CERBERUS
The multi-headed dog
When one thinks of Cerberus, one is reminded of the three-headed hell-hound that watches over Hades from the Hercules stories. Mentioned in works as early as Homer’s, Cerberus is an influential monster that still presents itself into modern day life, and is a significant child of Echidna. Cerberus, from what stories tell, is one of the twelve labors that Hercules is required to accomplish for Eurystheus (Theoi Project). This final labor involves Hercules bringing back the monster from the gates of hades to retrieve him. Sources vary on Cerberus’ capture; through the aid of Hermes and Athena, Hercules is noted to use a lion skin to wrap around the beast until it succumbs to him; he is noted to fight Hades; and he is noted to capture Cerberus without shield or iron, so some pottery shows Hercules with a wooden club. Aristophanes has Hercules seize “Kerberos (Cerberus) by the throat, and fled, and ran, and rushed, and bolted, haling of the dog” (Frogs), though other sources have Hercules subduing the beast with his lion skin or wooden club (Theoi Project).
For Eurystheus, there was no need to have the monster, but the task was only imposed on Hercules because Eurystheus thought it to be impossible to do. Depictions of this monster have varied; “his three throats filled the air with triple barking, barks of frenzied rage, and spattered the green meadows with white spume” as was mentioned in Metamorphoses (Ovid); “the savage Stygian dog… tossing back and forth his triple heads, with huge bayings he guards the realm”(Seneca). Ideally, a normal image of this beast is simply a three-headed dog; however, Cerberus is also known to have been the son of Echidna and can be known to have tracings of serpentine qualities. Surprisingly, in Hesoid, the earliest documentation of Cerberus, he is noted to have fifty heads, though the snakes on his mane may account for this anomaly. Indeed, many sources also debate over Cerberus’ serpentine qualities.
However, there is literary documentation from Hecataetus of Miletus, who described Cerberus as “a terrible serpent lived on Taenarum, and was called the hound of Hades, because any one bitten was bound to die of the poison at once, and it was this snake, he said, that was brought by Heracles to Eurystheus” (Pausanias). In this century, Cerberus is quite noted to lack the serpentine qualities and has adopted more domesticated forms of dogs, as is seen in films like Harry Potter (renamed “Fluffy”). However, despite the misconception of appearance, the guardian of hades remains to be a significant and relevant monster, and we can thank Mother Echidna for this beast’s presence.
This Laconian black-figure pottery image portrays the Cerberus as is depicted in many primary sources and dates back to the 6th century BCE (Theoi Project). The monster is three-headed and wolf-like, possibly to show that Cerberus was noted to take the form of an undomesticated, savage animal in Greek mythology. Cerberus has, as Aristophanes and other Greek figures noted, many snakes adorning his mane and another serpent in place of a tail. Sharp teeth gnash at two figures in the pottery. We see Hercules’ foot and club in this photograph, so this pottery depiction may have Cerberus just before he is sedated; we also see a bird flying overhead, which, according to Theoi.com, “probably represents a flittering soul.”
Laconia is noted to be in the Sparta region of Greece, so the fact that story-telling through an artistic medium was popular in a region that always fought with Athens, a city that practically functioned on humanities, is interesting. According to an analysis of early black-figured pottery, “mythological and daily scenes appear on only a small number of the extant early black-figured vases.
This is largely due to both the dominance of animal friezes and to the small volume of production for this period” (Alexandridou, 49). Cerberus, or at least the story of Hercules, must have been an influential monster to the point of being placed in production of pottery that did include mythology, and therefore strengthens Echidna’s reign of mother monster as her hound child has spread into artistic mediums of storytelling.