THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
Cerberus, offspring of Typhon and Echidna, is the hound that guards the gate of the underworld. Hesiod gives him fifty heads and a voice like bronze; the standard later image has three heads, a serpent for a tail, and snakes bristling from his neck. He crouches at the threshold beside the river of the dead, fawning on the souls who enter and devouring any who try to leave, so that the realm of the dead admits all and releases none.
The twelfth labor of Heracles was to fetch him alive. Eurystheus forbade weapons, so with Hades's leave the hero wrestled the dog into submission with his bare hands, carried him on his shoulders to Mycenae — where Eurystheus hid in a storage jar at the sight — and then returned him below. Orpheus lulled the hound asleep with his lyre when he descended for Eurydice, and in Virgil's Aeneid the Sibyl of Cumae feeds him a cake soaked in honey and drugged herbs so that Aeneas may pass, the origin of the proverbial 'sop to Cerberus.'
