Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Cerberus.
The gallery
Heracles, Cerberus and Eurystheus (Caeretan hydria)
Unknown (Caeretan workshop), c. 530 BC
On this archaic black-figure water-jar, Heracles — wrapped in his lion-skin, club in his right hand and leash in his left — hauls a three-headed Cerberus before the cowering king Eurystheus, who hides in a half-buried storage jar (pithos). The vase depicts the climax of the hero's twelfth and final labour, the capture of the hound of Hades and its delivery to the mortal world. It is one of the earliest images to give Cerberus the canonical three heads, a form later writers such as Apollodorus and Ovid would fix, against Hesiod's fifty-headed beast. Now in the Louvre (E 701).
Heracles leading Cerberus from the underworld (Attic red-figure plate)
Paseas (the Cerberus Painter), c. 520–510 BC
An early Attic red-figure plate showing Heracles, club raised, leading a two-headed Cerberus up out of the realm of the dead. The painter, conventionally called the Cerberus Painter after this very subject, renders the hound with serpents bristling along its neck — the snaky mane that Apollodorus describes when he writes of 'the heads of all sorts of snakes' on the monster's back. The composition concentrates the entire twelfth labour into a single taut moment of restraint. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (01.8025).
Hercules and Cerberus
Peter Paul Rubens, 1636
Rubens' Baroque oil-sketch translates the ancient labour into churning, muscular drama: a powerfully built Hercules drags the three-headed dog of Hades from the mouth of the underworld while the heads snarl and twist away from the unfamiliar light — exactly the detail Ovid notes, the beast turning its eyes aslant and shaking the air with triple howls. Painted for the decorations of the Torre de la Parada hunting lodge near Madrid, it now hangs in the Museo del Prado. The work shows how the chthonic guardian of Greek myth was reimagined as a trophy of heroic force in early-modern European painting.
Cerberus (illustration to Dante's Inferno)
William Blake, c. 1824–1827
Among the watercolours Blake made for Dante's Divine Comedy near the end of his life, this sheet depicts Cerberus as the three-headed warden of the Third Circle of Hell, where the gluttons lie in cold rain. Blake gives the monster three fully human-eyed canine faces and a swollen, beast-like body, faithful to Dante's 'great worm' yet charged with the artist's own visionary intensity. The image carries the ancient hound of Hades into the Christian afterlife, the role Virgil and Dante had assigned it, and stands as one of the most celebrated post-classical portrayals of the creature.
On screen
In play
Fluffy
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter's three-headed guardian dog is Cerberus in a school corridor — the underworld hound rewritten as Hagrid's pet, calmed by music as in the old tales.
Hades
Supergiant Games
Supergiant's roguelike keeps Cerberus as the House of Hades' enormous, affectionate pet — the terror of Tartarus turned into a good boy at the gates.