From Ancient Times To Today, We Love Good Dogs

When you are a young father, you have to make a choice at some point about what is, to my mind, an important thing: what will be the first movie your children will ever see? It matters even if they don’t remember it. If they love it, it matters more. So you have to spend more than a moment of thinking about it, particularly if, as many of us are, the idea that you would put a barely cognizant child before a flickering screen begets responsibility for what comes from it.

For this reason, my three children have all had the same movie play before them before their first birthday, intentionally and without hesitation: “Isle of Dogs,” Wes Anderson’s stop motion journey through the Japanese archipelago of the future. My daughters have memorized it fully – they quote the jokes and even the Japanese lines with readiness. There is, in the early days, a confusion that not all dogs sound like Bryan Cranston or Liev Schreiber. But they understand that there is a language gap. They know the label of man’s best friend. And they know what it means to say: I’ve gone to find my dog.

Amidst the overheated discourse surrounding Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey” – the summer flick which launched ten thousand takes – there was one thread which stuck out to me, even as someone who lacks the linguistic and antiquarian knowledge to fully analyze what that vest-wearing troublesome child of Westminster threw into our discourse. That was the rejection by the supposed poorly-tattooed muse for the screenplay, Emily Wilson, of key aspects of Nolan’s creation: she found it too modern, too wrought, too different from both the original and her own interpretation. Fine. But this was the line that stuck out to me: an irritation at an iconic scene of Odysseus’ reunion with his long-serving pup, Argos. Her dismissal was that it was too modern, too mawkish: “everybody’s a sucker for a dog”.

Emily Wilson after watching the Odyssey:

‘The film presents an Odysseus who feels very bad about things that he’s done in war, and is struggling to process them in a very modern, psychiatrised way – and needs drugs to do so! He seems to feel bad about being a warrior, and we… pic.twitter.com/m0rfyHd7Ux

— Gareth Harney (@OptimoPrincipi) July 22, 2026

Ms. Wilson is entitled to her opinion, but the role of Argos in “The Odyssey” is an emotional connection she seems unfamiliar with. Perhaps she is, as her appearance suggests, a cat lady. But even so, she should understand the unique nature of man’s relationship with dog, which the Greco-Roman era highlights throughout our discovery of their unique and heartfelt tributes. The ancients buried their dogs with markers; they wept and mourned them; they wrote verses for them; and they knew them as loyal friends, fellow hunters, and protectors of home and hearth. To dismiss Argos as if he is some inserted bit of sappy emotion – the sort of lazy, emotionally manipulative, unearthly thing that appears, CGI hair ubiquitous, in the films of James Gunn, brought to you by James Gunn – is to dramatically underestimate his importance.

Am I saying Odysseus might have left Calypso just to find his dog, to say goodbye?

Yes, I am.

“Surely, even as you lie dead in this tomb, I deem the wild beasts yet fear your white bones, huntress Lycas; and your valor great Pelion knows, and splendid Ossa and the lonely peaks of Cithaeron.”

This is the memory etched in the tomb of a Thessalian hunting hound, and it is of a piece with the memories that Greeks and Romans alike left behind for their companions. There is the dog of Eumelus of Malta – whose name was Bull, or Tauros – “This stone holds the white dog from Melita, the most faithful guardian of Eumelus; Bull they called him while he was yet alive, but now his voice is imprisoned in the silent pathways of night.” Or for the woman Rhodope, who buried her devoted protector beside her eventual grave. Or for Tauron, who protected his master to the end:

A dog is interred beneath this marker—Tauron who was not undone when faced with a killer. For he encountered a boar in direct combat… But the dog struck two feet into its back and grabbed the bristling beast in the middle of its chest and drove it down into the ground—he made a gift of the beast to Hades and died himself… He saved the life of Zenon, the hunter he followed. So he is buried here beneath this light dust.

The encounter with Argos is a particularly poignant one: he recognizes Odysseus after 20 years of absence, wags his tail in greeting, and dies an honorable death having stayed alive to welcome his master home. The story is so iconic that it is echoed across media for centuries, and it’s not like it’s gone now. Is there any question that the one episode anyone who ever watched “Futurama” remembers is Jurassic Bark, where Fry’s dog remains steadfast in wait of his master? Sam’s sacrifice in “I Am Legend” is the heart of a relatively forgettable movie. Or what about John Wick, a series which is entirely based on the premise of what a retired expert assassin would do if you kill his dog?

As a former speechwriter, the notion that this love of dogs is some modern tendency is at odds with the understanding that the greatest single speech in American history isn’t the Gettysburg address; it’s a random speech in defense of a lonely dog, delivered by future Senator George Graham Vest in a courthouse in Missouri in 1870. The case was decidedly against the now deceased canine – but Vest won based on his eulogy, which is unmatched in American rhetoric:

Gentlemen of the Jury: The best friend a man has in this world may turn against him and become his enemy. His son and daughter that he has reared with loving care may become ungrateful. Those who are nearest and dearest to us, those whom we trust with our happiness and our good name, may become traitors to their faith. The money that a man has he may lose. It flies away from him when he may need it most. Man’s reputation may be sacrificed in a moment of ill considered action. The people who are prone to fall on their knees and do us honor when success is with us may be the first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our heads. The one absolutely unselfish friend a man may have in this world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous is the dog.

A man’s dog stands by him in prosperity and poverty, in health and in sickness. He will sleep on the cold ground when the wintry winds blow and the snow drives fiercely, if only he may be near his master’s side. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer. He will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounter with the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince.

When all other friends desert, he remains. When riches take wings and reputation falls to pieces he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journey through the heavens. If fortune drives the master forth an outcast into the world, friendless and homeless, the faithful dog asks no higher privilege than that of accompanying him to guard him against danger, to fight against his enemies, and when the last scene of all comes and death takes his master in its embrace and his body is laid away in the cold ground, no matter if all other friends pursue their way, there by his graveside will the noble dog be found, his head between his paws and his eyes sad, but open in alert watchfullness, faithful and true even to death.

A statue is erected in Johnson County in honor of Old Drum, who was, despite his faults, a very good dog. Let Emily Wilson have her vagaries about “The Odyssey,” about masculinity and PTSD, modernity and its insufficient feminism – but do not, for one moment, let her take from us the friendship of a man and his dog.