Echidna
Generation V · Mother of monsters
Half lovely nymph and half vast speckled serpent, Echidna lived alone in a cave and, Hesiod insists, is ageless and immortal all her days. As Typhon's mate she is the mother of monsters — Orthrus, Cerberus, the Hydra, and more besides. A later tradition adds that the hundred-eyed watchman Argus caught her sleeping and slew her, one of the few tales to contradict her deathlessness. Hesiod's pronoun here is ambiguous: most readers take her parents to be Phorcys and Ceto, but some read the mother as the Oceanid Callirhoe.