Cerberus: A Family Portrait and a Honey Cake

Step into the entrance of the House of the Tragic Poet at Pompeii and a black dog strains toward you from the floor, chained, teeth bared, above two words set in tesserae: cave canem, “beware of the dog”. Roman householders liked a guard dog on the threshold, real or laid in stone. The Greeks imagined the ultimate version of that animal at the ultimate threshold, the doorway between the living and the dead, and they gave him a pedigree as alarming as his teeth.

A family set out by Hesiod

Cerberus first appears by name in Hesiod’s Theogony, composed around 700 BCE, and he arrives with his whole household. His mother is Echidna, a creature Hesiod builds from two halves that refuse to blend: above, a nymph with quick eyes and lovely cheeks; below, a vast speckled serpent that eats raw flesh in the hollows of the earth. She lives in a cave far from gods and mortals, among a people Hesiod calls the Arimi. Even her parentage is uncertain. Hesiod’s pronouns leave it unclear whether she is a daughter of the sea powers Phorcys and Ceto or of Chrysaor and the Oceanid Callirhoe, and Apollodorus, centuries later, makes her a child of Tartarus and Gaia.

Her mate is Typhon, the last and most dangerous child of Gaia, a giant with a hundred snake heads whose voices could bellow like a bull, roar like a lion or yelp like puppies. Zeus burned him with thunderbolts and flung him into Tartarus, but not before he had founded a dynasty. Hesiod lists their children in order. First came Orthus, the dog that guarded the cattle of Geryon. Then Cerberus, whom Hesiod calls unspeakable, an eater of raw flesh, the bronze-voiced hound of Hades, fifty-headed, shameless and strong. Then the Hydra of Lerna. After her comes the fire-breathing Chimera, though Hesiod’s wording does not make clear whether the Chimera’s mother is Echidna or the Hydra. And from Orthus and one of these mothers came the Sphinx of Thebes and the Nemean lion.

Think of it as the border of a mosaic floor, beasts linked tail to neck all the way round. Later writers kept adding tiles. Hyginus, compiling his Fabulae in Latin, credits Typhon and Echidna with the Gorgon, Scylla, the serpent that guarded the apples of the Hesperides and the dragon that coiled round the Golden Fleece at Colchis. Read that way, the family is less a pack of random horrors than a guild of guardians: almost every treasure or threshold in Greek myth has one of Cerberus’ relatives sitting on it.

Heracles spent a good part of his career working through this single household. He killed Orthus, the Hydra and the Nemean lion, and his last labour in most lists was to fetch Cerberus himself, as told in our tale of the twelve labours. The hound, though, was borrowed rather than destroyed. Apollodorus says Hades allowed the hero to take the dog only if he mastered it without weapons. Heracles, protected by his breastplate and lion skin, locked his arms round the beast’s neck and held on while the serpent of its tail bit him, until it gave in. He showed it to Eurystheus and then took it back below.

Heads, voices and a serpent’s tail

Hesiod’s fifty heads did not stick. Homer never names the animal at all, calling him only the dog of hateful Hades. Horace, writing in Latin, makes him a hundred-headed beast. Most later writers, and most artists, settled on three: Apollodorus gives him three dog heads, a serpent for a tail and the heads of snakes rising all along his back. Athenian vase painters often made do with two, which sit neatly side by side in profile, a reminder that a monster’s anatomy depends on the space available to draw it. His sister, the Hydra of Lerna, had the same trouble with her numbers.

What does not change is his job. Hesiod describes it in the passage where he walks us through the underworld:

In front of the hall a fearsome hound keeps watch, pitiless, with a wicked trick: he fawns on all who enter, wagging his tail and both his ears, but he will not let them go back out. He lies in wait, and whoever he catches leaving by the gates, he devours.

Hesiod, Theogony (our rendering)

This is a guard dog turned inside out. The cave canem dog keeps strangers away from the house. Cerberus welcomes every newcomer and saves his teeth for anyone trying to leave.

A cake for the dog

If force was Heracles’ way past the hound, and music was Orpheus’ (Virgil pictures Cerberus with all three jaws hanging open as the singer passes), the commonest way was food. In the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Sibyl leads Aeneas to the cave where Cerberus lies, his necks already bristling with snakes. She tosses him a lump of honey and drugged grain. He snaps it up with three famished throats, sprawls across the whole floor of the cave and sinks into sleep, and Aeneas slips past the buried guard.

Apuleius, in the second century CE, turns the trick into a ritual. In the tale of Cupid and Psyche in his Metamorphoses, Psyche must go down to Proserpina to fetch a box of beauty. She is told to carry a barley cake soaked in honeyed wine in each hand and two coins in her mouth, one for each crossing of the ferry. One cake quiets the dog on the way in, the other on the way out. The second cake is the important one: anyone can enter the house of Hades, as Hesiod warned, but coming back has to be paid for.

Behind these literary sops may lie real habits of the Greek graveside. Honey cakes were among the offerings brought to the dead, and in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata the heroine taunts an old magistrate by offering to knead him one, as if he were already a corpse; ancient commentators on the play connect such cakes with the hound. English kept the idea in the phrase “a sop to Cerberus”, a small concession offered to quiet someone troublesome.

Ovid adds one more consequence of Heracles’ visit. When the hound was dragged into daylight, he says, the foam that dripped from its jaws took root as aconite, the deadly wolfsbane. Even Cerberus’ spit was dangerous out of place.

Why the hound keeps the door

Seen together, these stories make the same point. Cerberus is not evil, and he is not there to punish anyone. He is the hinge of a one-way door. The dead go in, the living stay out, and a pedigree full of storm-giants and serpents guarantees that the arrangement holds. Every story of getting past him is a story of exception, and every exception comes at a price: a labour, a song, a cake carried with care in each hand.

Later Greek communities feared what might happen if that door failed and the dead walked out. That fear has its own tale here, the vrykolakas of Greek folklore. You can also meet his father Typhon, and his sister the Chimera, in our Bestiary.