Orthrus

Also Known As: Greek Ὄρθρος, Orthros; Hesiod’s older form is Ὄρθος, Orthos
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: He kept watch over a herd at the western edge of the world with two heads that could not both be looked away from at once.
Role in Mythos: He is the first thing Heracles has to kill on the tenth labour, the guard between the hero and Geryon’s red cattle.
Relation to Humans: No mortal is recorded as having lived near him or made an offering to him, because the island he guarded lay past the last inhabited coast. The only man who ever reached him came to steal, and killed him within a few lines of arriving.

Past the last of the water, where the Ocean stream runs out of names, there is an island the Greeks called Erytheia, the red one. The cattle grazing on it were red too, several hundred of them, moving slowly over thin salt grass in a light that always seems to be going. A herdsman worked there and had almost nothing to do. Beside him, in the shade of the rock, lay a dog with two heads, and the trouble with a dog like that is that there is no moment when it is looking somewhere else.

He is called Orthos in the oldest source and Orthrus in the later ones, and the two spellings pull in different directions. One suggests orthros, the twilight, the grey hour before the sun clears the sea. The other suggests orthos, straight or upright. Neither meaning is explained anywhere in the surviving texts, which is a small frustration, because a name that means twilight sits very well on an animal posted at the place where the day goes to die.

Apollodorus gives him two heads and that is the number most people know. The painters were less disciplined. A bronze horse pectoral from Samos of the late seventh century, the earliest image of him anyone has found, shows two. So does the red-figure cup by Euphronios now in Munich, and a black-figure neck amphora by the Swing Painter. But an Attic vase in the British Museum gives him one, and an early fifth-century stone relief from Cyprus gives him three, which makes him briefly indistinguishable from his brother. The tail is just as unsettled. Euphronios and the Cypriot carver end him in a snake. Everyone else paints an ordinary dog’s tail, the kind that would have wagged.

Nothing in the record says how big he was, or what colour, or whether his coat was rough or smooth. The Greeks who wrote about him were not interested in that. They were interested in his family.

Hesiod puts him first in the litter. Echidna, half beautiful woman and half enormous speckled serpent, bore him to Typhon in a cave, and after him came Cerberus, brazen-voiced, with fifty heads in Hesiod’s count before literature settled on three. The two dogs are so alike in function that one classicist called Orthrus a doublet of Cerberus, and the parallel holds all the way down: same parents, extra heads, sometimes a serpent’s tail, a herd or a gate to keep, and eventually the same man walking up the path toward them.

Then the genealogy does something strange. A few lines later Hesiod has a female monster lie with Orthos and produce the Sphinx and the Nemean Lion. Who she is depends on how you read a single pronoun, and the candidates are the Chimera, Echidna herself, or Ceto. The grammar has never been settled. What is clear is that this two-headed cattle dog, who gets barely half a dozen lines of his own in all of Greek literature, is credited with fathering the riddler who broke Thebes and the lion whose hide Heracles would wear for the rest of his career. His son’s pelt was on the shoulders of the man who killed him.

The cattle he guarded belonged to Geryon, who had three bodies joined at the waist, and the herdsman beside him was Eurytion. Stesichorus told the whole of it in the sixth century BC in a lyric poem of perhaps thirteen hundred lines, the Geryoneis, most of which was lost until fragments turned up on papyrus at Oxyrhynchus. It contains the first mention of Tartessos in Greek, and it places Eurytion’s birth opposite Erytheia, by the silver-rooted waters of the river, in the hollow of a rock. Orthrus moves through those fragments too, doing his job.

He did it well enough that he found Heracles first. In Apollodorus, the hero crosses to Erytheia and makes camp on Mount Abas, and it is the dog who picks up the scent and comes for him, running, both heads fixed on the same target. Heracles hit him with the club. Eurytion heard it and came to help and was killed where he stood. Hesiod compresses the whole episode into a phrase: Heracles slew Orthos and the oxherd Eurytion out in the gloomy meadow beyond the famous Ocean.

The painters disagree about the weapon. In art he is almost never shown alive. The Samos pectoral has him crouched at Geryon’s feet with an arrow already through one head; the Euphronios cup shows him on his back, belly up, an arrow in his chest and the snake tail still moving; the Swing Painter puts two arrows through a single head. Pindar, oddly, speaks of the hounds of Geryon in the plural, the only writer to do so, and nobody knows whether he was counting the heads or knew a version with more than one dog.

His strengths were the obvious ones and they were real. Two heads mean two lines of sight, two sets of ears and no shared blind spot, and the scent of a stranger reached him across a whole island. He needed no weapon and no plan. He was awake.

His limits were built into the same design. A guard is fixed to what he guards, and everything Orthrus had was arranged for a threat arriving at the herd, on the ground, within reach. He could not be bought off, hidden from or reasoned with, but he also could not do anything except charge, and against a man with a club and a bow that is a short conversation. Cerberus at least survived his encounter with Heracles, dragged up into daylight, shown to a terrified king and sent back down to his gate. Orthrus got no such arrangement. He stayed in the meadow beyond the Ocean, and the cattle went east without him.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Orthrus in Greek mythology?

Orthrus was a two-headed dog who guarded the red cattle of the giant Geryon on the island of Erytheia at the western edge of the world. He was killed by Heracles during the tenth of his twelve labours. Hesiod, the oldest source, calls him Orthos, while later writers such as Apollodorus use the form Orthrus.

Who were Orthrus’s parents, and was he related to Cerberus?

Orthrus was the offspring of Typhon and the serpent-woman Echidna, and Cerberus was his brother. Hesiod names Orthrus as the first of Echidna’s brood and Cerberus as the next, and the two are so similar in form and function that scholars have described Orthrus as a doublet of Cerberus. Both were multi-headed guard dogs, both are sometimes shown with a serpent’s tail, and both were overcome by Heracles.

How did Heracles kill Orthrus?

According to Apollodorus, Heracles reached Erytheia and camped on Mount Abas, where Orthrus caught his scent and charged him, and Heracles struck the dog down with his club. The herdsman Eurytion came to the dog’s aid and was killed as well. Greek vase painters told it differently, showing Orthrus dead or dying with one or more arrows in him rather than club wounds.

Was Orthrus the father of the Sphinx and the Nemean Lion?

Hesiod says that a female monster lay with Orthrus and bore the Sphinx and the Nemean Lion, which makes him the father of both. The identity of the mother is uncertain, because the pronoun Hesiod uses could refer to the Chimera, to Echidna or to Ceto, and the passage has never been settled. The Nemean Lion was later killed by Heracles, the same hero who killed Orthrus.

How many heads did Orthrus have?

Apollodorus gives Orthrus two heads, and that is the standard number. Ancient artists were less consistent: most depictions show two heads, including the seventh-century bronze pectoral from Samos and the red-figure cup by Euphronios, but some sixth-century vases give him only one, and an early fifth-century Cypriot stone relief gives him three.