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.
Vincent van Gogh’s The Red Vineyard (1888). The finest wines have many stories to tell.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Most people think terroir means soil. Others think it means climate. Everyone agrees the concept is French. Everyone is only partly right.
Terroir is the entire relationship between a vine and its environment, including even the animals and people within it. Climate, geology, topography, soil microorganisms, plants and insects, centuries of accumulated know-how, and the choices of the grower and winemaker are only some of the things that contribute to the character of a wine. Terroir is not any one of these things but the interaction between them. The whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.
It took humanity thousands of years to arrive at this deceptively simple idea.
The first winemakers, in the South Caucasus some eight thousand years ago, left no written record. But they almost certainly understood that some vineyards produced better wines than others.
What we can be sure of is that, by the time of Homer (eighth century BCE), certain wines had already become famous. In the Odyssey, Odysseus carries the priest Maron’s Ismarian wine, so rich and fragrant that it has to be diluted with twenty parts water—and, even then, fills the room with perfume. Indeed, it is potent enough to bring down the Cyclops Polyphemus. Homer assumes his audience will recognise the wine’s reputation. Long before anyone understood why some places produced extraordinary wines, the Greeks already knew that they did.
In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle’s friend and student Theophrastus asked a new question: why? In his two great botanical works, Enquiry into Plants and On the Causes of Plants, he seeks not merely to describe plants but to explain them. ‘There are as many kinds of grapes as there are kinds of soil,’ he observes. It is a simple but revealing remark. For perhaps the first time, someone was looking beyond the reputation of a vineyard and, like Master Aristotle, asking about causes.
The Romans carried the idea further. Virgil famously wrote, Bacchus amat colles—’Bacchus loves the hills’—suggesting that vines do their best on well-drained slopes. Writing in the first century CE, Pliny the Elder argued that when a vine is transplanted, ‘it changes its character so completely owing to the difference of soil and climate that it is never recognised as the same.’ His conclusion is strikingly modern: ‘It is a fact that the soil matters more than the vine.’
Yet the Romans also contributed something even more enduring than practical viticulture. They spoke of the genius loci: the spirit of the place. A great vineyard possessed a character that everyone knew, but no one could fully explain. It was more than its soil, more than its climate, more than the skill of the grower. It had a spirit of its own.
Modern science has transformed our understanding of wine. We can analyse soils, study climates, sequence vine genomes, and measure almost every aspect of a vineyard. Yet in so doing we sometimes forget what the ancients grasped intuitively. A great vineyard, like any balanced ecosystem, is more than the sum of its measurable parts.
As a blind taster, I encounter this truth every time I lift a glass. A Chablis should not taste like a Napa Chardonnay, nor a Mosel Riesling like one from Clare Valley. The finest wines carry unmistakable traces of where they come from—even of the eucalyptus of Coonawarra and the garrigue of Provence. Their place speaks through them.
For this reason, I have never been fond of heavy-handed oak. Oak has its place, and in skilful hands it can add harmony and complexity. But when it overwhelms a wine, it drowns out many of the very signals that blind tasters rely upon and wine lovers cherish. Instead of hearing the voice of the vineyard—the genius loci—we hear only the barrel from another place.
Perhaps that is the deepest meaning of terroir. It is not merely a list of soils, climates, or slopes. It is the elusive way in which a place leaves its signature upon a wine. The highest calling of a winemaker is not to silence that voice, but to listen for it—and let it speak.
Sources: Homer, Odyssey 9.208–211; Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants 3.11 and On the Causes of Plants; Virgil, Georgics 2.113; Pliny the Elder, Natural History 14.4–5, 17.3–8.
Recognition, Memory, and the Need to Find Our Way Home
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.
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