Geryon was the giant master of red cattle on the far-western ocean island of Erythea, son of Chrysaor and the Oceanid Callirrhoe, slain by mighty Heracles over his shambling oxen on the day the hero drove the wide-browed kine to holy Tiryns.1
When Perseus beheaded Medusa, there sprang from the Gorgon the winged horse Pegasus and Chrysaor, whom she had by Poseidon. Chrysaor was the father of Geryon — fixing the line Medusa to Chrysaor to Geryon.2
Hesiod names Geryon the son of Chrysaor and the Oceanid Callirrhoe, the daughter of glorious Ocean, and calls him the strongest of all men. Hyginus too sets him down from Chrysaor and Callirhoe as three-formed Geryon.3
The sources quarrel over his shape. Hesiod calls him three-headed — a single body crowned by three heads. Apollodorus instead describes a body of three men grown together, joined in one at the waist but parted in three from the flanks and thighs; Hyginus likewise names him three-formed and triple-bodied; and on the Chest of Cypselus Pausanias saw him rendered as three men joined to one another — the canonical western form.4
On Erythia — an island near the ocean, in Apollodorus' day called Gadira — Geryon kept his cattle, guarded by the herdsman Eurytion and the two-headed dog Orthus, offspring of Typhon and Echidna. Heracles slew the dog, then the herdsman, then Geryon himself, and drove off the kine.5
Hesiod already knew the cattle-dog: Echidna bore Orthus, the hound of Geryones. Hyginus reports that Heracles killed the triple-bodied Geryon with a single weapon.6
His fame clung to the far west. When Lydian guides showed Pausanias a giant corpse they claimed was Geryon's, he refuted them — Geryon lies at Gadeira, where there is not a tomb but a tree that shows different shapes — and they admitted the body was that of Hyllus, a son of Earth.7
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