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fleeing enemy he wrote, with a hint of boast, “They were afraid that some
lyssa,
like that of dogs, had seized our men.” After he was exiled from Athens to the Peloponnesian town of Scillus, Xenophon spent his postmilitary years in a happy reverie of hunting and writing, pursuits that converged in his
Cynegeticus
. He describes his ideal hounds in sumptuous detail: flat and muscular head, small thin ears, long straight tail, sparkling black eyes; theforelegs “short, straight, round and firm”; the hips “round and fleshy at the back, not close at the top, and smooth on the inside”; the hind legs “much longer than the forelegs and slightly bent.” Profound respect suffuses every line of the
Cynegeticus
. Xenophon chastens the hunter not to employ collars that might chafe the dog’s coat. He prescribes the praise that should be showered upon the hounds while they chase the hare. “Now, hounds, now!” one is enjoined to shout. “Well done! Bravo, hounds! Well done, hounds!” *
    Nevertheless, scavenging dogs also roamed Greek fields and towns, carrying upon them the stench of death.
The
Iliad
invokes the dog perhaps twenty times as a devourer of corpse flesh, the first instance occurring in the second sentence of the epic’s very first stanza: “Many a brave soul did [the anger of Achilles] send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield as prey to dogs and vultures.” Hector’s father, the old king Priam, captures the sad irony of the fate that lies in store for him as he contemplates his imminent death at the hand of Achilles. “My dogs in front of my doorway,” he foretells,
    will rip me raw, after some man with stroke of the sharp bronze
    spear, or with spearcast, has torn the life out of my body;
    those dogs I raised in my halls to be at my table, to guard my
    gates, who will lap my blood in the savagery of their anger
    and then lie down in my courts. For a young man all is decorous
    when he is cut down in battle and torn with the sharp bronze, and lies there
    dead, and though dead still all that shows about him is beautiful;
    but when an old man is dead and down, and the dogs mutilate
    the grey head and the grey beard and the parts that are secret,
    this, for all sad mortality, is the sight most pitiful.
    The word “dog” was also hurled as an epithet to decry the shameless man or woman;
The Iliad
finds Iris slinging it at Athena and Helen of Troy applying it ruefully to herself.
    Beyond the dog’s fondness for corpse flesh, it also could succumb at any time (literally or metaphorically) to the frenzied madness of
lyssa
. One need look no further than the mythic fate of Actaeon, the hunter whose severe misfortune it is to stumble across Diana, goddess of the hunt, as she bathes in the woods. To punish him, she turns him into a stag, prompting a second, bestial transformation that causes his death: his own beloved hounds, seized by
lyssa
at the sight of his new form, set upon him and tear him limb from limb.
    Ovid, in the
Metamorphoses
—an all-encompassing volume about human-to-animal transformations—renders both transitions with awful acuity, allowing us to experience both from inside the hunter’s still-human consciousness. Actaeon realizes he has become a stag only when he witnesses his reflection in a pool. “Poor me!” he tries to exclaim at the sight but manages only to emit a groan, and thereby learns that groaning, for him, “was now speech.” His body has become alien to him—“tears streamed down cheeks that were no longer his”—even as his mind is left untouched, permitting him to grasp the full horror of his situation.
    Almost immediately thereafter come the hounds, formerly his charges but now his pursuers, “rushing at him like a storm.” His conscious mind lingers on each of them, one by one, noting their names and, at times, an endearing bit of detail that only an owner could know: Speedy and Wolf are siblings, while Shepherdess leads two puppies from a