by D. Felton
From fifty-headed primordial monstrous canine to three-headed pet of Hades, Cerberus is renowned for being the vicious guard dog of the Greek and Roman underworld, tasked with keeping the dead in and the living out. But his reputation seems largely unearned, given the rather large number of live humans who managed to infiltrate Hades.
If you’ve heard of Cerberus, you may know him not just as the unusually large, multi-headed guard dog of Hades but as the object of Heracles’ Twelfth Labor, the main myth in which he appears. The Greek hero, assigned twelve horrendous tasks to atone for killing his wife and children in a fit of madness (brought on by the goddess Hera), had already killed or captured many terrifying monsters, including the seemingly invulnerable Lion of Nemea, the nine-headed Hydra of Lerna, and the man-eating mares of King Diomedes of Thrace. As Heracles’ last labor, Cerberus was supposed to be terrifying not simply because of his monstrous form—which in addition to extra heads, included snakes growing from his body—but because of his location: the boundary of Hades. Sure, Heracles had already been to the edges of the known world: he had travelled all over North Africa, had obtained the belt of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, to the far east, and had stolen the golden apples from the tree of the Hesperides in the far west. But in contrast to the land of sunset, considered metaphorical for death, Hades itself was the land of the dead—no metaphor involved. So, as his final assignment, Heracles had to face his own mortality—though this would end up being rather irrelevant, given that he was granted immortality thanks to having Zeus for a father.
It certainly seems as though at least some artists didn’t take this Twelfth Labor too seriously:
“Nice doggy. Nice, two-headed doggy.” Attic bilingual amphora (red-figure on one side, black-figure on the other), ca. 520 BCE. This side attributed to the Andocides Painter.
In the Greek vase painting pictured above, Heracles approaches a calm, Cerberus who has only two heads (and a relatively normal body size), and who seems inclined to allow the hero to put on the chain leash. The dog’s heads extend just past the boundary of Hades (or of Hades’ palace, specifically). The dog may be complacent because, at least in some versions of the myth, Heracles obtained Hades’ permission to borrow the dog, promising to return the creature after proving that the labor was completed. The painting below depicts Heracles showing Cerberus to Eurystheus (Heracles’ cousin, and the man in charge of assigning and confirming the Twelve Labors). Here, the leashed, very large dog has three heads:
Greek black-figure hydria from Caere, Etruria, ca. 525 BCE, by the Eagle Painter.
This Cerberus also has snakes growing from various body parts, an indication of his chthonic connections, and the artist may have used different colors for each of the dog’s three heads to make them more clearly distinct from each other (though such use of color was also typical of Caeretan hydriai). But probably most striking—to the modern viewer, at least—is the humor implicit in Eurystheus posture and position: arms flung up in fright as he attempts to hide in a cauldron.
But what exactly is going on with the number of heads on this dog? Generally, the number diminishes over time. Cerberus appears in the earliest Greek literature, the poems of Homer and Hesiod (ca. 8th c. BCE). The Homeric epics refer to the creature not by name but simply as “the hound of Hades” (e.g., Iliad 8.368, Odyssey 11.623–6), and they don’t describe the dog physically at all—they just refer in passing to Heracles’ last labor. All these allusions tell us is that the dog was already so firmly ingrained in Greek myth (via oral tradition) that everyone would have understood the reference. Hesiod, on the other hand, gives us a lot more information in his Theogony, a poem narrating the origins of the gods and monsters of Greek myth. Hesiod provides the dog’s name and parentage: “Kerberos,” one of several monstrous offspring of the frightful entities Echidna and Typhon. He describes the creature as an unmanageable, unspeakable, savage fifty-headed horror (lines 310–12). Was this the standard description of Cerberus at this point in time—should we imagine, based on Hesiod, that Homer’s readers would have had a mental picture of Heracles trying to corral a fifty-headed dog?!
Even if artists of the 8th century BCE had wanted to attempt a sculpture or painting of a fifty-headed hound of Hades, the impracticality of such an objective along with the artistic style at the time (Geometric) precluded such ambitions. While literary descriptions across Greek and Roman literature ultimately ranged from one hundred heads to just one, most writers and artists settled on three. The earliest artistic depictions of Cerberus date to the early 6th century BCE, such as the painting below, in which the dog has the standard three heads:
Interior surface of Laconian cup from Sparta, early 6th century BCE. A snaky-maned, three-headed Cerberus in Hades, with Heracles just entering the scene on the right.
Why three? Over the centuries, various theories have emerged. Do the three heads represent the three ages of man—childhood, adulthood, and old age—as in the riddle of the Sphinx? Do they represent the past, present, and future, or some other abstract triad? If Cerberus’ three heads do represent such things, what’s the reason? Instead, the most straightforward answer could be that, as a guard dog stationed at the entrance to Hades with the land of the dead at his back, Cerberus needed to keep his eyes to the front and both sides to watch for any unauthorized visitors.
Still, in his role as a guard dog, Cerberus seems to have been surprisingly ineffective. We don’t know how many unreported live humans he might have kept from entering Hades, and none of the dead seem to have gotten out of Hades, even temporarily, without permission from at least one of the chthonic deities (examples include Alcestis, Eurydice, Protesilaus, and Sisyphus). But Cerberus certainly let an oddly high number of the living get past him. Heracles, at least in the main versions of his Twelfth Labor, receives permission to borrow the dog; in minor versions, he fights Hades and/or the dog, overcoming one or both. Theseus and his friend Perithous, foolishly aiming to kidnap Persephone, Hades’ queen, seem to have gotten to the underworld around the same time that Heracles was leashing Cerberus; they didn’t encounter the dog, but were captured by Hades and then rescued by Heracles on his way out. (Alternatively, Perithous, as the main offender, is stuck there—literally, as told by Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 2.5.12). When the famed musician Orpheus traveled to the underworld to retrieve his wife, Eurydice, after she died from a snakebite, he lulled Cerberus to sleep by playing the lyre. Cerberus was also distracted by food: The Cumaean Sibyl, accompanying Aeneas to Hades, gets the two of them past the guard dog by tossing it a honey-cake laced with soporific herbs. And Psyche, sent by Venus on the seemingly impossible task of fetching a box of “beauty” from Proserpina (Persephone), does the same thing: taking the advice of a talking tower (!), Psyche carries two barley-cakes with her to Hades, tossing one to Cerberus on her way in and another on her way out. The dog falls for the trick, stopping his barking to lap up the cake (Apuleius, Metamorphoses 6.20).
I’ve been trying to avoid saying that Cerberus’s bark was worse than his bite, but can’t reasonably get around it given the number of times the dog failed in his duty.
As a final note, one of the best adaptations of Cerberus in modern popular culture is in the excellent but lamentably short-lived Netflix series Kaos, where multiple Cerberus-dogs (all of the three-headed variety), fashioned along the lines of drug-detecting dogs at airports, are used to sniff all newcomers to Hades to ensure that only the dead are allowed in. Want to guess whether any of the living slip by?
These Cerberus dogs from Kaos are just adorable. If you’re interested in seeing how the visual effects were done, Cinesite has some great info.
Further reading: Derrek Joyce, “Cerberus, Hound of Hades” in The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth, 128–37.
D. Felton, Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the author of Haunted Greece and Rome (1999) and Monsters and Monarchs: Serial Killers in Classical Myth and History (2021), in addition to being editor of several volumes, including A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity (2021) and The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth (2024).