The Hydra

A monster raised against Heracles

The Hydra is a many-headed water monster. The early Greek poet Hesiod makes it a child of Typhon and Echidna. The goddess Hera raises it because she is angry with the hero Heracles. It lives in a marsh at Lerna, beside the spring of Amymone, on the coast south of Argos. Killing it becomes the second of the labours, the tasks King Eurystheus sets Heracles.

The fight is hard because of how the Hydra heals. Each time Heracles cuts off a head, two new heads grow from the open neck. He cannot win by repeating the blow. So his companion Iolaus takes burning torches and seals each wound with fire before it can split. Meanwhile Heracles works his way towards the one immortal head in the middle.

A crab joins the fight on the Hydra’s side and bites Heracles on the foot. He crushes it. The writer Hyginus, in his book on the stars, says that Juno, as he calls Hera, later set the crab among the stars for its attack. So the battle is more than one hero against one beast. Hera has raised the monster, a second creature helps it, and a human friend helps Heracles.

The head under the rock

Once every mortal neck is sealed, Heracles cuts off the immortal head. He buries it beside the road from Lerna to Elaeus and sets a heavy rock on top. Then he cuts open the body and dips his arrows in its poison.

The dead Hydra goes on killing through those arrows in later stories. One of them is the accidental shot that wounds Chiron, an immortal centaur, so that he can never heal.

Eurystheus still refuses to accept the victory. The first order had set Heracles ten labours. The king rules that the Hydra cannot count, because Iolaus brought the fire and Heracles did not win alone. The ruling follows the letter of the task, and it is meant to punish. Heracles has beaten a creature built to replace every loss with two more. In the eyes of the man who sets the labours, accepting help makes the success invalid.

How many heads

The ancient writers never agree on the number of heads. Hesiod’s account is the earliest to survive, but it gives no total. He says only that the Hydra was raised by Hera and destroyed by Heracles with Iolaus, through the plans of the goddess Athena. The playwright Euripides also calls it many-headed without choosing a number.

Apollodorus, whose handbook, the Library, retells the Greek myths, counts nine heads. Eight are mortal and one is immortal. The historian Diodorus Siculus gives the creature 100 necks, each with a serpent’s head.

These descriptions cannot all describe one fixed body. The heads that grow back explain why the number never settles. Each version can make the threat larger before Heracles and Iolaus find out how to stop it.

The one-headed snake Pausanias believed in

Pausanias, a Greek traveller who wrote a guide to Greece, visited Lerna. People there showed him a plane tree growing over the spot where the Hydra was said to have lived, beside the spring of Amymone. He believed in a large water snake with a deadly bite, which would explain the poisoned arrows. He did not believe in the many heads. He names Peisander of Camirus as the poet who added them, to make the beast more frightening and his own poem more impressive.

That judgement is ancient criticism, and it is not archaeology proving the myth. Pausanias saw a place that people pointed to, and he offered a natural animal to explain the story.

Lerna today

Today the excavated ground at Lerna is pointed to as the place where myth set the spring, the bottomless Alkyonian lake and the Hydra’s den.

What stands there comes from much earlier settlement. The remains include a house from the Middle Neolithic, part of the late Stone Age, and the stone enclosure raised above the House of Tiles, a building of the Early Bronze Age. The plane tree that Pausanias records is gone, and so is any trace of a many-headed body. The dispute over one head, nine or 100 lives on only in the texts.

So Lerna keeps two separate records. Ancient writers attach a changing monster and a disputed head count to its water. Excavation shows houses and enclosures made by people who lived there long before those writers. Neither record proves the other.