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get up each time but was not quick enough to keep up with the
constantly dodging and weaving god. Over time, therefore, Ty-
phon grew increasingly tired, weak, and disoriented. As the battle
raged, “great earth groaned,” in the words of the Greek epic poet
Hesiod. Zeus tossed his thunderbolts and the earth’s surface
“was widely scorched by the awful blast and melted.” 8
Finally, Zeus was able to hurl this gigantic opponent down
into the underworld’s darkest depths. Although defeated and in-
capacitated, Typhon was not dead. During the many centuries
that followed, according to Greek lore, he periodically expelled
a breath from his massive body. Each of those bursts of hot air
rose up to the earth’s surface and became a hurricane. (Sup-
posedly, one of the words for hurricane, typhoon, came from the
monster’s name.)

The Capture of the Supercanine

One of the numerous popular Greek myths says that not long be-
fore his confrontation with Zeus, Typhon mated with his unsightly
sibling Echidna. The result was still another revolting monster,
Cerberus, a huge dog-like beast. Whereas
most ancient myth tellers said that Cer-
Cerberus berus had three heads, Hesiod described it
as having fi fty heads.
A huge three-headed The number of Cerberus’s heads aside,
dog-like creature that all ancient accounts agreed that its job was
guarded the borders of
the underworld to guard the underworld’s outer border and
attack and eat any person who tried to en-
ter that dark realm ruled by Zeus’s brother
Hades. Hesiod writes that the ferocious supercanine “stands piti-
less guard in front” of Hades’s palace. “Lying in wait, he eats up
anyone he catches.” 9
The classical Greeks both feared and appreciated Cerberus.
On the one hand, he was clearly a vicious, villainous monster. But
people were also thankful for the giant dog’s existence because he
kept living humans out of the underworld and also stopped dead

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