The two-headed hound born of Typhon and Echidna, set to guard the red cattle of Geryon at the edge of Ocean until Heracles, fetching the herd, killed him.1
Hesiod places him first among the brood that Echidna conceived to lawless Typhaon: before all the rest she bore Orthus, the hound of Geryones. Next she brought forth Cerberus, who eats raw flesh, the brazen-voiced hound of Hades, fifty-headed and relentless — so that the two watchdogs, one for the cattle of the far west and one for the gates of death, stand as brothers at the head of the line.2
Apollodorus fixes his shape and his charge: Geryon, the triple-bodied man of Erytheia, owned red kine, of which Eurytion was the herdsman and Orthus, the two-headed hound begotten by Typhon on Echidna, was the watchdog — the guard set over the cattle that Heracles was sent to fetch in his tenth labour.3
His death comes at the boundary of the world. When Heracles drove the wide-browed oxen to holy Tiryns and had crossed the ford of Ocean, he killed Orthus and Eurytion the herdsman in the dim stead out beyond glorious Ocean — the cattle-raid that ends the hound in the same passage that first names him.4
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
