To know love is to be loved by a dog

“So Argos lay there dirty,

Covered with fleas. And when he realised

Odysseus was near, he wagged his tail,

and both his ears dropped back. He was too weak to move towards his master. At a distance,

Odysseus had noticed, and he wiped

his tears away and hid them easily.”

— Emily Wilson, The Odyssey, Book 17, lines 290–296

Twenty years he had waited. He had been a hunting dog in his prime—brave and intelligent, swift, with a penchant for danger. He had a master. He had only been a pup when that master disappeared. From then on, he never saw him again.

Slowly, the household he had once known began to disintegrate. The familiar faces vanished, replaced by strangers he no longer recognised. So he waited for his master to return. He did not perceive time as the humans around him did. Seasons changed. The foliage changed. The wind and the warmth of the sun upon his skin changed. The only thing that did not change was the waiting.

After a while, waiting became the sole purpose of his short life—a life that, surprisingly to humans, stretched far longer than they imagined a dog's could. For twenty years he waited, until the scent and sight of his master finally reached his frail body, now covered with ticks and lying atop a heap of manure. Only then did he allow himself to sleep peacefully, never to wake again.

It is almost wondrous to think that nearly 2,700 years ago Homer chose to write about the emotions of a dog. Argus is the first dog in Western literature on whom people have built entire academic careers. Ruth Scodel has argued that the episode performs a dual function: it evokes anticipatory grief in the reader before moving seamlessly into Odysseus' conversation with Eumaeus about wealth, the socio-political condition of Ithaca, and the meaning of a household without its patriarch. Irene de Jong observes that Argus is the only one of Odysseus' philoi—his loved ones—to recognise him instantly. Everyone else requires proof: a scar, a bow, or some carefully revealed sign. Argus simply knows.

Christopher Nolan takes this a step further in The Odyssey (2026), where the scene unfolds rather differently. Eumaeus walks ahead, but Odysseus does not. He pauses to acknowledge Argus, who has faithfully waited for him all these years. Argus responds as he does in Homer: his body relaxes, his tail gives a faint wag, his ears droop, and he dies. Odysseus, however, does not simply move on. He turns to Telemachus and tells him that Argus should be taken to the cliff and given a proper burial. It is only then that Telemachus recognises his father. Even the son is given a sign.

This acknowledgement is significant because most filmmakers and adaptors have overlooked Argus altogether. Nolan recently remarked that he had wanted to make The Odyssey because it was "the ultimate dog story". Nolan has also spoken about how, after his sons left for university, he and his wife Emma Thomas finally adopted their first dog—a chocolate Labrador named Charlie. One cannot help but wonder whether becoming a dog parent encouraged Nolan to reread The Odyssey with gentler, more compassionate eyes.

The 2024 film The Return, directed by the Italian filmmaker Uberto Pasolini and starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus, presents a similarly moving reunion. Argus, hearing his name, lifts his head towards his long-absent master. His ears fall back as he meets Odysseus' gaze before quietly lying down to die. He licks his master's hand one last time, and Odysseus does not recoil. Instead, he gently strokes him as tears stream down his face. As he walks away with Eumaeus, he glances back one final time, his eyes filled with quiet remorse.

The classicist Bernd Steinbock has pointed out that Homer does something rather remarkable in his description of Argus. Both Argus and Telemachus are portrayed as having received little benefit from Odysseus' care. Each was raised only to be abandoned. Homer silently invites us to compare a dog's devotion with a son's. The dog wins.

But Argus' story is not the only tale of a dog who waited endlessly.

In 1858, in Edinburgh, there lived Bobby, a Skye Terrier. Bobby belonged to John Gray, a night watchman—perhaps even a constable with the city police—who was affectionately known as "Auld Jock" among his few friends. For two years, Bobby and Jock were inseparable, until Gray died suddenly of tuberculosis.

After his master's death, Gray was buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard. Bobby seemed to know only one thing: he had always protected his master, and now that his master could no longer be protected, Bobby refused to leave his grave.

Although the cemetery caretaker repeatedly drove him away, Bobby always returned. Apart from a brief daily visit to a nearby inn at precisely one o'clock for a meal, he remained faithfully beside the grave. Days became weeks. Weeks became months. As the bitter Scottish winters arrived one after another, kindly neighbours fed him, sheltering and caring for the orphaned little dog whom the city had come to love.

For fourteen long years Bobby remained at Gray's grave before dying in 1872. He was buried close to his beloved master.

Victorian Britain became captivated by the story of the little terrier. In 1867, the Lord Provost of Edinburgh officially licensed Bobby so that he could not be removed as a stray. Following his death, a bronze statue was unveiled on Candlemaker Row in 1873. Even today, visitors to Edinburgh are struck by the number of places that continue to celebrate Bobby's memory. His statue remains one of the city's most photographed landmarks.

Like many beloved stories, however, Bobby's tale is not without controversy. A Swedish historian, comparing early and later photographs of Bobby, argued that the dogs appeared significantly different and suggested that the original Bobby had died much earlier, having been replaced by another terrier—after all, it is exceptionally rare for a Skye Terrier to live beyond twelve years. Whether this claim is true remains uncertain. What endures, however, are the words engraved upon Bobby's headstone:

"Let his loyalty and devotion be a lesson to us all."

No one disputes the fourteen snow-covered winters spent guarding John Gray's grave.

Nearly seventy years later, and almost nine thousand kilometres to the east, another dog would become a symbol of unwavering devotion.

In Shibuya, Japan, lived Hachikō, an Akita Inu born on 10 November 1923 on a farm near Ōdate in Akita Prefecture. In 1924, he was adopted by Professor Hidesaburō Ueno, an associate professor in the Department of Agriculture at Tokyo Imperial University. Every morning, Hachikō accompanied Ueno to Shibuya Station as the professor left for work. Every afternoon, he returned to the station to greet him on his journey home.

Their gentle routine continued until the fateful day in May 1925 when Professor Ueno suffered a fatal cerebral haemorrhage while at work and never returned to the station. But how could Hachikō have known that?

Every afternoon, without fail, for the next ten years, the little Akita waited at Shibuya Station, hoping his master would step off the train. At first, the station staff found his presence troublesome and frequently chased him away. Gradually, however, shopkeepers and commuters began feeding him, and those around him came to admire his extraordinary loyalty. Japan changed around him, but Hachikō's routine never faltered.

He became a national symbol of devotion. Hachikō may have been without a master, but he was never without love.

In 1934, while he was still alive, commuters raised enough money to erect a bronze statue in his honour outside Shibuya Station. At its unveiling, the unassuming dog sat quietly beside his own likeness, seemingly indifferent to the attention. Soon afterwards, on 8 March 1935, Hachikō died on a street near the station.

Years later, researchers uncovered an even more heartbreaking truth: throughout his final years, Hachikō had been suffering from terminal cancer as well as a severe parasitic infection. Yet neither illness altered his routine. He kept returning to the station, day after day.

During the Second World War, his bronze statue was melted down for the war effort. After the war, it was recast and permanently reinstalled outside Exit 8 of Shibuya Station, an entrance now universally known as the "Hachikō Exit". Thousands of commuters arrange to meet there every day, but how many pause to remember the loyal dog who never abandoned the hope that his master might return?

Today, Hachikō's preserved body remains on permanent display at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Ueno Park, Tokyo.

Three dogs. Three continents. Nearly three thousand years apart. The only thing they share is an indomitable refusal to surrender to what the world insists is reality.

Argus waited on the threshold of his home, believing that somewhere his master still lived. Only when that hope was fulfilled could he finally rest. Bobby knew his master would never return, yet he remained beside his grave for reasons no dog could ever articulate and no human can fully comprehend. Hachikō waited for a reunion that could never come. In doing so, he carried the burden of hope—and the disappointment that accompanied it—for ten long years.

Dogs do not care for evidence once they care for you. Their love is irrational, unconditional and immeasurable. They carry the scent of those they love throughout their brief lives. To us, they are companions for only a small chapter of our existence. To them, we are the whole story.

The tragedy of Argus has perhaps been captured most poignantly by the British painter Briton Rivière, whose oil painting depicts the dying dog gazing wistfully towards the master who has finally returned but cannot yet acknowledge him. Who could have imagined that this fleeting moment from Homer's epic would become one of the emotional centres of Christopher Nolan's biggest film?

The Odyssey is Nolan's thirteenth feature film and the first feature-length film to be shot entirely with IMAX cameras. Released worldwide on 17 July 2026, it received an overwhelming response, comfortably surpassing Oppenheimer at the global box office. Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland portray Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus respectively.

Among the film's many unforgettable moments, two scenes have consistently left audiences in tears: the first meeting between Odysseus and Argus, when the latter is still an exuberant puppy, and their final reunion decades later. Unlike previous adaptations, Nolan allows Odysseus to insist that Argus be given a proper burial—a choice that feels entirely consistent with a hero haunted throughout the film by the countless companions who died without receiving honourable funerals.

Before Warner Bros. entrusted Wolfgang Petersen with directing Troy (2004), Nolan had reportedly been involved in developing an adaptation of the Trojan epic. The desire to translate Homer for the screen, then, had long existed. Yet the Nolan of 2004 is very different from the Nolan of 2026: a filmmaker with a formidable body of work, two Academy Awards, and, perhaps most importantly, his first dog.

Following the film's release, Nolan reflected in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter:

"It's funny when you look at the films you've made and how they parallel your life. You get married, and then you make a film in which that relationship is important. You have kids, and then you find yourself making films about trying to get home for your kids. I had never had a dog, and a few years ago, we got our first dog as the kids were leaving for college. They were kind of bitter about it. They'd always wanted a dog, and we'd never been able to have one because we were travelling too much. And coming to The Odyssey, it's the ultimate dog movie. So I was definitely better prepared to take on the ultimate dog movie having become a dog owner."

In his appearances on several talk shows, including The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Nolan has repeatedly and unequivocally described The Odyssey as "the ultimate dog story". More intriguing still is a detail that surfaced through production paperwork and Greek government subsidy filings, tracked by several film industry accounts. According to these reports, the film's working title for more than a year was Charlie's Tale—a quiet tribute to Charlie, Nolan's chocolate Labrador.

There is a familiar trope of the reluctant dog owner: someone who never wanted a dog, only to discover that the animal gradually becomes their entire world. The dog transforms not only their daily routine but also the way they see love itself. Suddenly, John Wick—a man willing to wage war against an army of assassins in pursuit of those who killed his dog—no longer seems absurd. What once appeared to be an outrageous premise begins to feel strangely understandable.

Beneath the thunderous IMAX cameras, the staggering $250 million budget, and the monumental spectacle of Nolan's The Odyssey, lies something unexpectedly intimate: a quiet thank-you letter from one of contemporary cinema's greatest filmmakers. It is the gratitude of a man who returned to thirty-odd lines from a Bronze Age epic and found, after becoming a dog owner himself, an entirely new way of reading them. Naming the film's working title after Charlie feels like the most affectionate, unabashedly dog-owner-esque gesture imaginable.

Homer wrote Argus as the embodiment of unwavering loyalty to an aging hero. Yet when Odysseus discreetly wipes away his tears, he acknowledges something far greater than heroic devotion. In that brief moment, Homer captures a truth that generations have continued to discover and rediscover: love is perhaps understood most completely not through grand declarations or epic victories, but through the quiet, unquestioning faith of a dog.

For thousands of years, readers have returned to Argus, just as visitors continue to stand beside Bobby's grave in Edinburgh and gather beneath Hachikō's statue outside Shibuya Station. Their stories endure because they remind us of a love untouched by reason, untouched by time, and untouched even by death.

Perhaps that is why Christopher Nolan is right. The Odyssey is, indeed, the ultimate dog story.

For, in the end, you do not truly know love until you have been loved by a dog.

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