500–494 BC), who makes Cerberus a large poisonous snake. In the literary record, the first certain indication of Cerberus' serpentine nature comes from the rationalized account of Hecataeus of Miletus (fl. In art Cerberus is often shown as being part snake, for example the lost Corinthian cup shows snakes protruding from Cerberus' body, while the mid sixth-century BC Laconian cup gives Cerberus a snake for a tail. This is perhaps already implied as early as in Hesiod's Theogony, where Cerberus' mother is the half-snake Echidna, and his father the snake-headed Typhon. Horace's many snake-headed Cerberus followed a long tradition of Cerberus being part snake. The first appearance of a three-headed Cerberus occurs on a mid sixth century BC Laconian cup (see below). 590–580 BC), a Corinthian cup from Argos (see below), now lost, Cerberus is shown as a normal single-headed dog. On one of the two earliest depictions (c. In art Cerberus is most commonly depicted with two dog heads (visible), never more than three, but occasionally with only one. Perhaps trying to reconcile these competing traditions, Apollodorus's Cerberus has three dog heads and the heads of "all sorts of snakes" along his back, while the Byzantine poet John Tzetzes (who probably based his account on Apollodorus) gives Cerberus fifty heads, three of which were dog heads, the rest being the "heads of other beasts of all sorts". An exception is the Latin poet Horace's Cerberus which has a single dog head, and one hundred snake heads. However, later writers almost universally give Cerberus three heads. 8th – 7th century BC), Cerberus has fifty heads, while Pindar (c. In the earliest description of Cerberus, Hesiod's Theogony (c. And, like these close relatives, Cerberus was, with only the rare iconographic exception, multi-headed. His father was the multi snake-headed Typhon, and Cerberus was the brother of three other multi-headed monsters, the multi-snake-headed Lernaean Hydra Orthrus, the two-headed dog who guarded the Cattle of Geryon and the Chimera, who had three heads, that of a lion, a goat, and a snake. Cerberus was usually three-headed, though not always. Descriptions of Cerberus vary, including the number of his heads.
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