There’s actually a valid reason Odysseus’ dog Argos lived for 20 years in The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey left us sobbing over Argos the dog, but once the tears dried up, loads of people were left asking the exact same question: How on earth is he still alive after 20 years?

It turns out there’s actually a pretty simple explanation, and it all comes down to the world Homer created.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Argos is Odysseus’ loyal hunting dog, who he raised from a puppy before leaving to fight in the Trojan War. While Odysseus was away for two decades, Argos was left behind and neglected. When his owner finally returned to Ithaca, the ageing dog was the only one who recognised him straight away.

Nolan’s film makes the whole storyline even more emotional by showing much more of Argos’ life.

Early in the film, Eumaeus tells Telemachus stories about his father, Odysseus, and how he first met Argos. Through a series of flashbacks, we see the dog as an excited puppy happily licking Odysseus’ face before later appearing as a fully grown hunting dog. The pair are even shown hunting a wild boar together.

The film then returns to an elderly Argos, still faithfully waiting for Odysseus to come home from war all those years later. Seeing the dog at every stage of his life makes it much more obvious that he’s somehow survived for 20 years, which has left plenty of people confused.

Twenty years is an incredibly long lifespan for a dog, but that’s where the mythology comes in.

An explanation for the dog’s age is that Homer is set in this sort of quasi-historical fantasy legendary ‘Age of Heroes’. In Greek mythology, the Age of Heroes is essentially a legendary period where people weren’t like ordinary humans. Heroes were bigger, stronger, better-looking and had much closer relationships with the gods than later generations.

The heroes in the story are all meant to be stronger and hotter and on better terms with the gods and the like than mortals. There are examples of this throughout Homer’s epics: In Iliad 5 and then 12 it says Diomedes and then Hector pick up really big rocks which nowadays it would take two men to lift up, but they were able to toss about easily.

So if humans in this mythical world could do things that would be impossible today, it isn’t much of a stretch to think animals were a bit different too. It’s reasonable that in this fantasy-ish age, dogs also had slightly longer life expectancies.

Basically, Argos isn’t meant to be an unusually old dog by the standards of Homer’s world. He’s living during the legendary Age of Heroes, where people could perform superhuman feats, interacted with gods and, apparently, dogs got a few extra years too.

He really did wait his entire life for Odysseus to come home.

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Featured image credit: Universal