The Hesperides (Aegle, Erytheia, and Hespere)

At the far western edge of the world, past the place where the sun drops into the sea, there is a walled orchard where the light never fully leaves. Gold hangs in the branches of a single tree, or a grove of them, depending on who tells it, and the fruit is heavy and cool and smells faintly of metal and honey. Three young women move through the long copper light, singing. Their voices carry the way voices do at evening, clear and a little sad. Coiled at the roots of the tree, never wholly asleep, a hundred-headed serpent listens to them sing.

These are the Hesperides, the daughters of evening, and this garden is the only place they have ever been. They are nymphs of the sunset and the golden hour, named for Hesperos, the evening star, and the stories cannot agree on whose daughters they are. Hesiod makes them children of Nyx, Night herself, born without a father into the dark, which suits nymphs who live where the day ends. Others give them a father in Atlas, the Titan condemned to hold up the sky at that same western edge, so that the sisters tend their orchard almost within sight of his endless labor. A few hand them to the sea-powers Phorcys and Ceto instead. Their number drifts as well. Usually there are three, Aegle, Erytheia, and Hespere, whose names carry the sense of brightness, crimson, and evening glow. Sometimes there are four. Sometimes seven.

The garden itself began as a wedding present. When Zeus married Hera, the earth-goddess Gaia brought a branch hung with golden apples, and Hera loved them so much that she had them planted at the world’s end and set the Hesperides to keep them. The apples were said to give immortality to anyone who ate them, which made the orchard the most valuable ground in creation. Hera did not entirely trust the singing girls to guard something so precious, because the sisters had a weakness for helping themselves to the fruit. So she added a second keeper with no such appetite: Ladon, a serpent or dragon of a hundred heads that never all slept at once, wound through the branches with every mouth waking and dozing in shifts through the night.

No single ancient text describes the sisters head to foot, but the painters and sculptors filled the silence. They show clear-voiced maidens in robes the color of a dying sky, gold and copper and soft red, reaching up into the tree or gathered close around it, sometimes with the serpent’s coils looping between them. They appear this way on the chest of Kypselos, over the doorway of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, and across dozens of red-figure vases: young, unhurried, entirely at home. The picture was so fixed that later Christians looking at it recognized something of their own story, a garden, a tree of forbidden fruit, a serpent wound around the trunk.

The peace of the place broke once, and it is the only time most people ever hear of them. Heracles, working through the labors that were his penance for a madness Hera had sent, was ordered to fetch three of the golden apples, a task made almost impossible by the fact that nobody knew where the garden was. He wrestled the shape-shifting sea-god Nereus until the old man gave up directions. He crossed the world to reach the wall. And when he arrived, in the version told most often, he did not climb it. He went to Atlas, the sisters’ own father, and offered to shoulder the weight of the sky himself if the Titan would step into his daughters’ orchard and bring out the fruit. Atlas, glad of any excuse to set his burden down, walked past Ladon, who would not refuse him, gathered the apples, and returned with no intention of ever lifting the heavens again. Heracles had expected exactly that. He asked the Titan to hold the sky for one moment while he padded his shoulders with a cushion, and Atlas, never the quickest of the immortals, took the weight back. The hero left with the apples. In the harsher tellings there is no cleverness at all, only an arrow fired over the wall that killed Ladon where he lay, and the sisters weeping over the dead serpent and cursing the thief.

The apples did not stay in the mortal world. Athena carried them back to the garden, because things that grant immortality are not meant to sit in a king’s treasury, and the orchard closed again around its quiet.

What the Hesperides could do was narrow and complete. Inside their walls they made the garden grow and kept the golden fruit safe and sang in voices sweet enough that Euripides called them minstrel maids. Some said the air of the place itself gave a blessed ease, and Attic vases show Heracles resting there afterward in bliss, attended by the sisters, as though the garden were a reward as well as a prize. Their gift was cultivation, the slow patient work of keeping a place perfect.

Their limits were the limits of caretakers. They had no power to fight. When the theft came they could only grieve, because the real guarding had always been the dragon’s work, and once Ladon was killed or slipped past there was nothing left in them to stop a determined man. They were bound to the garden and could not leave it. They could not even reliably keep their own hands off the fruit they were set to protect, which is the whole reason a hundred-headed serpent had to be coiled in the tree beside them. They were the keepers of immortality who owned not a shred of the strength it would take to defend it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the Hesperides in Greek mythology?

The Hesperides are Greek nymphs of the evening and the golden light of sunset, often called the Daughters of Evening or the Nymphs of the West. They tend a walled garden at the western edge of the world where the golden apples of immortality grow. They are usually numbered as three sisters named Aegle, Erytheia, and Hespere, though some accounts give four or seven.

What did the Hesperides guard?

The Hesperides guarded a tree of golden apples that granted immortality, an orchard belonging to the goddess Hera. The apples had been a wedding gift from the earth-goddess Gaia to Hera, who had them planted at the world’s end. Because the sisters were prone to eating the fruit themselves, Hera also set the hundred-headed dragon Ladon to guard the tree.

Who were the parents of the Hesperides?

Ancient sources disagree about the parentage of the Hesperides. The poet Hesiod names them as daughters of Nyx, the goddess of night, born without a father. Other traditions make them daughters of the Titan Atlas, who held up the sky at the western edge of the world, while a few accounts assign them to the sea-deities Phorcys and Ceto.

How did Heracles get the golden apples of the Hesperides?

Heracles obtained the golden apples during his eleventh labor by tricking the Titan Atlas. He offered to hold up the sky in Atlas’s place if the Titan would fetch the apples from his daughters’ garden, since Ladon would not refuse Atlas. When Atlas tried to avoid taking the sky back, Heracles asked him to hold it briefly and then walked away with the apples. In harsher versions, Heracles simply shot the dragon Ladon and took the fruit himself.

What was the dragon that guarded the Garden of the Hesperides?

The dragon that guarded the garden was Ladon, a serpent or dragon said to have a hundred heads that never all slept at once. Hera placed Ladon in the tree because she did not fully trust the Hesperides to guard the golden apples alone. In most accounts Ladon was slain by Heracles during his quest for the apples.

Related Entries

Ladon, Atlas, Heracles (Hercules), Prometheus, Geryon, Hera, Zeus, Gaia, Nyx, Erebus, Nymph, Nereid, Oceanid, Fafnir, Eve