Cerberus in Greek Mythology: Three Heads or Fifty?

Cerberus was the watchdog of the Greek underworld, the hound who guarded the gates of Hades. He let the dead in and made sure none of them ever walked out. Most later writers give him three heads, but the oldest description, in Hesiod's Theogony, gives him fifty. He was a child of the monsters Typhon and Echidna, and he is best known as the beast Heracles dragged up into the daylight as his twelfth labour.

Cerberus quick facts

How many heads did Cerberus have?

It depends on which ancient author you read, and this is the most famous contradiction in his story.

• Fifty. Hesiod's Theogony, the oldest source to name him, calls Cerberus the bronze-voiced hound of Hades, an eater of raw flesh, with fifty heads.
• A hundred. A lost poem of Pindar is reported, by later ancient scholars, to have given him a hundred heads. Horace himself calls him a "hundred-headed beast" in one of his Odes.
• Three. Apollodorus' Library describes three dog heads, a serpent for a tail, and the heads of all kinds of snakes along his back. Virgil's Aeneid has him barking from three throats, and Ovid's Metamorphoses also gives him three.

Three became the standard number, and it is the one in nearly every modern retelling. But it is not the earliest answer, and Homer never says how many heads the hound had at all.

Who were Cerberus's parents?

In Hesiod's Theogony, Cerberus is the son of Typhon (Hesiod calls him Typhaon), the storm monster who later challenged Zeus, and Echidna, who was half nymph and half snake. The same pair produced Orthus, the dog who guarded the cattle of Geryon, and the Lernaean Hydra.

That makes Cerberus part of a family of monsters that kept running into Heracles. The hero killed the Hydra and Orthus, and he dragged Cerberus out of the underworld. You can place Cerberus's relatives among the older generations of gods on the Greek gods family tree.

What was Cerberus's job in the underworld?

Cerberus was not there to keep the living out. He was there to keep the dead in. Hesiod describes the trick: the hound fawns on everyone who enters, wagging his tail and both ears, but he does not let them out again. He watches the gates and eats anyone he catches trying to leave.

The other guardians of the dead had their own tasks. The ferryman Charon carried souls across the river, Hades ruled them with Persephone, and Cerberus closed the door behind them. In Virgil's Aeneid, he lies in a cave facing the landing place on the far bank, so he is waiting for the dead as soon as they cross. Far deeper below the house of Hades lay Tartarus, the prison of the Titans.

How did Heracles capture Cerberus?

The fullest account is in Apollodorus' Library, where fetching Cerberus is the twelfth and last labour that King Eurystheus set for Heracles.

1. Preparation. Before going down, Heracles was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, the rites that promised their initiates a better fate after death.
2. The descent. He entered the underworld at Taenarum, at the southern tip of the Peloponnese. When the shades saw him, they fled, except for Meleager and the Gorgon Medusa. Heracles drew his sword on Medusa until Hermes told him she was only an empty phantom.
3. Freeing Theseus. He found Theseus and Pirithous stuck fast to their seats as punishment for trying to carry off Persephone. He pulled Theseus free, but when he reached for Pirithous the earth shook, and he let go.
4. Hades' condition. Heracles asked Pluto (Hades) for the hound. Pluto agreed, on the condition that Heracles master Cerberus without the weapons he carried.
5. The struggle. Protected only by his breastplate and lion skin, Heracles threw his arms around the beast's head and held on. The serpent in Cerberus's tail bit him, but he did not let go until the beast gave in.

He carried Cerberus up, showed him to Eurystheus, and then took him back down to Hades. The episode is old: in Homer's Iliad, Athena recalls helping Heracles bring the hound of Hades up from Erebus, and in the Odyssey, the shade of Heracles tells Odysseus that Hermes and Athena guided him on the errand.

Other writers add their own details. Euripides' Heracles says the hero left the dog for a time in the grove of the goddess Chthonia at Hermione. Ovid's Metamorphoses says that as Heracles dragged the struggling hound into the light, Cerberus filled the air with his triple bark and sprayed white foam over the fields, and the foam grew into aconite, the poison Medea later prepared for Theseus.

How did Orpheus get past Cerberus?

With music. When the singer Orpheus went down to bring back his wife Eurydice, his song held the whole underworld still. In Virgil's Georgics, Cerberus stands with his three mouths hanging open, spellbound. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Orpheus tells Hades and Persephone that he has not come to see Tartarus or to chain the monster's three throats, shaggy with snakes. He has come only for Eurydice.

Orpheus got past the hound without a fight. He still lost Eurydice when he looked back.

What is the honey cake for Cerberus?

A drugged cake to put him to sleep. In Book 6 of Virgil's Aeneid, the Sibyl of Cumae leads Aeneas into the underworld. When they reach Cerberus, whose necks bristle with snakes, she throws him a cake of honey and drugged grain. He snaps it up with all three hungry throats, sprawls across the floor of his cave and sleeps, and Aeneas slips past. This scene gave English the phrase "a sop to Cerberus," meaning a small bribe to quiet a troublemaker.

The Latin novelist Apuleius uses the same trick in his story of Cupid and Psyche. Sent down to the underworld, Psyche carries two barley cakes soaked in honeyed wine, one to give Cerberus on the way in and one on the way out, along with two coins for Charon.

How was Cerberus shown in ancient art?

With far fewer heads than Hesiod gave him. Athenian vase painters usually gave him two heads, while other Greek artists more often gave him three, and snakes often rise from his heads or back, much like the snakes that Apollodorus and Virgil describe.

The favourite subject was his capture by Heracles. A well-known Caeretan hydria (water jar) in the Louvre shows Eurystheus diving into a storage jar in terror as Heracles arrives with the hound. An Attic amphora by the Andokides Painter, also in the Louvre, shows a quieter moment: Heracles crouching and reaching out to coax a two-headed Cerberus, chain in hand.

In the Hellenistic and Roman periods, statues of the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis, a lord of the underworld, often show a three-headed Cerberus sitting at his side.

In the sources

Cerberus appears in Hesiod's Theogony (his birth, his fifty heads and his job at the gate); Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, which mention the hound of Hades without naming him; Euripides' Heracles; the Library of Apollodorus (the full twelfth labour); Diodorus of Sicily; Pausanias' Description of Greece; Virgil's Aeneid and Georgics; Horace's Odes; Ovid's Metamorphoses; and Apuleius' Metamorphoses (the Psyche story).

The sources disagree on these points:

• How many heads? Fifty in Hesiod, a hundred in the reported Pindar fragment and in one of Horace's Odes, three in Apollodorus, Virgil and Ovid, and usually two on Athenian vases.
• Was he a dog at all? Pausanias, visiting Taenarum, reports that the earlier writer Hecataeus of Miletus explained the story away: the "hound of Hades" was really a deadly snake living on the cape, called that because its bite killed at once, and that snake was what Heracles brought to Eurystheus. Pausanias adds that Homer was the first to call the beast the hound of Hades, but gave it no name and no description.
• Which labour was it? Apollodorus makes Cerberus the twelfth and final labour. Diodorus of Sicily puts it before the golden apples of the Hesperides, which become the last.

In popular culture

• Dante's Inferno. In this medieval poem, not an ancient one, Cerberus guards the gluttons in the third circle of Hell, and Virgil silences him by throwing fistfuls of earth into his three mouths, a nod to the Sibyl's honey cake.
• Harry Potter. Fluffy, Hagrid's three-headed dog in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, guards a trapdoor and falls asleep when music plays. The idea borrows from Orpheus, but Fluffy is a modern invention, not a figure from Greek myth.
• Hades (2020). In Supergiant's game, Cerberus guards the house of Hades and players can pet him. The ancient hound was never anyone's pet.

Keep exploring

Cerberus is one part of the underworld's machinery. Meet his master in Hades in Greek mythology, the ferryman who brings him the dead in Charon, and the deepest pit of all in Tartarus. For another hound at the edge of death, compare Norse myth's Garm, or see where Cerberus ranks among mythological monsters. Then test yourself with the Greek mythology quiz.