Cerberus, the Three-Headed Dog Who Guards Hades

At the entrance to the realm of the dead, according to the Greeks, a gigantic dog kept watch. His task was not so much to stop souls from entering as to stop them from leaving, and to keep away the living who tried to cross the threshold. Cerberus, in Greek Kérberos, has become over the centuries the prototype of the stern guardian, so much so that his name is still used today to describe an inflexible and unaccommodating person.

The Heads of Cerberus

Homer knows the “hound of Hades” but does not call him by name. The first to do so is Hesiod, who in the Theogony describes him as the son of Typhon and Echidna, an eater of raw flesh, bronze-voiced and fifty-headed. Later in the poem he tells that the infernal dog welcomes those who enter by wagging his tail, but devours those who try to leave. It is a precise image of death, easy to reach and impossible to leave behind.

In later art and literature the three-headed version prevailed, although some authors speak of a hundred heads and vase painters sometimes depicted him with only two. He often has a serpent's tail and serpents sprouting from his back or neck. Later tradition places him on the bank of the Styx or the Acheron, near the point where the ferryman Charon lands the souls.

Heracles, Orpheus and the Sibyl

The twelfth and last labour of Heracles was to bring Cerberus up to the earth. According to Apollodorus, Hades agreed on condition that the hero overpower him without using weapons, and Heracles defeated him by gripping him in his arms, protected by the skin of the Nemean lion. After showing him to Eurystheus, he took him back to the underworld. Ovid tells in the Metamorphoses that from the dog's slaver, falling to the ground during the journey, the poisonous aconite was born.

Two other figures managed to get past Cerberus without fighting. Orpheus, who went down in search of Eurydice, charmed him with the music of his lyre. In the Aeneid, instead, the Sibyl who guides Aeneas through the underworld throws the dog a cake sweetened with honey and made drowsy; Cerberus devours it with his three hungry throats and falls asleep, letting the two pass. Virgil describes him making those realms resound with his three-throated barking.

Dante's Cerberus

Dante places Cerberus in the third circle of Hell, where the gluttonous are punished under an eternal rain, cold and heavy. He calls him a “beast cruel and monstrous” and describes him with three throats, crimson eyes, a greasy black beard, a wide belly and clawed hands with which he scratches and rends the damned. The mythological dog thus becomes an image of the very greed he punishes, a demon with partly human features.

Like Virgil's Sibyl, Virgil himself, Dante's guide, calms the monster with a simple gesture: he takes a handful of earth and throws it into the greedy throats. Cerberus quietens like a dog that, having got its food, thinks only of devouring it. The poet thus turns an episode of the Aeneid into a highly effective scene, joining classical memory to Christian moral reflection.

Cerberus represents the impassable boundary between the world of the living and that of the dead. The heroes who get past him, by strength, by music or by cunning, show that they possess exceptional qualities, but none of them abolishes the rule the dog upholds. That is why his figure has survived so long: he gives a face to the threshold that every human being, sooner or later, must cross.