear from his cheek.

We think of Odysseus as one of Homer’s two great heroes. Yet, he scarcely resembles the archetypal hero of myth. Lord Raglan famously identified twenty-two recurring features of mythical and legendary heroes, among them a miraculous birth, an attempt on the infant’s life, royal destiny, victory over monsters, a mysterious or sacrificial death… Figures such as Moses and Oedipus satisfy most of these criteria. Odysseus fulfils only eight. By the standards of comparative mythology, the greatest hero in Western literature turns out to be strangely incomplete. Which is, of course, precisely the point. He is no miracle child, no predestined saviour, no invulnerable demigod. He is simply a man—of exceptional intelligence and resilience, certainly, but recognisably human throughout.

For all its monsters, enchantresses, storms, and marvels, the Odyssey is not ultimately a poem about adventure. It is a poem about home: about memory, fidelity, identity, and belonging. Odysseus does not journey merely to recover his kingdom. He journeys to recover himself. This is why the Odyssey still speaks to us.

Or perhaps that is only part of the explanation. For many tales have been told of exile and homecoming. Many heroes have endured suffering, temptation, and loss. This raises another question. Why did this particular story become one of the foundational stories by which an entire civilisation came to understand itself?

The answer cannot simply be that the Odyssey is a great poem. Great stories abound. Homer became much more than a great storyteller. He became the educator of Greece. Long before Socrates knocked about, generations of Greeks had learnt from Homer what courage looked like, what honour demanded, what it meant to be a husband, a father, a king, a host, a guest—even what it meant to be human. His poems furnished the imaginative material from which philosophy itself would arise.

In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates often begins an investigation with a Homeric commonplace. Plato himself repeatedly challenged Homer, even proposing, in the Republic, to banish poets (meaning mainly Homer, Hesiod, and Simonides) from his ideal city. Yet, Plato quotes Homer so frequently that he seems unable to think without him. Even as he seeks to supplant Homer as Greece’s teacher, he continues to converse with him. Aristotle is more admiring, praising Homer as the unsurpassed master of epic poetry. The three greatest philosophers of antiquity differed profoundly in temperament and outlook. Yet all three remained rooted in Homer, each responding to him in his own way.

That is what distinguishes a foundational story from a work of literature, however great it might be. It does not merely entertain or even inspire. It furnishes the imaginative world within which a civilisation comes to understand itself. Successive generations may react to it, reinterpret it, or seek, like Plato, to transcend it—but always from within it.

Every civilisation seems to possess one or two such treasures. India has the Mahabharata, Persia, the Shahnameh, the Hebrew world, the stories of the Bible. Remarkably few people, though they may keep a copy, read these vast works from cover to cover. Many Europeans and Americans who revere Homer have never read the Iliad or Odyssey, just as many Indians, though familiar with the Pandava brothers, have never pored over the hundred thousand verses of the Mahabharata. We do not choose these stories any more than we choose our native language. We inherit them. They become part of our mental landscape, furnishing our images, our ideals, and our sense of what it means to be brave, faithful, cunning, or wise.

They are as the sacred fire tended by the Vestal Virgins in ancient Rome: seldom approached, yet somehow reassuring simply because it continues to burn. Quietly, they illuminate the language, values, and images through which successive generations come to understand themselves. Because they are so rich, they are never exhausted. Each age returns to them with new questions and finds new answers.

The history of the Odyssey is, in part, a history of these returns. James Joyce transformed Odysseus into Leopold Bloom, erring not across the wine-dark sea but through the sooty streets of Dublin. Derek Walcott carried the Odyssey to the Caribbean, discovering in it a language for exile, colonialism, and homecoming.

The Odyssey is an ancient poem about one man’s journey home. Perhaps that is why we have never stopped returning to it.

Continue Exploring

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.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Odyssey essays

By |

Given the Choice, Who Would You Be in Your Next Life?

The Last Judgement, by Michelangelo.
The responsibility lies with the chooser; God is not responsible. — Republic X

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Plato concludes The Republic with the myth of Er, a timeless story of death, judgment, reincarnation, and the soul’s freedom to choose its destiny. This fresh retelling and interpretation explores why it remains one of the greatest philosophical myths ever told.

The Myth of Er has had an enduring influence on the Western imagination, shaping, among other things, our inherited ideas of heaven, hell, and moral destiny. Although Plato presents the story as told by Socrates at the end of The Republic, it draws on older Greek and Near Eastern traditions of judgment after death, cosmic order, and the journey of the soul.

The Myth of Er

Er, a soldier from Pamphylia, was slain in battle. Twelve days later, as his body lay on the funeral pyre, he returned to life and told those around him what he had seen in the interval between death and rebirth.

During those twelve days, his soul had journeyed to a strange meadow marked by four openings: two leading upward into the heavens, and two descending into the earth below.

Judges sat in this meadow and assigned souls according to their conduct in life. The just were directed to the right and upward, ascending through one of the openings into the heavens; the unjust were directed to the left and downward, descending into the earth.

At the same time, other souls were returning. Bright, cheerful souls descended from above, having completed a thousand-year reward in the heavens. They spoke joyfully of what they had experienced. By contrast, other souls rose up from below, exhausted and in pain, describing a thousand-year punishment in the depths of the earth.

When Er approached the judges, he was told that he was not to be judged. Instead, he was to observe and later report what he had seen to humanity.

After seven days in the meadow, the souls set out on a further journey of five days, eventually arriving at the Spindle of Necessity.

This was a vast column of light, brighter than anything they had ever seen, extending through the cosmos and holding together the movements of the sun, moon, planets, and stars. The structure of the heavens rotated like a spindle, with concentric circles turning within one another.

At its centre stood Necessity, or Ananke, attended by her three daughters, the Fates. In each of the celestial circles sat a Siren, each producing a single note, so that together they formed a cosmic harmony.

When all the souls had gathered, a prophet announced:

“Hear the word of Lachesis, daughter of Necessity. Mortal souls, you are entering a new cycle of life and death. Your destiny will not be assigned to you, but chosen by you. The one who draws the first lot shall choose first; and the life chosen shall become his fate.”

The souls then came forward in order and selected their next lives from a vast assortment of human and animal forms.

The first to choose, having seen neither reward nor punishment in a way that had truly reshaped him, hastily selected the life of a tyrant. Only later did he discover that this life entailed horrors he had failed to foresee, including the destruction of his own family. His earlier virtue had been habitual rather than reflective; he had never truly understood what made a life good.

By contrast, many of those returning from punishment in the underworld, having suffered greatly, now chose more moderate and balanced lives. But their choices were often driven by fear and aversion rather than understanding.

Last of all came Odysseus, the man of many ways. Having experienced the extremes of fortune and glory, he searched for a long time before finding the life of an ordinary private man, overlooked by everyone else. Delighted with his discovery, he remarked that he would have made the same choice even if he had been first to choose.

Once all souls had chosen, they travelled to the plain of Forgetfulness. There they encamped by the River Lethe. Each soul was required to drink from the river, and in doing so forgot everything it had previously known. Some, still unsteady from desire or confusion, drank more than they needed.

In the night, as they slept, the souls rose upward like stars and were reborn into their chosen lives. At that moment, Er awoke to find himself once again on his funeral pyre.

Interpretation of the Myth

At the beginning of The Republic, Plato’s brother Glaucon challenges Socrates with a stark claim: most people are not just; they merely behave justly when it is advantageous to do so. If they could act unjustly without consequence, they would.

In response, Socrates constructs an elaborate account of justice—not as social convention or reputation, but as something belonging to the inner structure of the soul. Just as health is not merely the appearance of the body but its proper functioning, justice is the harmonious ordering of the self. An unjust soul, however successful it may appear externally, is internally disordered.

The myth of Er comes at the end of this argument, and one of its purposes is to show that justice does, in the end, prevail. Although the just may suffer and the unjust prosper in this life, each soul ultimately receives its due. In this sense, the myth answers Glaucon’s challenge: justice is not merely socially convenient, but intrinsically valuable, because it orders the soul. The myth suggests that such a soul is ultimately rewarded.

But the myth does something more than reassure us that justice is eventually rewarded and injustice punished. It explores something more unsettling: how easily souls can misjudge what is good for them, even after they have seen the consequences of their choices.

The problem Plato is concerned with is not only moral weakness, but moral blindness. Even a thousand years in heaven or hell does not guarantee wisdom. Some souls, having endured punishment, choose more carefully; others, despite every opportunity to learn, repeat their mistakes. Experience alone is not enough. Suffering may teach caution, but only philosophy teaches understanding.

Within this framework, justice is not simply about behaving correctly, but about forming a soul capable of recognising what is truly good. Without such understanding, even freedom of choice can become dangerous. The tyrant’s error lies not merely in his lust for power, but in his ignorance about the kind of life he is selecting. His failure is epistemic before it is moral.

Yet reward and punishment alone are not enough. The deeper concern of the myth is the formation of character. We do not choose wisely merely because we have suffered, nor because we have prospered, but because we have learnt to distinguish appearance from reality and the merely desirable from the truly good.

Odysseus, at the end of the myth, provides the final illustration. Having experienced the extremes of human life, he passes over lives of power and renown to choose that of an ordinary private man. It is one of the most quietly profound moments in Greek literature. The greatest of heroes no longer seeks greatness, but peace. His choice suggests that wisdom lies not in acquiring more, but in learning what is enough.

In the end, the myth of Er is less a literal description of the afterlife than a meditation on justice, character, and choice. Plato affirms that justice is ultimately rewarded, but he also insists that reward alone is not enough. A good life depends not merely on receiving one’s due, but on acquiring the wisdom to recognise what is truly worth choosing.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The Meaning of Myth and The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Plato Essays

Explore all Mythology essays

Explore all Indian Philosophy essays

Explore all Success & Failure essay

By |

A Psychiatrist and Philosopher Interprets the Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice

Orpheus and Euydice, by Edward Poynter

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Everyone knows the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. And it means the exact opposite of what everyone thinks.

The earliest mentions of the supreme musician Orpheus date to the sixth century BCE. By the fourth century BCE, Plato was already commenting on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Today, the fullest accounts survive in Virgil’s Georgics and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

The Story of Orpheus

Apollo gave his son Orpheus a lyre of gold and tortoise shell. Orpheus mastered the instrument so completely that no creature, and scarcely nature itself, could resist his playing and singing: the animals of the forest gathered around him, the trees bent toward him, and the streams and rivers came out of their beds to greet him.

Orpheus fell head over heels for Eurydice, and she readily returned his love. Hymen, the god of marriage ceremonies, presided over their wedding, but, in a terrible omen, his torch spluttered and spat and marred the feast with bitter fumes.

Eurydice ventured into the nearby woods, where the shepherd Aristaeus espied her dancing with the dryads. Enraptured by the scene, he began to chase her. As she beat back through the bushes, she tripped on a nest of vipers and died from a snakebite to the heel.

Orpheus sang of his grief from earth to heaven, moving the gods and all of creation. So empty did life seem without Eurydice that he resolved to go and see her in Hades—and, if possible, return her to the land of the living.

Orpheus entered Hades through a cave of poisonous vapours and, by his lyrical song, made it unhindered to the palace of King Hades and Queen Persephone. His lament entranced the ferryman Charon and the ordinarily fierce three-headed hound Cerberus, and even Hades himself, who, for the first and last time, shed a black and sooty tear.

With Persephone leaning heavily upon him, Hades declared that Orpheus could leave with Eurydice, as long as he did not look at her until they had both crossed into the land of the living—but should he break this one condition, Eurydice would forever remain in the underworld, where few of the living can enter, and none twice.

Orpheus led Eurydice back the way he came, resisting the urge to turn around and meet her doe eyes.

Then he realised that he could no longer hear her footsteps behind him, and began to fear that Hades had tricked him.

As soon as he saw the light of the sun, he glanced over his shoulder and glimpsed his beloved. But Eurydice had not yet crossed the threshold and was whipped back in a whirl into the bowels of the Earth.

Orpheus sat in a clearing and played mournfully on his lyre, spurning the many maidens who called upon him. According to Ovid, he was “the first of the Thracian people to transfer his love to young boys.” The scorned women threw sticks and stones at him, which fell back to the ground at the sound of his mesmerizing music. In the end, the Maenads, in a state of Dionysian frenzy, tore him apart from limb to limb.

Orpheus’ lyre and dismembered head, still dolefully singing, floated down the River Haebrus to the sea and washed up on the isle of Lesbos, which became famed for its poets. The Muses found his head and buried it in a cave, over which the nightingales sang more prettily than in any other part.

As for his lyre, it can still be seen in the constellation Lyra.

Orpheus and Eurydice before Hades and Persephone

Interpretation of the Myth

Orpheus is a personification of music, poetry, and art in general. In modern times, he has inspired countless paintings, poems, novels, ballets, operas, and films. More curiously, he became the patron of an ancient religious cult called Orphism.

In Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus says that, rather than a great man, Orpheus was, in fact, a coward. In arguing that the mark of true love is the readiness to die for it, 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 permitted to return alive from Hades, a rare reward indeed, whereas Orpheus returned empty-handed to be torn apart by women.

Although Orpheus traveled through Hades like a hero, he missed the mark of a hero. His anxious doubting, his turning to boys, and his being torn apart by women all point, in the Ancient Greek mind, to a lack of virility.

The gaze objectifies the beloved: If Orpheus had truly loved Eurydice, he would not have needed to look back upon her. Indeed, he would readily have died to be reunited with her and would never have found himself in such a predicament.

The descent into the nether regions, or katabasis, is found in mythologies from all over the world. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is strikingly similar to the Japanese myth of Izanagi and Izanami: Izanagi travels to the underworld to retrieve his wife Izanami, who warns him not to look at her. But so ardent is his desire that he lights a torch and casts his gaze upon her, only for it to be met by a rotting corpse.

By blurring the line between life and death, the katabasis explores themes of mortality and immortality. It is, by extension, a means of explaining natural cycles, especially the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of life, as symbolized also by the viper that undid Eurydice.

We might wonder whether Eurydice, beautiful but not much else, is something of a MacGuffin: an insignificant or irrelevant quest object that serves merely to motivate the adventure, like the Holy Grail in Arthurian legend or the ring in Lord of the Rings.

Far more fully realised than Eurydice is the power of art itself. No one and nothing remained unmoved by Orpheus’ song. For all his might, Hercules did not travel so easily through Hades. Even after his death, Orpheus’ severed head continued to sing, suggesting that art, besides being powerful, is immortal.

With such a gift, Orpheus had far more than most to be happy and, better than happy, useful. Yet he squandered it all for the mortal Eurydice, unable to understand that, for all her beauty, she was, like Izanami, never more than a decaying corpse.

How much better for him, and for all, if he had learnt to be happy on his own or with his one true love, music.

Instead of looking back on Eurydice, he ought to have been looking ahead, like a real hero, paying no heed to his own selfish, self-absorbed, self-indulgent happiness—the kind of happiness that, like Eurydice, dies in the moment that it is held.

Continue exploring

If this article spoke to you, you might look into The Meaning of Myth.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Mythology essays

Explore all Relationships essays

Explore all Success & Failure essays

By |

The History and Psychology of Labyrinths

A golden labyrinth or maze
The labyrinth symbolizes the winding path of life: not a puzzle to be solved, but a journey to be lived.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 22 July 2026.

What’s the difference between a maze and a labyrinth—and why are they making a comeback? Once thought of as little more than decorative curiosities, they are increasingly being rediscovered as places of reflection, meditation, and healing. To understand why, we must go back to the most famous labyrinth of them all.

The Cretan Labyrinth

In Greek myth, King Minos, to consolidate his position on the Cretan throne, asked the god Poseidon to send him a snow-white bull as a sign of divine favour. But instead of sacrificing the bull as he ought to have done, he decided to keep it for his stud farm. Poseidon punished Minos by making his wife Pasiphaë lust for the bull.

Pasiphaë pleaded with the master craftsman Daedalus to build her a hollow cow in which to hide out with the bull. Daedalus’ cow seemed so true to life that the bull mounted it. Some time later, Pasiphaë gave birth to the Minotaur, a monster with the head of a bull and the body of a man.

The Minotaur, as he grew, became increasingly violent and even began eating people. Fearing that his subjects would rise against him, Minos sought to contain his stepson in a series of ever stronger cages; but after he broke out of the strongest cage, he asked Daedalus to build a maze of tunnels beneath his palace.

The Labyrinth, as it came to be called, was so intricate that even Daedalus, having built it, struggled to escape from it. The Labyrinth served Minos well, enabling him to intimidate and dispose of his enemies while also hiding and feeding the Minotaur—who now would eat nothing but human flesh.

Theseus to the Rescue

Minos, Minotaur aside, was a great king. Under his rule, Crete prospered and grew into a naval power. When his eldest son Androgeus came of age, he travelled to Athens to partake in the Panathenaic Games. Somehow Androgeus died—or was killed—and Minos held Athens responsible for his loss.

In reparation, and as the price for peace, King Minos required that King Aegeus send him, every nine years, a tribute of seven of the most noble youths and seven of the most virtuous maidens of Athens. These unfortunates, drawn by lots, would be sent to Crete in a ship with black sails, paraded before the people, and cast into the Labyrinth.

When the time came for the third nine-yearly tribute to Crete, Theseus, the son and heir of Aegeus, volunteered to take the place of one of the fourteen unfortunates and confront the Minotaur. He sailed for Crete in a ship with black sails, promising his ailing father that, if victorious, he would return on white sails. As he was paraded through the streets of the Cretan capital, Minos’ daughter Ariadne saw him and immediately fell in love with him. He and the other Athenians were locked up in a dungeon to await morning, when they would be fed to the Minotaur.

That evening, Ariadne begged Daedalus, until he relented, to disclose the secret of the Labyrinth. Under the cover of darkness, she ran past the guards to Theseus and slipped him a sword and a clew of crimson thread. She instructed him to tie the thread at the mouth of the Labyrinth and unfurl the clew as he went along, ‘always straight, always down, and never left or right.’ 

Before leaving, she made him promise that, if he came out alive, he would take her with him and marry her.

As Theseus descended into the darkness, the air became putrid and he began tripping over what must have been human remains. He could hear the thumping of the Minotaur, but could not locate him until he could also hear his breathing. He may never have seen him had it not been for the blood-tinged ivory of his eyes and horns.

With his head down, the Minotaur made to gore him, but he leapt in Cretan style over his horns, rolled over, drew out his sword, and drove it up to where he imagined he had his heart. 

He then picked up the clew and wound it back up to find his way out of the Labyrinth… and into the waiting arms of Ariadne.

History or Myth?

In the early twentieth century, the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, working on Crete, uncovered the remains of a complex civilization whose people he called the Minoans after the mythical King Minos.

Minoan Crete flourished from around 3000 to 1500 BCE and came to revolve around a series of palace complexes, the largest of which was at Knossos in the north of the island. The palace at Knossos covered an area of around six acres (or three football pitches) and contained some 1,300 rooms connected by various corridors and stairways, leading Evans to speculate that the mythical Labyrinth was none other than the palace itself.

Pottery and frescoes unearthed by Evans and his team featured bulls and bull-leaping, and the most common symbol on palace walls was the labrys, or double axe—and it has been suggested, including by Evans himself, that Labyrinth might mean something like ‘Sanctuary of the Double Axe’.

The reconstructed palace at Knossos. Its network of rooms and corridors may have inspired the legend of the Labyrinth. Photo: Neel Burton.

Maze or Labyrinth?

Although the Labyrinth was clearly a branching, multicursal maze, it has long been represented—for example, on Cretan coins—as a single-path, unicursal maze in which it is impossible to get lost.

As a result, the word ‘labyrinth’, although essentially synonymous with ‘maze’, has come to connote unicursality, while the word ‘maze’ has come to connote multicursality.

In short, a maze offers choices; a labyrinth offers a single path.

A Universal Symbol

In his Natural History, the naturalist Pliny the Elder (d. 79 CE) describes four ancient labyrinths—in Egypt, Crete, Lemnos, and Italy—all of which seem to have been enclosed multicursal complexes, confirming that this is the ancient, original meaning of the word ‘labyrinth’.

In the Histories, the historian Herodotus (d. 425 BCE) claims that the Egyptian labyrinth surpassed even the pyramids in scale and ambition:

I myself have seen [the Egyptian labyrinth], and no words can tell its wonders: the sum of all that the Greeks have built and wrought would be a matter of less labour and cost than was this single labyrinth…

Far from a mere folly, the labyrinth is, like the serpent, the flood, and the trinity, something of a Jungian archetype, found in prehistoric rock drawings at, for example, Pontevedra in Galicia (Spain), Val Camonica in Lombardy (Italy), and Rocky Valley in Cornwall (England).

In medieval Europe, cathedrals sometimes contained a labyrinth traced out in the nave from contrasting paving stones. Those that have survived, such as the striking one in Chartres Cathedral, can still be walked today. Cathedral labyrinths were not simply ludic or ornamental but represented the spiritual path to God and provided a substitute for going on pilgrimage. Cathedral labyrinths were therefore unicursal, as were the first hedge mazes, which evolved from Renaissance knot gardens.

The Journey of Life

As I argue in The Meaning of Myth, mazes and labyrinths are in fact spiritual tools. Multicursal mazes such as the Cretan Labyrinth may have been built not only to guard against gold diggers but also to deter or trap evil spirits, including the Minotaur. Unicursal labyrinths, on the other hand, may have been traced to guide rituals or dances.

The circular unicursal labyrinth symbolizes the cosmos, completeness, and unity, and, by extension, the spiritual path or journey of life. More than a simple garden, it is a removed, secluded, and liminal space that serves to calm and concentrate the mind—which is why labyrinths, often simply mown into a summer field, are increasingly to be found in therapeutic settings such as hospitals and hospices. Labyrinths, especially single-path, unicursal ones, serve not only as a thing of beauty but also, above all, as an aid to meditation and mindfulness.

Ariadne’s Thread

To walk the labyrinth is to re-enter the womb and travel inward, and to come back out is a kind of rebirth. Ariadne’s crimson thread is thus an umbilical cord that ties Theseus to the world while he undertakes the hero’s journey into the underworld and slays the monster.

To escape the Labyrinth, Theseus simply followed the clew, or clue. This revised spelling of clew, ‘a ball of thread or yarn’, underwent a sense shift from around 1600 in reference to Theseus and the Minotaur, giving us the modern word clue and, more recently, clueless.

The path to wisdom is never a straight one; every twist and turn, every up and down, is part of the journey.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The Meaning of Myth.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Mythology essays