Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary/Cerberus

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Rich, Anthony (1849). The illustrated companion to the Latin dictionary, and Greek lexicon. p. vi. OCLC 894670115. https://archive.org/details/illustratedcompa00rich. 

CER'BERUS (Κέρβερος). The dog which kept watch at the entrance to the nether world; a monster fabled to have sprung from Typhaon and Echidna, and to have been dragged upon earth by Hercules as the last and most difficult of his twelve labours. In reality Cerberus was a dog belonging to the king of the Molossians, whose country produced the finest breed of dogs known to the ancients, and which are believed to be represented by the marble statues now preserved in the Vatican, exhibiting two dogs of very powerful frames, with long hair upon the neck and shoulders like the mane of a lion. The poets metamorphosed these hairs into snakes (Hor. Od. ii. 85.), and, to increase the horror, some gave the animal a hundred heads (Hor. Od. ii. 34.), others fifty (Hesiod. Theogn. 312., though in verse 771. he has but one), and others limited the number to three (Soph. Trachin. 1109.), the centre one being that of a lion, with the head of a wolf on one side, and of an ordinary dog on the other (Macrob. Sat. i. 20.). This is the usual type under which he is mostly portrayed by the painters and sculptors of antiquity (Mus. Pio-Clem. tom. ii. tav. 1. Bartoli, Lucerne, part 2. tav. 7. Cod. Vat. &c.); though examples are not wanting in which the fabulous is made subordinate to the real character of the monster, as in a group of Hercules and Cerberus in the Vatican (Mus. Pio-Clem. ii. 8.), where the leonine head and mane of the Molossian dog is strongly marked, and made to predominate entirely over the other two, which are executed upon a much smaller scale, and, as it were, rather indicated than developed.