The appearance of the Hydra was even more scattered and inconsistent in the visual arts. Even the smallest contact with the Hydra’s blood could be fatal Heracles used this to his advantage by dipping his arrows in the monster’s blood after he had killed it.

According to Hyginus, the creature was “so poisonous that she killed men with her breath, and if anyone passed by when she was sleeping, he breathed her tracks and died in the greatest torment.” The Hydra’s poison was said to give the swamps and springs in which it lived a terrible smell. Some sources claimed that one of the Hydra’s heads was immortal, while the other eight (or however many there were) were mortal (but could regenerate). Taking this ability into account, the Hydra could have started out with any number of heads and then increased them exponentially. But by the first century BCE, it was commonly said that the Hydra regrew two or even three heads for every one that was cut off. This was likely not a part of the earliest versions of the myth, where the creature’s many heads were sufficiently terrifying on their own. Louvre Museum, Paris, France.Īnother important attribute of the Hydra was its ability to regenerate its heads. The Hydra is here depicted with eleven heads-a number not attested in any literary sources.

Vase painting showing Heracles and Iolaus fighting the Hydra, in the manner of the Princeton Painter (ca. But other sources gave the Hydra as few as three heads or as many as fifty or one hundred. This number was probably the most popular one in antiquity. In the sixth century BCE, for example, the poet Alcaeus said that the Hydra had nine heads. Later poets gave a range of suggestions for the number of heads. However, Peisander failed to specify exactly how many heads the Hydra had. Literary representations of the Hydra began to appear around the same time, starting with Peisander in his lost epic the Heraclea (late seventh century BCE). The earliest known depiction of the Hydra was found on a pair of bronze fibulae (decorative brooches or pins) made in Boeotia around 700 BCE it showed the monster with six heads. Though the Hydra was (as far as we know) always imagined as a many-headed creature, there was no consensus as to the exact number of heads or its other attributes and abilities. Ancient authors claimed that the creature haunted a spring named for Amymone, a daughter of Danaus and a lover of Poseidon, until it was finally killed by Heracles. The Hydra lived in the swamps near Lerna, a town in the eastern Peloponnese.

Lernean hydra