Pallas Athena and the Herdsman's Dogs

The dogs see what humans cannot

In Book 16 of Homer’s Odyssey, the goddess Athena appears at the hut of the swineherd Eumaeus. Telemachus cannot see her, but the herdsman’s dogs can. They do not bark. They whimper and slink away in fear.

Briton Rivière, the Victorian painter best known for his animals, chose exactly that moment. He showed the picture at the Royal Academy in 1876. It now belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

A goddess wrapped in white

Athena stands alone on a rocky rise, wrapped in a pale mantle from head to foot, one hand at her throat. She is calm and still, almost a statue. Nothing about her is threatening, yet she is the cause of all the movement around her.

Rivière painted her in the same pale tones as the dry landscape and the sky, so that she seems to belong to the light itself.

Four dogs, four reactions

In the foreground, a golden dog creeps away with its head low, while a black dog lifts its nose towards her and backs off. Both are tense, tails down.

At the left, another dog rolls onto its back in submission, paws in the air.

At the right, a white dog crouches and looks up, frozen between fear and fascination. Rivière studied animals closely, and each pose reads as a believable response of a real dog to something it cannot understand.

An animal painter telling an ancient story

Rivière often used animals to carry the emotion of a scene, from faithful dogs to Daniel’s lions. Here the human story is almost absent. The dogs are the witnesses, and their fear tells us that the woman on the rock is a goddess.

Questions about Pallas Athena and the Herdsman’s Dogs

What story does it show?

Odyssey, Book 16: Athena appears at Eumaeus’s hut, and only the dogs sense her presence.

Where is the original?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

When was it painted?

It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1876.

Who was Briton Rivière?

A Victorian painter (1840 to 1920), famous for scenes in which animals carry the story.

Sources and image credit

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Pallas Athena and the Herdsman’s Dogs
• Homer, Odyssey, Book 16 (Perseus Digital Library)

Public-domain reproduction of Pallas Athena and the Herdsman’s Dogs (1876). Detail images are crops of the same historical painting; no reconstruction or upscaling.