What the Ancient Greeks Named Their Dogs

Most of what we know about the names Greeks gave their dogs comes from men who hunted hares. The fullest single piece of evidence is a list of 47 names in a short Athenian treatise on hunting, written in the late fifth or fourth century BC. Around it sit a handful of other witnesses: a dying hound in Homer, a Roman-era Greek writer’s tribute to his favorite greyhound, a Roman poet’s catalogue of a mythical pack, a painted vase with its dogs labelled, a Roman farm manual and a short epitaph for a dead lapdog. Taken together they show a naming habit with its own logic. They also show how narrow the evidence is.

A hunting manual’s list of forty-seven names

The Cynegeticus, or On Hunting, comes down to us under the name of Xenophon, the Athenian soldier and writer born around 430 BC. Its authorship is not settled. E. C. Marchant, who translated it for the Loeb series in 1925, judged the technical chapters to be contemporary with Xenophon and possibly his work, but he was frank about the problem: “The style does not in the least suggest Xenophon: much of the matter, both in the technical part and in the epilogue, does suggest him.”¹ What follows calls the author Xenophon for convenience.

The name list comes in chapter 7, among practical instructions for breeding and raising hounds. The author tells his reader to rest bitches in winter, leave puppies with their own mothers and feed them milk rather than heavy food. Then he turns to naming. In Marchant’s translation: “Give the hounds short names, so as to be able to call to them easily.” The list that follows runs from Psyche and Thymus to Hebe, Chara, Bia, Spudê, Gnomê and, last of all, Hormê.²

The reason given is purely practical. The hunt the treatise describes used nets and a pack of scent hounds, and the huntsman had to call individual dogs off false trails or on to a fresh line.³² Earlier in the same treatise the author lists the many ways hounds go wrong: those that run wildly round the track, those that bark on false lines, those “deaf to all recall.”² A name that can be shouted in a breath was a working tool.

What the names meant

Nearly every name on the list is an ordinary Greek word turned into a name. The Romanian classicist Răzvan Bran, who analysed all 47 in a 2011 study, found that most were common nouns or participles used unchanged as names, while a smaller group was built from familiar words with standard suffixes. The source words fall into a few groups: weapons and gear (Lonchê, “lance”; Styrax, the spike at the butt end of a spear; Xiphon, from the word for sword), physical and mental qualities (Rhomê, “strength”; Gnomê, “thought”; Medas, which Marchant renders “Crafty”), and states of mind (Chara, “joy”; Orgê, “anger”; Spudê, “zeal”; Hormê, “impulse” or “onrush”).³²⁴

Bran draws three further conclusions. First, grammatical gender followed the dog’s sex: masculine forms such as Thymus, Phylax and Sthenon were for males, feminine forms such as Psyche, Lonchê and Hormê for females. Second, none of the names describes a fault. Every one praises something a hunter wanted. Third, many carry military overtones, which fits a culture that treated hunting as training for war.³ Marchant’s footnote reaches a similar point more briefly: “The names are significant of the colour, strength, spirit, sagacity or behaviour of the hounds.”²

Not every name is clear. Bran notes that Kainon could come from a verb meaning “to kill” or from the adjective for “new,” and Marchant suspected that the transmitted Polys is a copying error for Poleus, which he rendered “Rover.”³² Translations of the list therefore vary, and any confident one-word gloss of every name goes beyond the evidence.

Did the author invent these names or record ones already in use? No one knows. Bran thinks a technical manual most likely wrote down names that hunters already gave their dogs.³ A Greek reader of the second century AD, as we will see, believed some were the author’s own creations.⁵

Argos, the swift

The most famous Greek dog appears centuries before the hunting manual. In book 17 of the Odyssey, Odysseus, back on Ithaca and disguised as a beggar, comes to his palace and finds his old hound Argos lying neglected on a dung heap before the palace doors. Odysseus had bred the dog himself but left for Troy before he could enjoy him. When Argos senses his master, he wags his tail and drops his ears but is too weak to come closer, and Odysseus hides a tear. The swineherd Eumaeus, not knowing who he is talking to, recalls the dog in his prime: “No creature that he started in the depths of the thick wood could escape him, and in tracking too he was keen of scent.” Then Argos dies, “in the twentieth year.”⁶

The name itself is a description. The Greek adjective argos means “shining,” and in Homer it is regularly applied to hounds in the sense of “swift-footed,” because fast movement seemed to flicker. The standard lexicon of ancient Greek lists Argos, the dog’s name at Odyssey 17.292, as “Swift-foot.”⁴ Argos is a character in an epic poem, not a documented animal, but the name fits the pattern of the hunting manual: short, and praising a quality a hunter valued.

The same passage also hints that not every Greek dog was a hunter. Odysseus, playing his part, asks whether Argos was any good in the field or was merely one of the “table-dogs” that masters keep for show.⁶ Homer gives no names for those.

Hormê and the second Xenophon

About five centuries after the hunting manual, a Greek writer from Nicomedia in Bithynia, Flavius Arrianus, wrote his own Cynegeticus about coursing hares with fast Celtic greyhounds, a kind of hound the older treatise did not know. Arrian admired the earlier author so much that he wrote as his “namesake and fellow-citizen,” and he refers to himself as Xenophon.⁵ His 1831 English translator, William Dansey, called him “the younger Xenophon.”⁵ This has caused a lasting confusion, because Arrian’s most famous passage is about his own dog, and it is easy to credit it to the Athenian.

In chapter 5, Arrian describes a hound he had bred himself, fast, tireless and gentle, which followed him to the gymnasium, sat by him while he exercised, pawed at him during meals to ask for its share and had “many tones of speech” for saying what it wanted. Then he names her: “Now really I do not think that I should be ashamed to write even the name of this dog; that it may be left to posterity, that Xenophon the Athenian had a greyhound called Hormé, of the greatest speed and intelligence, and altogether supremely excellent.”⁵

Dansey’s English calls the dog “he,” but in a note he admits that he changed the sex: Arrian’s Greek is feminine, the superlatives Dansey quotes in his notes have feminine endings, and Hormê is a feminine name. The dog was probably a bitch.⁵³ The name itself appears on the older author’s list.² Arrian does not say whether he took it from there.

Arrian also records how names were used in the field. When a greyhound caught its hare, he tells the rider to dismount, pat and kiss the dog and praise it by name: “Well done, Cirras!” “Well done, Bonnas!” “Bravo, my Hormé!” Dansey thought Kirra (the Greek form of Cirras) was probably named for a reddish coat and admitted he could not explain Bonna.⁵ Arrian endorsed the older advice on short names and called the earlier list “cleverly composed,” adding that the names were “in part the invention of others, and some of his own creation.”⁵

A poet’s pack, a painted hunt and an epitaph

The longest list of dog names in classical literature is not Greek at all, though the names are. In book 3 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, written in Latin in the early first century AD, the hunter Actaeon sees the goddess Diana bathing and is turned into a stag, and his own hounds pull him down. Ovid names more than thirty of them: Melampus of Spartan breed and Ichnobates from Crete, Pamphagus, Dorceus and Oribasus from Arcadia, then Laelaps, Theron, Harpyia with her two pups, Labros and Argiodus, born of a Cretan sire and a Laconian dam, and many more, before he stops with “quosque referre mora est” (“and others it would take too long to tell”).⁷ Brookes More’s 1922 translation renders most of the names in English, so that Melampus becomes “Blackfoot,” Ichnobates “Tracer” and Pamphagus “Glutton.”⁷

Ovid’s pack is literary invention, and many of its names are longer than any working huntsman would choose. Still, several overlap with other sources. Alce and Lacon are among Ovid’s hounds, Alkê is on the hunting manual’s list, and both turn up again in a Roman farm manual.⁷²⁸

Painted names are older still. On the François Vase, an Athenian black-figure krater painted by Kleitias around 570 BC and found at Chiusi in Etruria in 1844, the dogs in the hunt for the Calydonian boar are identified by name. The MANTO database of Greek myth records seven: Labros, Methepon, Egertes, Eubolos, Korax, Marpsas and Ormenos.⁹ Labros, the name of one of Actaeon’s hounds in Ovid, was evidently already a dog’s name in sixth-century Athens.⁹⁷

One of the very few named dogs outside hunting comes from an epitaph preserved in the Greek Anthology. A short poem attributed to Tymnes says that the stone covers a white Maltese dog, the faithful guardian of its owner. “They called him Bull,” the poem says, while he was alive.¹⁰

The Roman view and the limits of the evidence

The Roman agricultural writer Columella, working in the first century AD, gives the clearest statement of the rule behind all these names. Writing about farm watchdogs and shepherds’ dogs (he says hunting dogs have nothing to do with farming), he advises naming puppies with names that are not very long, so that each dog hears quickly when called, but not shorter than two syllables. His examples are Greek skylax and lakon and Latin Ferox and Celer for males; for females, Greek spoude, alke and rome and Latin Lupa, Cerva and Tigris.⁸ Three of his five Greek examples (Spudê, Alkê and Rhomê) are on the hunting manual’s list, and Tigris is one of Actaeon’s hounds.²⁷

So names passed between Greek and Latin writers and from hunting hounds to farm dogs. They did not pass unchanged into modern times. Marchant, writing for English readers in 1925, could point out that Hebe and Psyche “are still in the list of bitches’ names” and that some others had English counterparts such as Lance and Sentinel.² That is a resemblance of meaning, not a continuous tradition, and most of the ancient names, from Orgê (“anger”) to Hybris, have no modern equivalent.

The limits of the evidence matter. Almost everything comes from hunting writers, from poets describing heroes and gods, or from an artist labelling a myth. These were the dogs of men with leisure and land. The hunting manual’s list is advice, not a census, and nobody knows how many Athenians called their dogs Psyche or Hormê. Argos and Actaeon’s hounds are fictional. Of named dogs that were not hounds, we have little more than one Maltese dog called Bull, known from a single poem. What the sources do show is a consistent idea, shared across several centuries of Greek and Roman writing, that a dog’s name should be short, easy to shout and say something good about the animal that answered to it.

Footnotes

1. Marchant 1925, Introduction, pp. xxxix-xlii. ↩

2. Xenophon, Cynegeticus 3.5-9, 7.1-5 (Marchant trans.), with Marchant’s note to 7.5. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

3. Bran 2011, pp. 597-603. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

4. LSJ s.vv. ἀργός (A), στύραξ (B), ὁρμή. ↩ ↩²

5. Arrian, Cynegeticus 1, 5 and 18, and Dansey’s notes 71, 82-83, 164-166 and biographical notice (Dansey 1831). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

6. Homer, Odyssey 17.290-327 (Murray trans.). ↩ ↩²

7. Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.206-225 (Magnus text; More trans.). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

8. Columella, De Re Rustica 7.12.1-3 and 7.12.13. ↩ ↩²

9. MANTO, Florence 4209 (François Vase). ↩ ↩²

10. Greek Anthology 7.211 (Tymnes), Paton trans. ↩