Homeric Dogma: Of Dogs and Men in the Iliad and Odyssey

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Homer is the world’s first great poet of dogs, but he was not always so. He warms and rises to the subject. Dogs play a persistent, if not pervasive, nimbly metaphorical, seldom literal, role in the Iliad. The Odyssey portrays more vivid and lively dogs, some who are characters in their own right, and collectively these dogs (in fortuitous anagram) rival the gods as sentient beings who, though not human themselves, refine and deepen what it means to be fully human.

 

Dogs in the Iliad

From the opening invocation onward, the Iliad mentions hundreds of dogs, with over eighty variations upon kuōn, almost always in the plural, among other canine terms. And yet these multitudinous dogs play an oddly minor role in the epic. While dogs are frequently mentioned, they are seldom actually seen. They develop no individuality, display no personality, exert no real presence. They are found in formulaic phrases, often paired, either negatively with carrion birds, or more positively (though sometimes it is hard to tell) with human beings. They often figure in similes, but usually as a secondary supporting element, and in terser metaphors, invariably pejorative. They do haunt, though only vaguely, the minds and fears of warriors, including Hektor and Akhilleus, and finally of Priam. But these dogs never actually do anything. Amid so many Homeric animals—dynamic battle horses, birds both scavenging and auguring, lions and boars starring in similes and metaphors, oxen sacrificed in culture-confirming ceremony and eaten with real hunger—dogs play a relatively minor role in the Iliad. Narratively, they are but service animals. Nonetheless, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awards Oscars for best supporting role, and to be a secondary or even tertiary motif in Homer is no trivial matter.

The first book of the Iliad gives a representative sampling of Homeric dogs. The celebrated invocation is surprisingly brief, and yet it finds room to include dogs, here in one of its common pairings:

Anger be now your song, immortal one,
Akhilleus’ anger, doomed and ruinous,
that caused the Akhaians loss on bitter loss
and crowded brave souls into the undergloom,
leaving so many dead men—carrion
for dogs and birds; and the will of Zeus was done.[1]

Homer’s first dogs pair with carrion birds, an association and imprinting impression they will never entirely shake. In contrast with the Muse and Zeus who enjoy song, willful dominance, and eternal life, these scavengers symbolize death and desecration. Hundreds and thousands of lines later, characters pick up this grim coupling and energize it with contempt and rage. Agamemnon threatens any soldier who thinks of shirking battle, “But let me see / one of you willing to drop out . . . he has no chance against the dogs and kites” (2.459-62) after, presumably, Agamemnon has killed him. At the other end of the epic Akhilleus similarly―these bitter rivals have much in common, especially in their darker moods―taunts dying Hector, “Dogs and birds will have you, every last scrap” (22.422). But these are just words. Akhilleus does indeed defy Agamemnon and refuses to fight for much of the story, and dogs and birds never defile him, nor does Hektor’s corpse ever suffer its promised desecration. With no individuality or even physical presence, these scavengers are mere curses. The most realistic thing about this pairing is that the dogs are always mentioned first, suggesting that, on the downward curve of the circle of life, the dogs eat first and then the birds pick at what remains.

Yet dogs in the Iliad are far from being a sure and simple negative. Back in Book One, for instance, less than fifty lines down from their first invidious mention, dogs are no longer instruments of death and desecration but cross over to join humans, explicitly in dying, implicitly in living, as victims who suffer and, perchance, are to be pitied. As Apollo answers Khryses’ prayer against the Danaans, “Pack animals were his target first, and dogs, / but soldiers, too, soon felt transfixing pain / from his hard shots, and pyres burned night and day” (1.58-60). Though not quite spinning with a positive valence, not yet, these dogs are cursed but are not curses themselves. One degree closer than the pack animals, they share a special bond with humanity. Later mentions, especially in the epic similes, will develop the dog-human relationship still more positively and vividly.

But first, Book One broaches dogs one more time, in a logical permutation upon these precedents. If dogs are often awful, and humans are deeply linked to dogs, then humans may be just as wretched as dogs. Amidst a torrent of persiflage, Akhilleus adds this insult to Agamemnon, “Sack of wine, / you with your cur’s eyes [kunos ommat’] and antelope heart” (1.265-66). The metaphor runs both ways. The beastly greed of dogs degrades Agamemnon; the selfish connivance of Agamemnon degrades dogs. Joined in their “shamelessness”—what Fitzgerald and Franco see as the defining canine quality—dogs and men struggle to survive in an ugly hostile world.[2] Fitzgerald, in fact, on the basis of this association of dogs and shamelessness, adds dozens of “dogs” to sharpen the invectives of his translation despite no kuōn or other explicitly doggish term in the original text.

And yet whole books of the Iliad never mention dogs. Intriguingly, these dogless books, such as Book Three, seem, at first, in their focus more on the gods in their divine realm than mortal men clashing on earth, to suggest a stratification along the great chain of being: beastly dogs link to the lower nature of humans, while gods link to humanity’s better half—until the gods go doggish themselves. Olympians and other divine forces dominate Book Twenty-One, and prove themselves as angry and ugly as Agamemnon and Akhilleus. Ares disparages Athena, “dogfly” (kunamuia) an insult that Hera then spins around to describe Aphrodite, “There that dogfly goes, escorting Ares, / bane of mankind” (21.461, 490-91). Hera then turns on Artemis, “How can you think to face me, shameless bitch” (21.560, kuon addees). Rather than a simple vertical chain, it is something like the more expansive dimensions of a Venn diagram of dogs, humans, and gods, where a significant amount of overlap exists. If humans and human nature are the primary subject of the Iliad, then dogs and gods are two complementary illuminating accessories to that primary subject.

The valence of doggishness in the Iliad is not always a negative, particularly in the nearly two dozen epic similes that include dogs. In these similes dogs can be found only in the secondary subject or “vehicle,” and rarely in the front seat of that vehicle. In one of those rare instances, the primary subject—Hektor in one of his shining moments—is likened to a hunting dog:

. . . Hektor, elated, leading the attack.
You know the way a hunting dog will harry
a wild boar or a lion after a chase,
and try to nip him from behind, to fasten
on flank or rump, alert for an opening
as the quarry turns and turns: darting like that,
Hektor harried the long-haired men of Akhaia,
killing off stragglers one by one . . .     (8.380-87)

This outlier of a simile requires an almost algebraic manipulation to clarify its value and function. The subject is noble Hektor, perhaps the most exemplary warrior of the Iliad, but he is frightfully violent here, wreaking havoc on the Akhaians. The dog helps clarify this ambivalence. As in so many Homeric similes, the metaphor runs both ways. Hektor ennobles the dog, notably just one of two instances of a single dog in this epic, as close as the Iliad comes to granting a dog some semblance of individuality. At the same time the dog justifies Hektor and his violence. Hektor is a domestic dog bravely protecting the farmstead or even the whole civitas from the beastliness of lion or boar or Akhaian. In the uncannily tight karmic and poetic economy of the Iliad, it is Akhilleus, chasing Hektor naturally, who is later also likened to a single dog as the starring vehicle of a simile (22.222-27).

In all the other similitudes, dogs belong not only to the vehicle of the comparison, but they are relegated to minor elements, secondary, or tertiary, and even then often have to share that minor role. Consider Sarpedon in a moment of fury, in one of the longest and most exquisitely paced similes reverberating back and forth between tenor and vehicle until the two converge as one, beginning and ending in spearmen:

Lord Zeus impelled Sarpedon, his own son,
Against the Argives like a lion on cattle.
Circular was the shield he held before him,
hammered out of pure bronze: aye, the smith
had hammered it, and riveted the plates
to thick bull’s hide on golden rods rigged out
to the full circumference. Now gripping this,
hefting a pair of spears, he joined the battle,
formidable as some hill-bred lion, ravenous
for meat after long abstinence. His valor
summons him to attempt homesteads and flocks—
and though he find herdsmen on hand with dogs
and spears to guard the sheep, he will not turn
without a fling at the stockade. One thing
or the other: a mighty leap and a fresh kill,
or he will fall at the spearman’s feet, brought down
by a javelin thrown hard. (12.329-45)

How incidental the dogs seem at first, but they help clarify a profound contradiction in human nature, indeed in the larger Homeric world view. In the tenor of the simile, Sarpedon is a force of beastly violence, while in the vehicle the herdsmen strive to resist that violence. The breadth of the simile spans a divided human nature at war with itself. More strangely, the supreme god “impel[s]” that violence, while the humble dogs join forces with the herdsmen to resist it. The pairing is so simple, andras sun kusi, as dogs align with humanity’s better nature on behalf of life, peace, abundance and community, while the gods inspire man’s more destructive impulses. To borrow Lincoln’s language from another epic war, it is as if the dogs, not the gods, at least here and in the many similes they inhabit, are “the better angels of our nature.”

Dogs play a subtle significant role in the epic similes, where the secondary material in the vehicles evokes and affirms the common life outside the extraordinary circumstances of siege and battle, a shared life that transcends the divisions of Akhaians and Trojans. Tony Hoagland well takes their measure:

Homer’s metaphors are unobtrusive acts of what could be called “culture binding.” Even when describing scenes of violence, destruction, war, or great storms, Homer’s metaphors assert the ultimate unity of Greek culture, its unfragmented wholeness and unity.

Hoagland’s holistic reading of these many similes can be adapted to that other signature exercise of Homeric style, here not multitudinous and pervasive but rather a singular one, though multi-faceted in its own way: the Shield of Akhilleus. The similes and shield play similar roles, and with a few strategic modifications, Hoagland’s assessment of the similes well describes how the shield functions as an

unobtrusive acts of what could be called “culture binding.” Even when describing scenes of violence, destruction, war, or great storms, [especially when describing the tasks and rituals of daily life,] [Akhilleus’/Hephaestus’]/Homer’s metaphors [shield] assert[s] the ultimate unity of Greek culture, its unfragmented wholeness and unity.[3]

So many elements appear in both the vehicles of the myriad similes and the singular yet multi-faceted shield: herding, ploughing, harvesting, fighting, dancing, stargazing, and much more. And dogs are found here too.

Engraved by Hephaestus upon the shield in gold and tin, inscribed by Homer in lines of dactylic hexameter, the herding scene presents the Iliad’s liveliest dogs, with finely drawn hints of consciousness and agency:

The artisan made next a herd of longhorns,
fashioned in gold and tin: away they shambled,
lowing, from byre to pasture by a stream
that sang in ripples, and by reeds a-sway.
Four cowherds all of gold were plodding after
with nine lithe dogs beside them.
………………………………………………..On the assault,
in two tremendous bounds, a pair of lions
caught in the van a bellowing bull, and off
they dragged him, followed by the dogs and men.
Rending the belly of the bull, the two
gulped down his blood and guts, even as the herdsman
tried to set on their hunting dogs, but failed:
no trading bites with lions for those dogs,
who halted close up, barking, then ran back. (18.661-74)

The content is typical of a Homeric simile, but it is not a simile, and perhaps because the narrative is not constrained to maintain contact with some original tenor, the description is livelier and more detailed. Curiously, the animals are all enumerated—one bull, two lions, nine dogs, as well as four herdsmen—which confers a certain particularity, as if they actually exist, as if. The description then ventures into the minds of the herdsman and, so very briefly yet profoundly, into the minds of the dogs. At the urging of their masters, the lithe brave dogs follow the lions, then vacillate, and fall back. Against these dangerous odds, what’s in it for us? they seem to wonder. And consonant with Akhilleus questioning his own reasons to fight, the dogs, though only inscribed upon a shield, flash a glint of reflective consciousness.

These chasing, barking, hedging dogs, the most vital in the Iliad, do not really exist in the primary story. They are artifacts, created by the craftsman, the crafts-god really, of Hephaestus, doubly beyond the life-and-death struggle on the plains of Troy. The only actual living, breathing, and, for two, no-longer-breathing dogs in the entire epic come a few books later, only briefly remarked. The funeral pyre for Patroklos is (hyperbolically?) enormous, 10,000 square feet in area, then piled high. To the fresh carcasses of “four fine horses” and twelve “noble sons of Troy,” Akhilleus makes a smaller, even modest, addition: “Nine hunting dogs had fed at the lord’s table; / upon the pyre he cut the throats of two” (23.198-202). Like the hunting scene on the god-given shield, the elements are numbered, the dogs in fact identically numbered at nine, creating a resonance between the passages and their dogs, one pack immortalized in gold and art, the other pack grimly real, particularly the dis-chosen two, with cut throats, consuming fire, and a grief that cannot be assuaged. The two dogs who are sacrificed, we shall further see, seem to correspond in their number to the life—and here the death—of a young man.

Dogs are ambivalent creatures, really an ambivalent concept, in the Iliad. Over the final books, as the epic grinds toward its grim conclusion, the negative predominates. Immediately upon the sacrifice of his own dogs upon Patroklos’ pyre, Akhilleus curses Hektor’s corpse with the darker side of dogs, “I will not restore / Hektor to Priam; he shall not be eaten / by fire but by dogs” (23.210-12). Priam instinctively feels the other side of that curse, in mourning for dead Hektor and more viscerally for his barely living self. Priam laments:

……………………..when an old man falls,
and dogs disfigure his grey head and cheek
and genitals, that is most harrowing
of all that men in their hard lives endure. (22.88-91)

Priam repeatedly voices this visceral fear, so degradingly particular, even as it serves as synecdoche for the looming fall of Troy and the tragedy of life itself. But once again these dogs never materialize to consume Hektor’s corpse or Priam alive. The epic ends in the close bond of man and animals—not the gods—but not dogs either. Rather, the final resonant note associates humanity and horses, as the Trojans belatedly perform “the funeral rites of Hektor, breaker of horses” (24.961). With this, the doggishness recedes to the background as the secondary motif that it is.

 

Dogs in the Odyssey

Whatever the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey may be, a question as intriguing as it is irresolvable, whether one poet, or two, or innumerable poets and bards, tradition has called that authorship by the singular name of Homer, a simplicity that still recommends itself to appreciating the two epics together. The Odyssey makes an uncanny sequel to the Iliad, in their continuities and their differences, so that, read together, each epic enriches and enlarges the other. The broad contrasts have been widely observed. The Iliad is a tragedy of war, of nations, of both alienating dislocation and tragic immobility, of the battlefield and the embattled city, ending in death and grief. Sharing the same central matter of Troy, reprising many of the same characters, cameos for some, promotions for others, while developing new characters into prominent roles, the Odyssey is a comedy, in the deepest most serious sense of the word, of post-war, the abiding family, travel then home, rising through righteous vengeance to culminate in reunion, life, and love. Homer is a master of such large themes because he is also a master of details, and the development of dogs over these two epics, so subtle the reader might not notice on the first or even the tenth reading, perfectly accords with, and harmoniously enriches, the distinctive nature of each epic and the larger dyad they combine to make.

More than a century ago, D. B. Monro articulated what has become known as Monro’s Law, namely, that the Odyssey is careful not to repeat the major “incident[s]” of the Iliad, suggesting an alert and attuned sense of sequel, which may be reasonably extended beyond plot to include both major themes and minor motifs.[4] Monro’s Law holds for the animals as well. Our focus on dogs should not obscure the fact that in the Iliad horses receive five times as many mentions as dogs, and all this with no mention of the Trojan Horse looming just outside the text. The equine presence goes far beyond the numbers. Frothing horses fight and die on the battlefield with their charioteers. Horses star as the vehicle of similes for Akhilleus, Hektor, Paris, and others. More quietly and personally, Akhilleus calls his horses by name, and, empowered by Hera, they answer back, as man and horse confide and confer upon revenge, grief, and doom (17.439-74). And once more we may note that famous final phrase, even more pronounced in English than in Greek, upon which the epic concludes, “Hektor, breaker of horses” (hippodamoio, literally “horse-breaker”).

The Odyssey turns from all this. It has barely a tenth of the horses of the Iliad, and 60% of those are found in Books 3, 4 and 15, which first narrate and then recount Telemakhos’ experiences in Pylos and Sparta. The reduced presence of horses makes perfect sense for an epic set at sea or on the narrow island of Ithaka. As Telemakhos artfully declines Menelaos’ gift of horses, his words signal a larger turn:

As for the gift, now, let it be some keepsake.
Horses I cannot take to Ithaka;
let me bestow them back on you, to serve
your glory here. My lord, you rule wide country,
rolling and rich with clover, galingale
and all the grains: red wheat and hoary barley.
At home we have no level runs or meadows,
but highland, goat land—prettier than plains, though.
Grasses, and pasture land, are hard to come by
upon the islands tilted in the sea,
and Ithaka is the island of them all. (4.641-51)[5]

These gift horses provide the opportunity for Telemakhos to show his rapidly developing social awareness and for the epic at hand to resituate itself against its predecessor. As Telemakhos declines the offered gift, the Odyssey itself turns away from horses. Dogs, less grand, more agile, well suited to both a rocky island and a family romance, expand to fill the spaces vacated by Homeric horses.

The Odyssey actually mentions far fewer dogs (a little over forty) than the Iliad does, but the dogs are often more developed and less formulaic than those in the Iliad. Part of what gives the dogs of the Odyssey greater presence is that they play off the dogs of the Iliad, essentially subsuming their precursors and then adding their own distinctive contribution. The first mention of dogs in the Odyssey has a weight and spaciousness far beyond what is essentially a single phrase as Telemakhos steps forth into the public space of the family home:

………………………………………………..he entered
spear in hand, with two quick hounds at heel;
Athena lavished on him a sunlit grace
that held the eye of the multitude. Old men
made way for him as he took his father’s chair. (2.10-14)

Homer counts, and these two living hounds recall the two dogs, the only actual dogs with any physical presence in the Iliad, whose throats were cut and bodies thrown on Patroklos’ funeral bier. Those were consumed in fire, in a grisly image of death, waste and inconsolable grief; Telemakhos’ dogs, in harmony with the lavishing god, live and move in a gentler even blessèd light. With both a certain consistency and stark contrast, two dogs seem to stand, respectively, for the death—or life—of a young man. The pairing of these canine details, equidistant from their great divide and really not so far from each other in Iliad 23 and Odyssey 2, lies at the heart of the Homeric dyad. Efficiently, the Odyssey reprises Telemakhos’ dogs twice more, on the other side of the epic, as he has grown and continues to grow into his manhood, “with two swift flickering hounds for company” (17.78-79, 20.162).

The second mention of dogs in the Odyssey reprises a familiar formula from the Iliad. Speaking to Telemakhos of the fate of Agamemnon slain by adulterous Aigisthos, Nestor imagines Menelaos exacting revenge on behalf of his brother, invoking the old curse of “dogs and carrion birds” (3.279) for Aigisthos. Aptly, in this scene bridging the two epics, Nestor goes back to the language and ethos of the Iliad, even of Agamemnon himself. The Odyssey never uses this precise formula again, but it does invoke variations of it, consistent with their new setting. While chatting with Odysseus incognito and ironically lamenting the sure death of the very same man, Eumaios refreshes the old trope for the new context, adding bone-picking fishes to the “wild dogs and carrion birds” (14.161-65). And once in Ithaka, Odysseus hauls the beaten Iros from his own house with another variation attuned to this setting, “Here, take your post. / Sit here to keep the dogs and pigs away” (18.129-30). This is not the wide plains of Troy but the manor house on a small island with a thriving pork industry and perhaps even a few strays, of pigs and dogs and men. Homer, whoever, whatever, he is, knows of what he speaks, integrating theme and setting into the smallest of details.

A significant strand of negative “dogma” carries over from the Iliad into the Odyssey, and the more prominent female presence in the latter leads naturally to more women being called dogs or, essentially, bitches, though Fitzgerald shies away from that term. Kunōpidos, literally “dog-eyed” or “dog-faced,” seems reserved for women of higher status. So, Helen, repentant and reformed, describes her foolish past, freely rendered by Fitzgerald as “wanton that I was” (4.157). Demodokos, through Hephaestus, applies the same term to Aphrodite caught in adultery, Fitzgerald dispersing the pejorative across the phrasing: “damned pigeon, / so lovely and so wanton” (8.334-35). In what seems to be a class distinction, Melantho and the corrupt servants are simply called declensions of kuōn by Odysseus (18.338), Penelope (19.91 and 19.154), and Eurykleia (19.372).[6] But contra Franco, kuōn is not inherently misogynistic. As we saw back in the Iliad, men regularly insulted each other as dogs, and Odysseus will cast Homer’s final kuōn at the male suitors. More surprisingly, “bitch” in Homer is not, as we shall see, necessarily negative nor even exclusively feminine. Just after the flurry of bitches thrown in Books 18 and 19, Book 20 opens with Odysseus, through simile, embracing his inner bitch as his hackles rise toward revenge.

The Iliad does portray dogs positively in places, and it is here that the Odyssey ingeniously restrategizes. In the Iliad dogs are just one element in one scene of the grand set piece of the Shield of Akhilleus that gathers in one place the representative and harmonious whole of Greek culture, from its primeval elements to its daily customs. What is a sequel to do? Centuries later Virgil found his own original strategy. Book 8 of the Aeneid closely follows with the re-arming of its own hero, including a fantastic shield, in this case writ large: the contents and tone are prophetic, distinctively Roman, and gloriously triumphant. Homer really had left Aeneas little choice, as he himself had already executed a subtler strategy. Consistent with its revisionary strategy, the Odyssey refracts the Shield of Akhilleus into much smaller, even intimate, scenes and artifacts. Remarkably, each of these refractions features dogs. Through the eyes of Odysseus the narration marvels over the palace doors of Phaiakia:

……………………..The doors were golden
guardians of the great room. Shining bronze
plated the wide door sill; golden handles
curved on the doors, and golden, too, and silver
were sculptured hounds, flanking the entrance way,
cast by the skill and ardor of Hephaistos
to guard the prince Alkinoos’s house—
undying dogs that never could grow old. (7.93-101)

Both shield and dogs are fashioned by Hephaistos of precious metals with consummate art, both so vividly that they seem to live and move and have a certain being. Both are guardians of their culture, the shield more demonstratively martial and defensive, the door and dogs a barrier of sorts, but one, as is the case here, that can open and welcome. The shield portrays in two dimensions, or perhaps 2.5, engraved and embossed. The statuary dogs stand forth in a full three dimensions, and they are “undying.” As such, they embody both enduring art and Phaiakia, where life is so very long and death so remote and seemingly painless. Like a prelapsarian Garden of Eden, Phaiakia idealizes the best life could ever be for humans upon this earth. These guarding, guiding dogs sharply contrast with Akhilleus’ shield and doomed Troy, and, as we shall see, they plangently differ as well from the real dogs on the island of Ithaka.

A second refraction of the Shield of Akhilleus is still smaller and more intimate: the crafted brooch that Penelope gave Odysseus the day he left for Troy. The grand shield contains multitudes; the brooch just one little scene, familiar from the many similes and the singular shield, a dog hunting. Hephaestus’ grand shield broadly evokes, gathers and unifies Greek culture. In implicit zeugma the little brooch binds both a cloak and the love of husband and wife. The brooch arises in the most intimate and happily ironic circumstances. Odysseus, still incognito as the wayfaring beggar, meets with Penelope at their hearth to tell his tale, a pure invention, of having met Odysseus twenty years before when he—the real Odysseus—first journeyed toward Troy. Penelope asks for details, practically to confirm veracity, emotionally to revel in the memory. Odysseus knows what she wants and gives it to her, in details that would be transparently preposterous to anyone but Penelope, who is so emotionally famished after twenty years:

Lady, so long a time now lies between,
it is hard to speak of it. Here is the twentieth year
since that man left the island of my father.
But I shall tell what memory calls to mind.
A purple cloak, and fleecy, he had on—
a double thick one. Then he wore a brooch
made of pure gold with twin tubes for the prongs,
and on the face a work of art: a hunting dog
pinning a spotted fawn in agony
between his forepaws—wonderful to see
how being gold, and nothing more, he bit
the golden deer convulsed, with wild hooves flying. (19.263-74)

The brooch has long been lost, if not years ago on the plains of Troy, then certainly at sea (Odysseus landed on Phaiakia with literally nothing), but now it glows in their shared memory and Odysseus’ story that reignites it. The dog may not seem particularly romantic, but it shows Penelope’s understanding of Odysseus—he enjoys hunting—just as Odysseus dwelling on the outfit she made and assembled and its admiration by women shows his understanding of her. He knows exactly what would please her, and he gives it. As first a thing and then a story, the brooch could just as well have read amor vincit omnia, but the hunting dog says as much with more subtlety and art.

At two or three mysterious and largely invisible degrees of separation, the scar of Odysseus functions as yet another refraction of the Shield of Akhilleus. It is, like its predecessor, a physical object that tells a story, in this case a much smaller personal tale of adventure, pain, and affection, inscribed not in precious metals but the still more precious and tender flesh, then transliterated into words. And uncannily, dogs artfully figure once again. In the same Book 19, shortly after Odysseus lovingly conjured the brooch with the hunting dog, Odysseus accepts the offer of a bath from Eurykleia, the loyal old servant. Too late Odysseus recalls the distinctive scar on his thigh that Eurykleia will surely recognize and thereby give away his cover. Eric Auerbach marvels how Homer interrupts these crucially fraught seconds with a lengthy digression upon the scar, not really as background but in the epitome of Homeric style promoted as foreground for 82 lines.[7] Auerbach published Mimesis in 1946, and we may update this phenomenon to our computer age. Click on the scar as a hyperlink, and the whole story is there. Click again, and it is gone, and we are back in Odysseus’ home, some thirty years later, among firelight and flickering shadows, as Eurykleia drops the wash basin with a clang and she instantly apprehends what took us several minutes to read. We too could marvel at length with Auerbach over Homer’s prescient counter-intuitive style, but what matters to this essay is that once again dogs figure in the inset story.

In variation upon the scenes engraved on Akhilleus’ shield in self-evident ekphrastic verisimilitude, the story of the scar is crudely gashed into Odysseus’ flesh and thereby mutely encoded, inaccessible except to those who hold the key, such as Eurykleia, whose recognition is crucial to the plot, and the narrator, crucial to the readers, who decodes it for us, so that the story implicit in the scar, including its dogs, becomes as vivid and immediate as those on the shield. The familiar formula of “men and dogs” is personalized here, “with hounds questing” and “Odysseus in the lead, behind the dogs.” With the boar waking in the thicket we hear the “patter of hounds’ feet, men’s feet” (19.501-17). Then boy meets boar, death for one, a scar for the other. The long story of how the scar came to be characterizes Odysseus as a brave and passionate hunter, confirming once again how apt and thoughtful was the brooch Penelope gave Odysseus, the object itself beautiful, the thought behind it strong enough to hold them together through a thousand miles and decades of separation. And once again dogs are shown as a natural part of Greek culture, of “men and dogs,” or in this case, a boy and his dogs.

Though not that numerous by line count among the 48 books and nearly 28,000 lines of the dyad, Homer’s dogs project a larger presence by barking forth and back among themselves. The dogs of the Odyssey presume and subsume the dogs of the Iliad, efficiently evoked by just an echo, to which the sequel adds entirely new threads. Solely within the Odyssey, the dog scenes run in packs, such as the cluster of aesthetic dogs intimating an ars poetica—the guardian statues of Phaiakia, the lovers’ brooch, the baying hounds forever young implicit in Odysseus’ aging scar. Complementing these dogs of artifice, the Odyssey also develops real dogs growling, sniffing, stinking, whimpering, dying, arguably the first compelling dogs as characters in world literature, and in Argos, perhaps still the finest dog to ever grace a page.

Eumaios’ dogs at the pig farm on the back side of Ithaka form their own complex cluster in a series of recognition scenes posed and counterposed over several books, the dogs variously alert, vicious, obedient, affectionate, and also uncannily sensitive to the numinous. As Odysseus makes his way from Phorkys Cove to the farm, he is met by four dogs (Homer numbering again), the first mortal creatures (divine Athena aside) to meet him upon his return to his home island after twenty years absence: “The watch dogs, when they caught sight of Odysseus, / faced him, a snarling troop, and pelted out / viciously after him” (14.32-34). Fraught with irony, the scene is at once profoundly literary and yet realistic and practical. The dogs initiate the mounting irony of the latter half of the epic: the Lord of the island returns to his own, and his own do not recognize him, whether dogs, servants, son, wife, father. More practically, Odysseus does not run, which would further inflame the dogs, but rather,

…………………………………like a tricky beggar
he sat down plump, and dropped his stick. No use.
They would have rolled him in the dust and torn him
there by his own steading if the swineherd
had not sprung up and flung his leather down,
making a beeline for the open. Shouting,
throwing stone after stone,
he made them scatter. (14.34-41)

Fortunately, Eumaios is nearby to save the stranger, who is also his lord, as these few lines quickly establish his character. The throwing of stones may seem harsh—but so are the world and its equivalent of junkyard dogs—and Eumaios knows how things work. He knows his dogs, and they know him. These same dogs don’t know Odysseus at all, but quickly learn that if he is accepted by their master, then he is accepted by them.

Book 16 introduces another homecoming, Telemakhos returning from his own small yet necessary, soul-growing adventure, and he returns to the exact place and cast of characters as Odysseus did—the farm, Eumaios, and the dogs. How differently the dogs respond this time: “When Telemakhos came, / the wolvish troop of watchdogs only fawned on him / as he advanced” (16.5-7). How realistic is their response, so typical of dogs to quickly recognize a voice, a scent, or even, as here, a familiar gait. These are the dogs that tellingly do not bark in the night or at noon. Odysseus, ever alert, attunes his awareness to theirs, and notices the dogs noticing:

……………………..Odysseus heard them go
and heard the light crunch of a man’s footfall—
at which he turned quickly to say:
…………………………………………….“Eumaios,
here is one of your crew come back, or maybe
another friend: the dogs are out there snuffling
belly down; not one has even growled.
I can hear footsteps—” (16.7-14)

Before Odysseus can finish, Telemakhos stands before him, and father and son are reunited, almost, but essentially with the dogs between them as one dynamic measure of the stubborn disconnect between them. And it is the loyal servant Eumaios who embraces Telemakhos, who had been gone for a week, while Odysseus, absent for twenty years, must stand back, held in place by the tensing irony.

Within this same tiny cast of characters on the back side of the island—Odysseus, Eumaios, Telemakhos, and the watchful dogs—Athena re-enters the mix for one more recognition scene. We have seen how horses play a much smaller role in the Odyssey than they did in the Iliad, and how dogs expand into the space the horses have vacated. Likewise the gods, even Zeus, all but Athena, play a smaller role with far fewer lines in the Odyssey, making the sequel less mythological and more natural. Here, too, dogs expand into that newly opened space. But the horses and gods do not disappear entirely, and god and dogs actually meet here in the final recognition scene at the farm, introducing a divinity into the humblest circumstances, flexing the irony once more, and sharing an understanding of dogs that is at once uncanny and realistic. Just a hundred some lines further into the same Book 16, Telemakhos sends Eumaios on an errand into town, leaving father (still incognito) and son awkwardly alone. Athena enters upon Eumaios’ departure:

…………………………………………..From the air
she walked, taking the form of a tall woman,
handsome and clever at her craft, and stood
beyond the gate in plain sight of Odysseus,
unseen, though, by Telemakhos, unguessed,
for not to everyone will gods appear. (16.183-88)

Athena manifests like the ghost in Hamlet, raising a host of questions—who sees it? who hears it? who can speak with it? who can’t? Greek divinity similarly moves in mysterious ways. One of the most extraordinary lines in dog lore follows, though so simply predicated it is easily overlooked: “Odysseus noticed her; so did the dogs” (16.189). The sense of the supernatural is exquisite here because it is not sequestered on Olympus but so intimately fitted to the mundane, including dogs. The same dogs that snarled at Odysseus and fawned before Telemakhos now “cowered whimpering away from Athena” (16.190). Who has not seen a dog bark or whimper, running to or from some seemingly nonexistent thing? They hear and smell better than humans and perhaps enjoy other senses that tingle beyond ours. At this intersection of dogs, god, and human, again we see they do not form a linear hierarchical chain of being, but rather splay in a Venn diagram of variously shared as well as independent phenomena, frequencies, and lives. Dogs and men share a special bond, and yet dogs and gods share things that humans do not, at least not some. Telemakhos cannot see Athena, but he is aware of an aura that pervades the moment and seems to settle upon Odysseus as he reveals his identity to his incredulous son. As father and son reunite, Athena quietly fades into a name to be evoked going forward, while the dogs have seemingly retreated to the sure and accustomed task of keeping an eye on the swine.

From farm to manor and then back to Laius’ garden, Odysseus’ disguise generates the irony that is successively tensed and released through the series of recognition scenes. These scenes with Telemakhos, Penelope, Laius and, on the darker side, the suitors, are crucial to the plot and resolution of the Odyssey. The recognition scene of Argos is hardly necessary at all; Homer seems to include it for the sheer love of dogs. A mere 37 lines in the Greek, Argos’ scene could easily be detached and deleted, and yet, though inessential, it does ably serve two purposes: first, to culminate the dog motif; second, to deepen the pathos and make the reader as teary-eyed as Odysseus himself.

In a complex nexus of resonating similarities and clarifying contrasts, Argos completes the dog motif. For all the anonymous dogs of the Iliad onward, finally one has a name, an animal privilege heretofore limited to Akhilleus’ horses. At the palace doors of Phaiakia the statuary dogs, burnished and “undying,” embody their idealized culture. Argos holds the equivalent place here, but aged, sickly, infested, consigned to a stinking dung pile, dying, and, by scene’s end, dead. He too represents his world. The dogs at the farm, all their senses bristling, greet Odysseus with a snarl and near assault, but Argos,

…………………………………when he knew he heard
Odysseus’ voice nearby, he did his best
to wag his tail, nose down, with flattened ears,
having no strength to move nearer his master. (17.389-92)

Unlike the young watch dogs, understandably ignorant, unlike the suitors, viciously blind, unlike even loyal Eumaios, son Telemakhos, wife Penelope, father Laius, each lapsing into their own hopelessness, this Argos is the only mortal being who recognizes Odysseus and welcomes him into his own land and home.

The Argos scene is risky, straining credibility, verging upon the sentimental, but it stands up to scrutiny. The gap of twenty years, demanded by the well-established timeline of the dyad, is problematic, but a dog can indeed live that long. But can a dog really remember that long? Canine psychology and the phenomenon of imprinting, first impressions indelibly stamped into the mind to never be forgotten, as well as the experiences of millions of dogs and their humans, say yes. In fact, a six-month old dog has a much stronger, though selective, long-term memory than a two-year old child, Lorenz observes.[8] As for the sentiment and sentimentality, the last tail wag, the death, the tears, these too are reasonably realistic within their extraordinary circumstances. Most likely blind, Argos pointedly hears and responds to Odysseus’ voice, and Odysseus, ever alert, gives Argos what a dog relishes, to be praised aloud. (Who’s a good boy?) Then Eumaios, who lacks the awareness of Odysseus but seems to be guided as always by his good heart, joins in that praise. This is exactly how sick, old, beloved dogs are whispered to the threshold of death. The ironies of the moment, both sweet and dangerous, require Odysseus to hide his tears, but apart from the dramatic situation, this is how men, explicitly men, have mourned their dogs for millennia, weeping and yet holding back or hiding those tears in adherence to some unwritten code of manhood. All this sentiment is further grounded in the material world by the dung and flies.

The simplest of names, Argos means hound or dog, making him a universal of sorts, a dog named Dog, as he plangently enacts the commonplaces of dogs dying, many still so prevalent today (and many which apply as well to dying humans). The feces, slop, sores and stench are unavoidable, even with the best care. Against Argos’ present misery, Odysseus and Eumaios fondly recall his better days, his excellencies as a dog, swift, strong, tireless, brave. Just as Odysseus’ scar holographically includes the past, made visible with a just a flick of perspective, a click upon the invisible hyperlink of the linebreak, in this brief scene the whole of Argos’ life is present. Robert Frost taught classics in one chapter of his life, and Argos may well inform his couplet aptly titled “The Span of Life”:

The old dog barks backwards without getting up;
I can remember when he was a pup.[9]

Argos’ scene similarly spans his life, though Odysseus has missed almost everything between his entrance and his exit. Notice how Frost’s little poem comes back to the I who remembers, the aging dog evoking the passage of years in the narrator’s own life. Though it goes unspoken, Argos, so much of his life missed by Odysseus, suggests the years that Odysseus also missed in his relationship with his wife and, more so, in the life of his son. Family dogs are one measure of a childhood, and Argos and Telemakhos are of an age. When we weep for long-lived dying dogs, those tears are tinged with sorrow for the broader passage of time, the years gone and irrecoverable, the innocence and childhood lost. The Odyssey is a comedy, but it is well acquainted with grief, and Argos casts much of that deepening shadow.

The Argos scene integrates dog fact and lore, human psychology, the grit and stench of this world, weepy but well-earned pathos, a unique twist upon the driving irony, and to all this Homer adds what the legendary Longinus would call the sublime. The nearest analogue to the Argos scene in Western literature is the equally brief scene in the Gospel of Luke when the baby Jesus is first brought to the temple. The aged Simeon, waiting so long and loyally for the Messiah, recognizes Jesus as his Lord, and he is satisfied. Odysseus similarly comes unto his own, and his own do not recognize him—except for Argos. In joy Simeon breaks into song, nunc dimittis, “Master, now I can depart in peace, for my eyes have seen your salvation” (2.29-30). Argos recognizes his own Lord’s voice, wags and fawns the best he can, and as Odysseus passes through the door he built into his own hall,

…………..death and darkness in that instant closed
the eyes of Argos, who had seen his master,
Odysseus, after twenty years. (17.420-22)

Luke and Homer, respectively, never mention Simeon and Argos again, but these minor roles befit their beautiful humility. Neither of these willing joyful servants is essential to the looming crises and ultimate triumphs of their Lords, but they have immeasurably enriched the larger stories that go forward without them.

Odysseus knows and loves dogs, and it is only fitting that he become one, if only for one fleeting simile. Late on the eve before the climactic day when the suitors will be avenged and the true lovers finally and fully reunited, Odysseus tosses and turns in the main hall, his disguise becoming unbearable, as he watches the disloyal servants and suitors giggle as they hook-up for one last time in the house he built:

……………………..His heart cried out within him
the way a brach with whelps between her legs
would howl and bristle at a stranger—so
the hackles of his heart rose at that laughter. (20.14-17)

Gilbert Rose faults the Fitzgerald translation for missing the full doggishness of the passage—that the introductory hulaktei from hulakteō might have been better rendered as “Odysseus’ barking heart,” but the simile itself cannot be missed.[10] It may seem odd at first that the simile is cross-gendered, but this allows Odysseus to feel something close to what Penelope might have long felt. Homer will balance the gesture three books later when Penelope shares the feeling of an exhausted sailor nearly lost at sea, crawling onto shore, just as Odysseus had done multiple times (23.262-70). Fitzgerald’s term brach for kuōn, though sounding somewhat archaic, aptly suggests its linguistic cousin bitch, and then redeems it. The whelps or puppies, for skulakessi, is Homerically unique to the Odyssey—the Iliad never uses it—and, in brief, distinguishes the epics’ respective dogs. The Iliad has no need for dogs cute and vulnerable and especially pathetic when abused. Intriguingly, Odysseus’ first introduced the term narrating his adventures to the Phaiakians, how Kyklops “clutched at my companions / and caught two in his hands like squirming puppies / to beat their brains out, spattering the floor” (9.313-15). Odysseus himself seems to make that very association as he steadies himself here on the verge of vengeance in his own hall:

“Down; be steady. You’ve seen worse, that time
the Kyklops like a rockslide ate your men
while you looked on. Nobody, only guile,
got you out of that cave alive.” (20.19-22)

While Fitzgerald may have missed the metaphorical lead, he perfectly closes out the passage, as Odysseus’ “rage / held hard in leash, submitted to his mind” (20.22-23).

Argos in real life, the brach within the simile, represent dogs as real and admirable characters. From this remarkable achievement, Homer’s final dogs regress to the invective and violence of the Iliad. Upon shooting an arrow through Antinoos’ throat, Odysseus reveals himself to the suitors in ferocity Ahkilleus would envy:

“You yellow dogs, you thought I’d never make it
home from the land of Troy. You took my house to plunder,
twisted my maids to serve your beds. You dared
bid for my wife while I was still alive.
Contempt was all you had for the gods who rule wide heaven,
contempt for what men say of you hereafter.
Your last hour has come. You die in blood.” (22.37-43)

All their crimes and sins gather in and under the word dogs. The battle is on, and it will end with dogs as well. At the end of all the slaughter, Melanthios, the disloyal goatherd, is hacked to pieces and has his genitals “pulled off . . . to feed the dogs” (23.529), finally fulfilling in the flesh the primal fear that the Iliad only dared to suggest. The grisly image may seem out of tune with the Odyssey’s otherwise happy ending, but it binds the two epics together. Homer never mentions dogs again.

The domestication of dogs is a matter for anthropologists and cynologists, the precise timeline endlessly debatable but certainly well before the matter of Troy. The Iliad brusquely presumes that domestication, even as a remnant of wild dogs remain. The Odyssey shows dogs becoming characters in their own right, as animals, of course, but uniquely contributing to what it means to be human. Beyond domestication, whether hounds on the hunt, watch dogs at the farm, or Argos at the manor, these dogs enrich humanity, even to a degree humanize humanity. Homer does not sentimentalize dogs as humans themselves, but the two are profoundly related, and it is their shared interests and complementary differences that make this relationship so rewarding, in some ways even more so than that between humans and the Homeric gods. The dogs have certainly aged better. Homer’s gods, while at times profoundly human, remain inextricably mythological; above all, they do not die. Homer’s dogs would be right at home in the 21st century. Each species of being—gods, dogs, human—have their own realm and life, overlapping and intersecting with the others, but each also with its own independence, suggesting a breadth of life that extends beyond the epics themselves. That is the Homeric dogma.

 

Notes

[1] Homer, Iliad, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Doubleday, 1974), 1.1-6. All citations of the Iliad hereafter refer to this edition and appear in text parenthetically.

[2] Christiana Franco, Shameless: The Canine and the Feminine in Ancient Greece, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: California University Press, 2014).

[3] Tony Hoagland, “What These Ithakas Mean: Some Thoughts About Metaphor and Questing,” The Writer’s Chronicle 51.1 (September 2018): 28.

[4] D.B. Monro, ed., Homer’s Odyssey: Books XIII-XXIV (Oxford: 1901), 325; R.B. Rutherford, “From the Iliad to the Odyssey,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 102 (1982): 145-160, rpt. in Oxford Readings in Homer’s Iliad, ed. Douglas L. Cairns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 120.

[5] Homer, Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1961), 4.641-51. All citations of the Odyssey hereafter, unless otherwise noted, refer to this edition and appear in text parenthetically.

[6] These citations refer to the Greek text in the Loeb edition: Homer, Odyssey, trans. A.T. Murray and George Dimock, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

[7] Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953).

[8] Lorenz, Konrad. Man Meets Dog (London: Metheun, 1954).

[9] Robert Frost, “The Span of Life” in The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Holt, 1979), 308.

[10] Gilbert Rose, “Odysseus’ Barking Heart,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 109 (1979): 215-30.