Apples of the Hesperides

Also Known As: Greek chrysea mela, the golden apples; Latin Hesperidum mala; the Greek word melon can mean an apple, any tree fruit, or a sheep, a double sense the ancient rationalisers exploited
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: Fruit of solid gold grown from branches that Earth brought as a wedding present for Zeus and Hera, so sacred that it could not lawfully be set down anywhere outside the goddess’s garden.
Role in Mythos: The apples are the prize of Heracles’ eleventh labour and the fixed treasure of the western garden kept by the Hesperides and the serpent Ladon.
Relation to Humans: No mortal in the old tellings eats one, and the only human hands that hold them do so briefly, by trick, theft or divine gift. Later Greeks tried to find them in the everyday world, as golden sheep, as the citron of Libya, or as a fragrant, inedible fruit laid on the tables of the gods at Sparta.

Atlas came back from the orchard with three apples in his hands, and for a moment the most valuable fruit in Greek myth belonged to a Titan with a grievance. He had spent an age holding up the sky. Now someone else was holding it, and he had no intention of taking it back. He would carry the apples to King Eurystheus himself, he said. Heracles, bent under the weight of heaven, agreed, and asked only for a moment to put a pad on his head. Atlas laid the apples on the ground and took the sky back. Heracles picked them up and left.

That is the version in the Library of Apollodorus, the Greek handbook of myth compiled in the Roman period, and it is the scene that made the golden apples famous: a treasure lying in the dust between two strongmen while one of them is outwitted. Apollodorus adds that some told it differently, with Heracles walking into the garden himself and killing the snake that guarded the tree. Either way the apples left the edge of the world in his hands.

Where they came from is a later story than most people assume. Hesiod’s Theogony, the oldest poem to mention them, knows the Hesperides who guard the rich golden apples beyond glorious Ocean, and the serpent who guards the apples all of gold in the secret places of the dark earth. He says nothing about a wedding. The earliest surviving account of their origin belongs to Pherecydes, an Athenian mythographer of the fifth century BC, as reported by the Roman writer Hyginus. When Zeus married Hera, Earth came bearing branches hung with golden apples. Hera admired them so much that she asked Earth to plant them in her gardens near distant Mount Atlas. When Atlas’s daughters kept picking the fruit, Hera set the serpent to guard it. Apollodorus has Earth give the apples to Zeus rather than to Hera, and a writer quoted by Athenaeus says simply that Earth brought them forth in honour of the marriage.

Nobody in the old stories eats one. The poets and mythographers who tell the story never say what a bite would do, and the popular claim that the fruit made its eater immortal finds no support in the passages that describe it. What the old poems give instead is metal. Hesiod’s apples are all of gold. The sixth-century poet Stesichorus says the Hesperides kept their homes of solid gold on an island of the gods. The garden was the treasury of a goddess, not a larder, and the fruit behaved like treasure.

Even treasure needs tending. The Roman poet Virgil describes a priestess of the Massylian people of Africa who kept the temple of the Hesperides and fed the dragon there, guarding the sacred boughs on the tree and sprinkling dewy honey and sleep-heavy poppies. The picture is quiet and domestic: sticky honey, the red of the poppies, a great serpent fed by hand so that it stays where it is and the branches stay heavy.

King Eurystheus sent Heracles for the apples as his eleventh labour in Apollodorus’s count, the last of all in the account of the historian Diodorus of Sicily. The tellings could not agree on where to send him. Apollodorus insists the apples were not in Libya, as some claimed, but with Atlas among the Hyperboreans in the far north. The poet Apollonius of Rhodes put the garden in the Libyan desert, and gave the aftermath its most vivid scene. The Argonauts, dragging their ship overland and mad with thirst, reached the sacred ground the day after Heracles had passed through. Ladon lay by the trunk of the apple tree, only the tip of his tail still twitching, and flies died in the festering wounds made by arrows dipped in the Hydra’s poison. The Hesperides were wailing with their arms thrown over their golden heads. Aegle told the sailors that a brutal man in a lion’s skin had come the day before, killed their serpent, stolen their golden apples and gone.

What happened next is the strangest fact about the apples. Eurystheus received them and handed them straight back to Heracles, who had no use for them either. Athena took them and carried them back to the garden, because, in Apollodorus’s words, it was not lawful that they should be laid down anywhere. The prize of the labour could not be kept. It could only be fetched and returned, which makes the eleventh labour less a theft than a round trip.

Other golden apples drifted toward this tree over the centuries. Virgil, in his sixth Eclogue, sings of the girl who marvelled at the apples of the Hesperides, meaning the runner Atalanta, whom Hippomenes beat in a footrace by throwing golden fruit in her path. Ovid tells the same race but gives the apples a different home, a gold-leaved tree in the Tamasus field on Cyprus from which Venus plucked three. The Greek poet Colluthus, writing in the fifth or sixth century AD, has Eris think of the golden apples of the Hesperides when she is shut out of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, and take from there the apple that would start the quarrel of the goddesses and, in the end, the Trojan War. The link is late, and earlier tellings of the apple of discord do not make it. The epic poet Nonnus has Aphrodite hang golden fruit from the nymphs’ garden in the bridal chamber of Cadmus and Harmonia.

Ancient readers also tried to explain the apples away. Diodorus reports that the word mela meant sheep as well as apples, so the golden mela of the Hesperides might have been a flock of beautiful sheep with fleeces the colour of gold, watched by a shepherd named Drakon. King Juba of Mauretania, quoted by Athenaeus, said the Libyans called the citron the apple of Hesperia and that Heracles had brought it to Greece. The grammarian Pamphilus reported that in Sparta fruit called apples of the Hesperides was set on the tables of the gods, fragrant and not good to eat. Pliny the Elder, describing the supposed site of the garden on the Atlantic coast of Africa, found an altar of Hercules and nothing of the famous grove but some wild olive trees. In 1646 the Italian writer Giovanni Battista Ferrari titled his book on growing citrus fruit Hesperides, with engravings of the nymphs offering their citrus.

The apples’ power was belonging. They were Hera’s, planted at her request and fenced by her serpent, and the whole cosmos seems to have agreed they could not stay anywhere else. Their weakness was that gold on a branch invites hands. The nymphs picked at them, Atlas carried them off for a bargain, Heracles walked away with them, and Eris borrowed one to wreck a wedding. Some ancient artists skipped the violence entirely and showed the Hesperides handing Heracles the fruit themselves. Every road out of the garden, though, led back into it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Apples of the Hesperides?

The Apples of the Hesperides are golden apples in Greek mythology that grew in Hera’s garden at the far edge of the world. They were guarded by the nymphs called the Hesperides and by the serpent Ladon. Heracles was sent to fetch them as one of his labours.

Where did the Apples of the Hesperides come from?

The oldest surviving account, by the fifth-century BC mythographer Pherecydes as reported by Hyginus, says Earth brought branches of golden apples as a wedding gift when Zeus married Hera. Hera asked for them to be planted in her garden near Mount Atlas. Hesiod’s Theogony, the earliest poem to mention the apples, does not tell this story.

How did Heracles get the Apples of the Hesperides?

In the best-known version, told by Apollodorus, Heracles held up the sky while Atlas fetched three apples, then tricked Atlas into taking the sky back by asking for a moment to put a pad on his head. In another version Heracles killed the serpent guarding the tree and took the apples himself. Apollonius of Rhodes describes the dead serpent Ladon found by the Argonauts the day after.

What happened to the apples after Heracles took them?

King Eurystheus received the apples and gave them back to Heracles. Athena then returned them to the garden of the Hesperides, because Apollodorus says it was not lawful for them to be laid down anywhere else.

Did the Apples of the Hesperides make people immortal?

No ancient telling of the myth says that eating one of the Apples of the Hesperides made anyone immortal. The ancient texts describe them as apples of solid gold belonging to Hera, and nobody in the stories eats one. Ancient writers who rationalised the myth identified them with golden sheep, the citron of Libya, or a fragrant but inedible fruit offered to the gods at Sparta.