Echidna- Greek CreatureCreature · Monster"Mother of All Monsters"

Origins

Hesiod names Echidna as a daughter of Phorcys and Ceto, the ancient sea deities who also bore the Gorgons and the Graeae. She was kin to Medusa and to the grey women who shared a single eye between them. Apollodorus gives her different parents: Tartarus and Gaia in one account, the river Styx in another. Whether sea-born or earth-born, she predated the Olympians.

Hesiod describes her: "half a nymph with glancing eyes and fair cheeks, and half again a huge snake, great and awful, with speckled skin, eating raw flesh beneath the secret parts of the holy earth." Beautiful from the waist up, monstrous below it. Her name means "she-viper." The nymph drew men close. The serpent kept them.

The Cave at Arima

Echidna dwelt in a cave at Arima, a place Hesiod set "apart from the deathless gods and mortal men." Homer names the land of the Arimoi. Later writers placed her in Cilicia or beneath Mount Etna. All are volcanic ground at the world's edge, where fire and smoke breached the surface.

Her mate was Typhon, the serpentine giant who nearly toppled Olympus. In the Theogony, a hundred dragon heads burned on his shoulders, each speaking in the voices of gods and beasts. When he rose against Zeus, the other gods fled to Egypt and hid in animal forms. Zeus alone stood his ground. He threw bolt after bolt.

In Apollodorus, the fight went badly first. Typhon ripped the sinews from Zeus's hands and feet with an adamantine sickle and hid them in a bearskin in a Cilician cave. He set the she-dragon Delphyne to guard them. Hermes and Aegipan crept in, stole the sinews, and refitted them to Zeus's body. Zeus resumed the fight, chasing Typhon across Thrace to Sicily and burying him beneath Mount Etna, where his rage still erupts as fire.

Before that defeat, Typhon had joined Echidna in their cave, and from their union came the monsters.

The Brood

Nearly every great beast the heroes faced traced back to Echidna's cave.

The Hydra lurked in the swamps near Argos, a serpent with nine heads. For every one Heracles severed, two grew back. His nephew Iolaus cauterized each stump with a burning brand before the new heads could sprout. The one immortal head, Heracles buried under a heavy stone.

The Chimera scorched the plains of Lycia, breathing fire from a lion's head while a goat's body held it aloft and a serpent served as its tail. Bellerophon rode Pegasus above the flames and drove a lead-tipped lance into its throat. The creature's own fire melted the lead and choked it.

The Nemean Lion roamed the hills of Argolis in a golden hide no blade could cut. Heracles cornered it in its den and strangled it. He wore the skin as armor.

Cerberus guarded the gates of Hades, and the Sphinx crouched on the road to Thebes with a riddle that killed everyone who answered wrong, until Oedipus answered right. Others came from the same cave. In the Theogony, the Chimera mated with the two-headed dog Orthrus and bore the Sphinx and the Nemean Lion. Echidna was grandmother as well as mother.

Heracles in Scythia

Herodotus records a story from the edges of the Greek world. In the wilds of Scythia, a half-serpent, half-woman living alone found Heracles driving the cattle of Geryon through her country. She hid his horses and refused to return them until he lay with her. Heracles had no choice. He stayed, and she bore him three sons: Agathyrsus, Gelonus, and Scythes.

Before he left, Heracles gave her a bow and a belt and told her to test the boys when they were grown. Whichever son could string the bow and buckle the belt as Heracles wore it would inherit the land. The two elder brothers tried and failed. Only Scythes, the youngest, managed both, and he became the ancestor of the Scythian people.

The Mother Who Remained

Hesiod declares that Echidna is "half divine, and dies not nor grows old." Heroes killed her children across a generation. The Hydra fell. The Chimera fell. The Lion fell. Echidna did not age.

Apollodorus records a different end. Argus Panoptes, the hundred-eyed giant in Hera's service, caught Echidna sleeping. Argus never slept fully: when some of his eyes closed, others stayed open. He found the mother of monsters in her cave, vulnerable for once, and killed her.