The story goes back for a moment to the palace gate that day. It was the moment Eumaeus and Odysseus were going in, and on the dung heap by the gate lay an old dog.
His coat was falling out and he was crawling with fleas. He had once been the swiftest hunting dog in the country, Argos, raised by the hand of Odysseus before he left for Troy.
In the twenty years without his master nobody had cared for him. People had forgotten whether he was even alive, and the dog was spending his last days on a dung heap.