Cerberus

Cerberus is the son of Typhon and Echidna, and Hesiod's Theogony disposes of him in a single devastating line: the eater of raw flesh, the brazen-voiced hound of Hades, fifty-headed, relentless and strong. Echidna, half a fair-cheeked nymph and half a huge speckled serpent, lives in a cave beneath a hollow rock at Arima, far from the deathless gods and mortal men. Before Cerberus she had borne Orthus, the hound of Geryon, who is therefore his elder brother and also a dog; then came the Hydra of Lerna, reared by Hera against Heracles, and the fire-breathing Chimaera. The Sphinx and the Nemean lion are not his siblings: in the same passage Hesiod makes them the offspring of Echidna by her own son Orthus. Cerberus's job is settled in that first mention and never changes in any source: he lets in everyone who arrives, and lets no one out.

The three-headed dog is not the dog of the oldest sources. Hesiod gives him fifty; Pindar is credited with a hundred. The three arrive late, with Apollodorus, Horace and Virgil, and above all with pottery: archaic Greek vases paint him again and again with two, because two fit a profile view and the third gets in the way. What the sources do repeat is everything around the dog. Apollodorus describes him with three dog heads, the tail of a dragon, and on his back the heads of snakes of every kind. Hesiod insists on the voice and uses a rare adjective, brazen-voiced, describing a bark with the sound of struck metal. What no ancient source gives him is bloodshot eyes, lion's claws or pointed ears: that is modern iconography, inherited from nineteenth-century engraving and fantasy illustration. The drool, however, is there, and out of it comes the strangest story he has.

Eurystheus orders Heracles to fetch the dog from Hades, and Apollodorus says the hero first had himself initiated at Eleusis, after Eumolpus purified him of the blood of the centaurs. He went down at Taenarum, at the tip of the Peloponnese, guided by Hermes and Athena. Hades granted him Cerberus on one condition: that he master him without the weapons he carried. Heracles seized him by the throat, endured the bites of the dragon-tail and did not let go until the dog gave in. Ovid tells another version, in which he drags him out bound in adamantine chains and the animal turns its eyes from the daylight it has never seen. He showed him at Mycenae, Eurystheus hid in terror, and Heracles returned the dog to his gate. There is no version in which Cerberus dies: he is the only monster of the twelve labours still alive, and still at his post, when the labour ends.

Out of the dog's mouth, according to Ovid, comes a plant. When Heracles drags him into the light, Cerberus struggles, rages, shakes the air with a triple howl and sprinkles the once-green fields with white foam; the foam takes root in the earth and turns into aconite, the plant English calls wolfsbane. Medea will later use it in an attempt to poison Theseus. Botany does not contradict the myth: aconite grows on stony ground and is one of the most toxic plants in Europe.

That same dog is got past twice without a fight. Orpheus lulls him with the lyre on his way down to fetch Eurydice. And in the Aeneid, the Sibyl of Cumae throws him a cake kneaded with honey and drugged herbs; the dog swallows it whole and collapses in his cave. Apuleius repeats the trick with Psyche, who goes down to Hades carrying two cakes, one for the way in and one for the way out. The unbeatable guardian can be bought with bread.

Dante puts him to work again in the fourteenth century: in canto VI of the Inferno, Cerberus flays the gluttons under an eternal filthy rain, and Virgil silences him by throwing fistfuls of earth into the three mouths. It is the honey-cake scene repeated thirteen hundred years later, with mud instead of honey.

A dog guarding the entrance of the dead is not only Greek. In the Rigveda, the god Yama has two four-eyed dogs, the offspring of Saramā, who watch the road the souls travel; one of them is called Śabala, the spotted one. In Scandinavia, a dog is bound before the cave of Gnipahellir and barks as the end of the world draws near. Three separate traditions and the same job.

In the nineteenth century several philologists thought they had the proof: Kerberos and śabala would come from one Indo-European root meaning spotted, and the dog's name would literally be Spot. The idea is still repeated in popular books, but linguistics has been abandoning it because the sound correspondences do not work. In 1991 Bruce Lincoln took it apart and proposed instead linking Kerberos to the Norse Garmr through a root meaning to growl, and that second proposal does not quite hold either. Today the origin of the name is treated as unknown.

What is not in dispute is the motif. Wherever the word comes from, three peoples speaking related languages put a dog at the same gate, and that remains a fact even if the etymology fails.