Counting the Hydra’s Heads

Anyone who has tried to lay a monster in tesserae knows the problem. Every head needs a neck, an eye, a tongue and a margin of background so it does not blur into the next. Before the first stone goes down, the craftsman has to decide how many heads there will be. Greek and Roman artists and writers faced that choice with the Hydra of Lerna again and again, and they never came close to agreeing.

A serpent in the springs of Lerna

Lerna lies on the coast south of Argos, a place of springs, reeds and marsh where fresh water wells up close to the sea. It was always a little uncanny. Pausanias was shown the Alcyonian Lake there, said to be bottomless, through which Dionysus was believed to have gone down to bring his mother back from the dead. Archaeologists, for their part, found at Lerna an Early Bronze Age building now called the House of the Tiles, after the baked clay tiles of its roof, which feels like a good omen for a site like ours.

Hesiod, the earliest source, places the Hydra in Cerberus’ family, a daughter of Typhon and Echidna, and adds that Hera reared her out of anger against Heracles. He tells us Heracles killed her with the help of Iolaus and the plans of Athena. He does not tell us how many heads she had.

The fullest account of the fight is in Apollodorus. The Hydra lived by the spring of Amymone and came out onto the plain to destroy cattle and crops. Heracles drove her from her lair with burning arrows, then grappled with her, but every time he clubbed off a head, two grew in its place. Hera sent a giant crab to bite his foot. Heracles crushed the crab and called for Iolaus, who set fire to part of the nearby wood and seared each stump with a burning brand before new heads could sprout. The last head was immortal, so Heracles cut it off and buried it beside the road under a heavy rock. He dipped his arrows in the creature’s bile, and Eurystheus, as told in the story of the twelve labours, refused to count the victory because the hero had had help.

A census of heads

Here, roughly in the order the witnesses speak, is what the count looks like.

The earliest pictures come from the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, and painters were free to improvise. A Corinthian or Athenian Hydra might rear up with a handful of heads or a dozen, each a separate snake on its own long neck, sprouting from a coiled body. On a Caeretan hydria of about 525 BCE, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, the creature is a writhing knot of serpent necks as the two heroes close in. The numbers on vases vary with the space, the skill and the mood of the painter.

Among poets, a later commentator on Hesiod reports that Alcaeus gave the monster nine heads and Simonides fifty. Euripides, in his Heracles, has the chorus call it the ten-thousand-headed hound of Lerna, which is less a number than a shudder. Virgil sets a fifty-mouthed Hydra inside Tartarus, though it is not clear that he means the creature of Lerna. Ovid, giving Heracles the floor in the Metamorphoses, settles on a hundred:

It grew rich on its own wounds. Of its hundred heads not one could be cut off without a price, for the neck came back stronger, with two heirs in place of one.

Ovid, Metamorphoses (our rendering)

Apollodorus, the methodical handbook writer, gives nine: eight mortal and one in the middle that could not die.

And then there is Pausanias, the traveller, who stood by the plane tree at Lerna under which the Hydra was said to have grown up. He decided she had only one head. In his view she was a water snake larger than others, with venom so deadly that Heracles used it on his arrows. The many heads, he suspected, were the invention of Peisander of Camirus, an epic poet who wanted the beast to look more frightening and his own verses to seem more remarkable.

Why the number would not settle

Each count answers a different need. For a painter, a head is a unit of design: enough of them and the monster looks overwhelming, too many and it dissolves into noise. For a poet, numbers are a way of turning up the volume, which is why the totals climb from nine to fifty to a hundred to ten thousand. For a rationalizer like Pausanias, the right number is the smallest one that still explains the story, and one head explains the poison perfectly well.

Apollodorus’ nine has a different logic. His Hydra needs a special head because the plot needs one: something that fire cannot finish, that must be buried and weighed down rather than destroyed. Whatever the total, every version keeps the same arithmetic of doubling. Cut one, face two. It is the oldest image of a problem that grows faster than the effort spent solving it, and it is why “hydra-headed” still describes anything that multiplies when attacked.

The venom that outlived the marsh

The Hydra may have died at Lerna, but its poison ran on through Heracles’ story like a dark seam through stone. Apollodorus tells how one of his arrows accidentally struck the wise centaur Chiron, who could not die and could not heal, until he was allowed to give up his immortality. Another arrow killed the centaur Nessus, whose tainted blood Deianeira later smeared on a robe, believing it a love charm; in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis that robe burns Heracles alive. His bow and arrows then passed to Philoctetes and went on, eventually, to Troy.

Few monsters keep killing so long after their deaths. Whether you picture one head or a hundred, the Hydra’s real reach was measured in the wounds it left behind. Some of her relatives, from the Chimera to Typhon, wait in our Bestiary.