Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Hesiod places Echidna in a cave beneath the earth: half lovely nymph, half terrible serpent, immortal and ageless, eating raw flesh far from gods and men. To her Typhon (Typhoeus)—the storm-monster later blasted by Zeus—unites, and from that pairing spring the great named beasts of archaic epic. First Orthrus, the two-headed hound of Geryon; then Cerberus, the fifty-headed (in Hesiod; later three-headed) bronze-voiced hound of Hades, eater of raw flesh; then the Lernaean Hydra, whom Hera reared in wrath against Heracles; then the fire-breathing Chimera—lion before, snake behind, goat in the middle—whom Bellerophon would slay with Pegasus’s aid. Hesiod also nests the Sphinx (Phix) that ruined the Cadmeans and the Nemean Lion among Echidna’s line (via the Chimera or related unions in the same stretch), so that Theban and Argive monsters share one subterranean mother. The catalogue is genealogical, not a single battle: each child later fills a hero’s labor or a city’s terror, but Hesiod’s point is that the worst mortal-facing monsters are siblings, born of the union of serpent-nymph and cosmic rebel. Apollodorus and later handbooks rearrange counts of heads and sometimes reassign parentage (e.g. Ladon, the Crommyonian sow, Scylla), yet the Hesiodic core—Orthrus, Cerberus, Hydra, Chimera—remains the classical monster family. Catalogue the brood apart from Zeus’s fight with Typhoeus so the offspring list stands as its own theogonic unit.