Hesperides

"The Garden of the Hesperides" by Frederick, Lord Leighton, 1892

In Greek mythology, the three Hesperides are nymphs who tend the blissful garden in the farthest west, on the slopes of Atlas, where the nymphs tend the Tree that bears the golden apples. The Hesperides are three, like the other Greek triads: the Three Graces, the Moirae. Their names are Hespere, Aegle and Erytheis and they sing in the deathless orchard. The English painter Lord Leighton, whose Greek was as good as his technique, got the slightly narcotic fruit-rich classicizing atmosphere right (illustration): the single Tree, the guardian serpent Ladon, the singing, the golden light, the boundless Atlantic beyond.

Alternatively the Hesperides are nymphs who live in a beautifully tended garden located, according to various sources, in the Arcadian Mountains in Greece, or near the Atlas mountains in Libya, but most sources place the garden somewhere in a far western corner of the earth.

The Garden of the Hesperides is Hera's orchard in the west, where perhaps a grove of immortality-giving golden appless grew, perhaps a single tree, planted from the fruited branches that Gaia gave to her as a wedding gift when Hera accepted Zeus. The Hesperides were given the task of tending to the grove, but occasionally plucked from it themselves. Not trusting them, Hera also placed in the garden an unsleeping, hundred-headed dragon named Ladon as an additional safeguard.

Hesperis is the personification of the evening, as Eos is of the dawn, and the Evening Star is Hesperus.

Only one hero ever managed to steal any of the golden Apples of the Hesperides: Heracles. He tricked Atlas into getting the apples for him as part of one of his Twelve Labors. First Heracles had to slay Ladon, another of his triumphs over a chthonic earth-guardian of an older time. This time, though, the intrusions of Heracles clearly overstepped the bounds of decorum, and Athena later returned the apples to their rightful place in the garden.

Alternatively, the Hesperides are sometimes called the Western Maidens, the Daughters of Evening, or the Sunset Goddesses, all apparently tied to their location in the distant west. They are also called the African Sisters, and thought to be in Libya.

According to different accounts, there were either three, four, or seven Hesperides, but they are usually numbered three. Among the names given to them are Aegle ("dazzling light"), Arethusa, Erytheia, Hesperia (or Hespereia), Hespere (or Hespera), Hestia, and Hesperusa. They are sometimes called the Western Maidens, the Daughters of Evening, or the Sunset Goddesses, all apparently tied to their imagined location in the distant west. They are also called the African Sisters, perhaps when thought to be in Libya. In addition to their tending of the garden, they were said to have taken great pleasure in singing.

They are daughters of Night (Nyx) and Darkness (Erebus) quite the way Eos in the farthermost east, in Colchis, is the daughter of the sun titan Hyperion. Or they are the daughters of Atlas who fathered the Hyades and the Pleiades Or they have other parentage: Zeus and Hesperius or Themis, or Phorcys and Ceto.

The ancients also named Hesperides some islands on the extreme west of their known world. They may have been the Canary Islands or Cape Verde.

Hesperides was the original name of a Greek city in Cyrenaica, North Africa, that was traditionally founded in 446 BC, by a brother of the king of Cyrene. The city was refounded during the Ptolemaic Dynasty as Berenice, the name by which it is generally remembered. (It is the site of the modern seaport of Benghazi, Libya.)