kata-chthonia:
ozzy698:
awkward-angel:
Still not over the fact that Hades named his three-headed...
:
Still not over the fact that Hades named his three-headed monster dog Spot.
maybe Cerberus was a Dalmatian?
I was doing some research on ancient dog breeds so I could get a clear mental image of what Cerberus’ heads would look like (his body was said to be covered in sharp scales and that he had the tail of a serpent)
Dalmatians only came into existence around 1600 CE, and were part of the great post-Renaissance explosion in dog breeds among the upper classes. But since Dalmatians were originally bred in Eastern Europe, their ancestors likely had the spots and other traits that were bred to be dominant later.
A strong candidate for what Cerberus may have looked like is the Cretan Hound, which has a more fox-like body and a longer snout. But Cretan hounds were more gentle, used for hunting small game, and wander the island of Crete even today. On a lot of the artwork of Cerberus, he seems to have a longer snout, which might back up this idea.
Another ancient breed was the Maltese, popular with the aristocracy of Ancient Greece and Rome. Hilarious though it might be, I can’t imagine a three headed Maltese guarding the Underworld.
There was a breed of dog, now extinct, called the Mollosus, whose modern descendents are Mastiffs, Rottweilers, Mountain dogs and Danes. I read that the breed is less muscular and more wolf-like (longer snouts) than modern mastiffs (which makes sense… we’d only started selectively breeding dogs away from their wolf-like ancestral appearance after the agricultural revolution). Much like their descendents, they had very strong jaws, were used for large game hunting, as war dogs and for guarding homes, which sounds a lot like Cerberus.
