Echidna is the fierce she-monster born in a hollow cave, half a nymph with glancing eyes and fair cheeks, half again a huge speckled snake that eats raw flesh beneath the secret places of the earth, immortal and ageless in her lair deep under a hollow rock. In Hesiod's standard reading she belongs to the brood of the sea-gods, the youngest issue of Ceto and Phorcys.1
Hesiod gives her the most vivid portrait: in a hollow cave was born a monster like neither to mortal men nor to the undying gods, fierce Echidna, half a fair-cheeked nymph with glancing eyes, half a great and awful serpent of speckled skin, devouring raw flesh beneath the holy earth. There she keeps her cave deep down under a hollow rock, far from gods and men, where the gods appointed her to dwell, immortal and unaging all her days. In context she is the youngest child of Ceto and Phorcys.2
Apollodorus tells a wholly different lineage and a mortal end. There Echidna is daughter of Tartarus and Earth, a creature who carried off passers-by until Argus Panoptes, the all-seeing herdsman, caught her asleep and slew her, a death the Theogony's deathless cave-dweller never suffers.3
Subject in love to terrible Typhon, Echidna bore the foremost of the brood: first Orthrus, the hound of Geryon; then Cerberus, the brazen-voiced hound of Hades who eats raw flesh, fifty-headed and relentless; then the Hydra of Lerna, whom white-armed Hera nourished in her wrath; and the fire-breathing Chimera, lion in front, serpent behind, a goat in the middle, whom Pegasus and noble Bellerophon slew.4
Apollodorus repeats the brood with his own details: the Chimera "begotten by Typhon on Echidna, as Hesiod relates"; Orthus the two-headed watchdog of Geryon's kine, likewise begotten by Typhon on Echidna; and the hundred-headed apple-guarding dragon, offspring of Typhon and Echidna. Her son Cerberus he describes differently from Hesiod, giving him three dog-heads, a dragon's tail, and the heads of all sorts of snakes down his back rather than fifty heads.5
Hyginus folds yet more beasts into the same monstrous family, naming as the children of Typhon and Echidna the Gorgon, the three-headed Cerberus, the apple-guarding dragon of the Hesperides, the Hydra of Lerna, the dragon that guarded the fleece at Colchis, Scylla, the Sphinx of Boeotia, and the Lycian Chimera.6
The brood's last and most disputed offspring divide the sources. Hesiod makes Echidna the mate of her own son Orthrus, bearing by him the Sphinx that destroyed the Cadmeans and the Nemean Lion that Hera reared to haunt the hills of Nemea; the same poet assigns the golden-apple dragon (Ladon) instead to Ceto and Phorcys, not to Echidna at all. One by one Heracles would unmake these children: he slew the Nemean Lion and the Hydra, killed Geryon's Orthrus, fetched up Cerberus, and in the Hesperides labour the dragon Ladon was overcome.7
Apollodorus and Hyginus rearrange that ending: they name Typhon, not Orthrus, the father of the Sphinx by Echidna, and they place the hundred-headed apple-guarding dragon (Ladon) squarely within the Typhon-and-Echidna brood rather than the sea-line of Ceto and Phorcys.8
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
