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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?

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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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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.

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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.

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