Geryon

What it is

Geryon is a giant of Greek myth, remembered as the keeper of a celebrated herd of red cattle. His home was Erytheia, an island at the western edge of the Mediterranean, set among the mythic Hesperides. Writers give his shape in competing ways: three bodies with three heads, three heads on a single body, or three bodies sharing one head. Most accounts keep him largely human in form, with strange additions such as wings, or six hands and six feet in one lost description, or six legs. He is the child of Chrysaor and Callirrhoe, which makes him Medusa's grandson and Pegasus' nephew. A two-headed dog, Orthrus, and a herdsman called Eurytion watched the cattle alongside him.

Where it comes from

Greek writers disagreed about him. Hesiod has him single-bodied with three heads, while the tradition Aeschylus followed gave him three bodies. A lost poem by Stesichorus, the Geryoneis, written in the sixth century BC, seems to lie behind the fullest surviving telling, in the Bibliotheke ascribed to Pseudo-Apollodorus. Papyrus scraps found at Oxyrhynchus preserve parts of it, and they carry the earliest mention of Tartessos. Pausanias adds a daughter, Erytheia, who bore Hermes a son, Norax, said to have founded Nora in Sardinia. In medieval Iberia the figure was treated as an early inhabitant of the peninsula, so the story became bound up with the beginnings of Spain and Portugal.

How it is done

The tale is told as Heracles' tenth labour: he had to bring the cattle of Geryon back to Eurystheus. Crossing the Libyan desert, he grew angry at the heat and shot an arrow at Helios. The sun god admired his nerve, lent him the golden cup he sailed in each night, and in it Heracles crossed to Erytheia. He killed the dog Orthrus with his olive-wood club, then the herdsman Eurytion. Geryon armed himself three times over, with shields, spears and helmets, and chased him to the river Anthemus. There an arrow carrying Hydra venom struck his forehead, and the poem compares him to a poppy shedding its petals.

Tools and materials

Geryon's gear is listed as triple: a set of shields, spears and helmets for his three-fold frame. His household on Erytheia included the two-headed hound Orthrus, brother to Cerberus, the herdsman Eurytion, a son of Erytheia, and the red cattle that are the object of the whole expedition. Against these, Heracles carries an olive-wood club and a bow, while the cup of Helios ferries him over the water, a scene vase painters liked. In Roman versions the stolen cattle are made to walk backwards so their tracks point the wrong way.

What it is for

The cattle are the point of the story: Eurystheus wants them, and Heracles must drive them back to him. In the Roman telling, Cacus steals part of the herd while Heracles sleeps and is killed for it; Romans said an altar was set up where the cattle market, the Forum Boarium, later stood. Hera interferes twice, sending a gadfly to scatter the animals and then raising a flood that blocks the road, until Heracles fills the river with stones. On arrival the herd is sacrificed to Hera. The episode also gave vase painters a favourite subject.

Peoples and places

Greek speakers told the story, and later Greek writers moved Erytheia from a vague western island to a real region, Tartessos in southern Iberia. Roman poets took it up; Vergil mentions the conquest in the Aeneid and may have modelled Erulus, king of Praeneste, on Geryon. Medieval churchmen on the peninsula read the giant as a local figure. Joan Margarit i Pau, bishop of Girona, and Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, bishop of Toledo, used his stand against the Greek invader to argue for Iberian legitimacy, and the Portuguese friar Bernardo de Brito pictured him as a tyrant ruling the descendants of Tubal.

What people believe

Geryon belongs to a world where gods take sides in quarrels between heroes and monsters. In Stesichorus' poem the gods hold a council, and Athena warns Poseidon that she will stand by Heracles against Poseidon's own grandson. Geryon's mother Callirrhoe begs him not to go out to fight, and the fragments seem to raise a question over whether he is immortal. Hera works against Heracles throughout, scattering the herd with a gadfly and swelling a river in his path. The herd ends as an offering to her. Heracles' arrow carries the Hydra's poison, so victory comes through another monster's remains.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Denys Page noticed that painted scenes of the Geryon fight become common from the middle of the sixth century BC, and proposed that Stesichorus' poem prompted the fashion. Page also worked out that the poem ran in twenty-six-line groups of strophe, antistrophe and epode set in columns down a scroll, which let him place fragments sometimes only a word long. Winged Geryons appear on Chalcidian vases of the same period. The Herculean Sarcophagus of Genzano shows him with three heads. Vergil's Erulus, a king of Praeneste with three souls, may borrow from him.

Compare and confuse

Dante's Geryon shares only a name with the Greek giant. In the Inferno he is the Monster of Fraud, with a lion's or bear's paws, a wyvern's body, an honest human face and a scorpion's sting in the tail, closer to a manticore; he glides below the cliffs between the circles of violence and fraud. Modern works return to older material: Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red rebuilds Stesichorus' fragments, and a London monument, the Cádiz Memorial, sets a captured mortar on a dragon modelled on Geryon.

Today

The myth survives mainly through retellings. Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red (1998) reworks the Geryoneis fragments into a modern story, and scholarly work on the papyri continues. At A Coruña the Tower of Hercules, a working lighthouse built over a Roman one, is tied by medieval Spanish chronicle to Heracles' victory: Alfonso X of Castile's Estoria de España recounts that the hero cut off the giant's head and had a tower raised on the site. In London the Cádiz Memorial carries a dragon based on Geryon.

Questions people ask about Geryon

Good reading and sources

• Encyclopaedia BritannicaArticle

• Geryon on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data