The Dracaenae belong to the oldest stratum of Greek myth, emerging from the chthonic depths where the earth itself gives birth to horrors. The term drakaina is the feminine form of drakon, the Greek word for serpent or dragon, and it describes a specific kind of monster: a woman from the waist up, with a coiling serpent's tail or sea-monster's body in place of legs. Hesiod, the poet of the Theogony, gives us the most famous of them all. Echidna was born to Phorcys and Ceto, the primordial sea deities who personified the terrors of the deep, though some say her parents were Tartarus and Gaia, the underworld and the earth itself. She was a nymph who never aged and never died, dwelling in a remote cave beneath a hollow rock in the land of Arima. Hesiod describes her with terrifying precision: "half a nymph with glancing eyes and fair cheeks, and half again a huge snake, great and awful, with speckled skin." She ate raw flesh in the secret depths of the earth, far from both gods and mortals, and there she waited.

She did not wait alone. Typhon, the most monstrous being ever born, came to her cave. He was a giant whose head brushed the stars, whose eyes blazed with fire, and from whose hands sprouted the heads of a hundred dragons. Gaia, the primordial Earth, had borne him to challenge the rule of Zeus. Typhon and Echidna fell in love, and from their union came a brood of monsters that would define the age of heroes. Their children included Orthrus, the two-headed hound who guarded the cattle of Geryon; Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guarded the gates of the underworld; the Lernaean Hydra, the many-headed serpent whose heads grew back doubled when cut; the Chimera, the fire-breathing beast with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent; the Sphinx, the winged monster who devoured those who could not answer her riddle; the Hesperian Dragon, the hundred-headed serpent who guarded the golden apples of the Hesperides; the Caucasian Eagle, the creature that tore at Prometheus's liver every day; and Scylla, the sea-monster who snatched sailors from passing ships. Echidna was not merely a monster. She was the forge from which every great trial of Greek heroism was hammered.

Not all Dracaenae were mothers. Some were jailers. Campe, a creature of pure terror, was appointed by the Titan Cronus to guard the Cyclopes and the Hecatoncheires, the hundred-handed giants, in the deepest pit of Tartarus. She was a drakaina of a different order: serpentine hair writhed around her head, a twisted mass of beasts sprouted from her core, lions and boars gnashing and baring their tusks, and where legs should be, a thousand vipers writhed with venomous fangs. Dark wings stretched across her back like tattered shrouds, and a deadly scorpion tail poised to strike. When Zeus rose against the Titans in the Titanomachy, the war between the old Titans and the young Olympian gods, he knew he needed the imprisoned giants. He descended into Tartarus, slew Campe with a decisive blow, and freed the Cyclopes and Hecatoncheires. They forged his thunderbolts and fought beside him, and the Titans fell. Campe's death was the price of Olympian victory, the serpent-jailer struck down so that the gods of order could be born.

Other Dracaenae wandered the surface world, bringing terror to mortal lands. The Scythian Dracaena, the first ruler of the land of Scythia, was a woman from the waist up with the tail of a serpent below. When Heracles, the hero forced to complete twelve impossible labors, was driving the cattle of Geryon through her realm, she stole some of the herd and refused to return them unless the hero mated with her. Heracles, ever pragmatic, agreed. She bore him three sons: Agathyrsus, Gelonus, and Scythes. Heracles left behind his bow and his girdle, instructing her to keep whichever son could bend the bow and wear the belt. Only Scythes succeeded, and he became the first king of the Scythians, a line of rulers descended from both a serpent-queen and the greatest of Greek heroes. Herodotus, the father of history, records this tale as a Greek translation of an older Scythian myth, suggesting that the Dracaenae were not merely Greek inventions but echoes of far older earth-goddesses.

The Argive Dracaena, daughter of Peiras and the river-goddess Styx, ravaged the region of Argos until the hundred-eyed giant Argus Panoptes, a creature who never slept because his eyes took turns resting, found her in her cave and slew her while she slept. Poene, another serpent-woman, was sent by the sun god Apollo as a plague upon the Argives after the death of his son Linus, her breath carrying disease and her gaze withering crops. She was slain by the hero Coroebus, who saved the city from divine wrath. And Delphyne, a half-woman, half-serpent, guarded the stolen sinews of Zeus in a cave in Cilicia after the storm-giant Typhon had ripped them from the king of the gods during his rebellion. Hermes and Aegipan, the goat-god, stole the sinews back and restored Zeus to power. Every Dracaena was a guardian of something the gods needed, a barrier between the Olympians and the chaos beneath the earth, and every Dracaena had to be overcome for order to prevail.