Hydra
animal · 4 works · 4 mentions · 5 anchored passages
the hydra · a Hydra's head · hundred-headed hydra · the Hydra
in the texts
Heracles
The many-headed monster slain by Heracles as one of his labors, whose venom coats the arrows later used, in madness, to kill his own children.
Slain them in a wild fit of frenzy with arrows dipped in the venom of the hundred-headed hydra.
or how when I had killed the hydra, that monster with a ring of heads with power to grow again, I passed through a herd of countless other toils besides and came to the dead to fetch to the light at the bidding of Eurystheus the three-headed hound, hell’s porter.
Republic
The mythological many-headed serpent invoked as a simile for endlessly multiplying, futile legal reforms.
For surely such fellows are the most charming spectacle in the world when they enact and amend such laws as we just now described and are perpetually expecting to find a way of putting an end to frauds in business and in the other matters of which I was speaking because they can’t see that they are in very truth trying to cut off a Hydra’s head.
Letters to Lucilius
Mythological many-headed serpent invoked as an analogy for parts belonging to one whole living creature.
And yet none of those heads is a living creature, but the head of a living creature, while the hydra itself is one living creature.
De Pallio
Mythological monster whose venomous blood tipped Hercules's arrows, invoked as a symbol of his lost heroism.
The old blood of the Hydra and the Centaurs in the arrows was now shut out by the pumice of the dart, luxury insulting, that after the monsters transfixed they might perhaps stitch a garland.