The monstrous giant with a hundred dragon heads who challenged Zeus was Typhon.
In Hesiod’s Theogony, Typhon is born from Gaia and Tartarus and rises as a final threat to Zeus’s rule of the cosmos. His hundred serpent heads spit fire and produce many sounds, including the voices of gods and animals. Other ancient writers describe him as winged, enormously tall, and serpentine below the waist.
Zeus defeats Typhon with his thunderbolt after a cataclysmic battle. Different traditions place the defeated monster beneath Tartarus, Mount Etna, or the island of Ischia, linking him with volcanic fire. Typhon is not the same as Python, the serpent Apollo kills at Delphi; nor is Tartarus the monster, but the primordial abyss associated with Typhon’s parentage.
Typhon and Echidna are also presented as parents of several famous monsters, including Cerberus, the Hydra, and the Chimera. His defeat forms part of the Greek succession myth explaining how Zeus secured cosmic sovereignty.