Counting the Heads, and Getting Past Them

The sources do not agree on the hound's anatomy. Hesiod gives fifty heads. The number that stuck is three, which is what the vase painters use and what later poets assume, though two is common in archaic art and probably reflects the practical difficulty of drawing three. A serpent for a tail, and snakes along the back, are frequent additions rather than fixed features.

What is consistent is the job. Cerberus is not there to stop the living entering; several people enter. He is there to stop the dead leaving, and every account of getting past him is an account of a trick rather than a fight. Orpheus plays until the dog sleeps. The Sibyl in the sixth book of the Aeneid throws a drugged honey cake. The offering of honey cakes to the dead, attested as an actual practice, sits behind that detail, so the poem is describing a rite and not inventing a stratagem.

Heracles is the exception and the exception is defined as such. His twelfth labour is to bring the hound up alive, without weapons, and then take it back. He wrestles it. The point of the labour is that it is the one thing a mortal should not be able to do, which is why it comes last and why the dog is returned rather than kept.