Part VI: The Faithful Dog and the Patient Wife

Argos

Odysseus, still disguised as a beggar, approaches his own palace for the first time in twenty years. At the gate, he passes a heap of dung where an old dog lies, too weak to stand. The dog was once Odysseus's — a hunting dog he bred himself before he sailed for Troy, and never once took out into the field. In the old days, the young men of the estate used him to track wild goats and deer. Now no one looks after him. He is covered in fleas and forgotten.

The dog's name is Argos.

He raises his head. His tail moves. He tries to get up and cannot. He recognizes his master — the only one, of all the people in the palace, who does — and then he dies.

Odysseus passes without stopping. He does not look at the dog. He wipes one tear away quickly, before Eumaeus can see it, and goes inside.

This is eight lines of the poem. Homer does not comment on it. He gives it no discussion question, no moral. He just puts it there and moves on, the way the poem moves on — the way Odysseus has to move on.

It has made readers cry for three thousand years.

The Beggar in the Hall

The suitors abuse the beggar — one pelts him with a footstool. Penelope, who has heard there is a stranger in the hall who claims to have news of Odysseus, sends word that she wishes to speak with him.

In a deeply tense scene, the disguised Odysseus speaks with his own wife, who does not know him. He invents an elaborate story about meeting Odysseus on his travels. He cannot resist praising him. Penelope weeps. He watches his wife cry over news of himself, and does not move.

Penelope asks the old nurse Eurycleia to wash the guest's feet — an honor she reserves for travelers. Eurycleia washes him and feels, under her hands, a scar on his thigh — from a boar hunt on Mount Parnassus in his youth. She knows it immediately. She looks up at him with the water still on her hands.

Odysseus grabs her throat, gently, and whispers: tell no one.

She doesn't.

Discussion

1. Argos recognizes his master after twenty years and dies. Why does Homer place this scene exactly here — at the moment Odysseus first crosses his own threshold? What does the dog represent?
2. Odysseus watches Penelope weep over news of himself and says nothing. What does this restraint cost him? What would he lose by revealing himself?
3. Only Eurycleia recognizes him — by a scar, not by his face. What does it mean that the body remembers in ways that even twenty years cannot erase?