Specifically, Heracles had the impossible task to overpower Hades’ hellhound without weapons as his final labor – 12 acts of penance for killing his family in a craze. īy far the most famous legend involving Cerberus centers around the famously admired Greek demigod, Heracles. The sea creatures who likely inspired mermaids. Learn more about various other mythical creatures: “I don’t think is necessarily just a Greek story. “The idea of the kind of creature that inhabits entrances to sacred places is something that we find in lots and lots of world mythology,” Meineck says. Greek religious cults like the Eleusinian Mysteries, which focused on gaining a better afterlife, drew their influences from regions in ancient Africa like Nubia and Egypt.Īs stories passed between cultures through trade, Greece’s location in the Mediterranean also made it a central hub for these cultural exchanges.

Vedic Indian stories similarly tell of dogs of death. Hesiod’s Theogony has nearly exact parallels with Sumerian and Babylonian creation stories, according to Meineck. One reason why descriptions of Cerberus flicker over time can be attributed to the human imprint left by the storytellers who spent generations passing down myths. Hesiod’s poem wasn’t put into written form until much later, since Greek culture was a heavily visual and oral tradition. Hesiod coined the first overt, named reference to Cerberus in his poem Theogony, which chronicled the origins of the cosmos and the Greek pantheon. The story of Cerberus dates back many millennia, to the ages of poets like Homer and Hesiod in the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. Though it elicited horror in people, it was not necessarily a purely evil creature, says Peter Meineck, who is an associate professor of classics in the modern world at New York University. Who Was Cerberus?Ĭerberus was a functional dog, fulfilling its purpose as the gatekeeper of Hades. Some authors even described it with a dragon tail. Snakes writhed along its body, sometimes in manes around its heads.

Poets and artists depict it as a large canine beast with three, sometimes 50, even 100 dog heads. Cerberus: The 3 Headed Dogīorn from the monstrous, multi-headed Typhon and the serpent-woman Echidna, Cerberus was among the primordial monsters predating humanity. A hellhound is a mythical dog depicted in ancient Greek and Scandinavian mythologies.

Hades dog name