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In Greek mythology, the Hesperides are nymphs who tend a blissful garden in a far west corner of the world, located, according to various sources, in the Arcadian Mountains in Greece, near the Atlas mountains in Libya, or on a distant island at the edge of the ocean.
Additionally, Hesperides (also called Fortunate Isles) is a name given by the ancients to a series of islands located to the extreme west of the then known world. These may have included the Canary Islands, the Madeira Islands, and Cape Verde.
The Garden of the Hesperides is Hera's orchard in the west, where either a single tree or a grove of immortality-giving golden apples grew. The apples were 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 LadonLadon is the hundred-headed dragon that guarded the garden of the Hesperides in Greek mythology. He is variously described as the offspring of Phorcys or of Typhon and Echidna. It was said that his heads spoke with a multitude of voices in many languages. as an additional safeguard.
According to different accounts, there were either three, four, or seven Hesperides, but they are usually numbered three, like the other Greek triads (the Three Graces and the MoiraeIn Greek mythology, the white-robed Moirae or Moerae (the Three Fates were the personifications of destiny ( Roman equivalent: Parcae). They controlled the metaphorical thread of life of every mortal and immortal from birth to death (and beyond). Even the). Among the names given to them are Aegle ("dazzling light"), Arethusa, Erytheia (or Erytheis), 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, and Hesperis is appropriately the personification of the evening (as EosEvelyn de Morgan (1850 1919), 1895 (Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC): for a Pre-Raphaelite painter, Eos was still the classical pagan equivalent of an angel Eos ("dawn") was, in Greek mythology, the Titan Goddess of the dawn, who rose from her home a is of the dawn) and the Evening Star is Hesperus. 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 sometimes portrayed as the evening daughters of Night ( NyxIn Greek mythology, Nyx was the primordial goddess of the night. Nyx in Hesiod In Hesiod's Theogony, Night is born of Chaos; her offspring are many, and telling. With her brother Erebus, Night gives birth to Aether ("atmosphere") and Hemera ("day"). Later) and Darkness ( ErebusIn Greek mythology, Erebus or rebos was a primordial god, personification of darkness, offspring of Chaos alone. He was brother of Nyx and father of Aether by himself and, with Nyx, Hemera, Moros, Charon, Eros and the Keres. According to some later legend), in accord with the way Eos in the farthermost east, in ColchisColchis ( Georgian Kolkheti , or Aea-Colchis was, in ancient times, a district of Asia Minor, at the eastern extremity of the Black Sea, bounded on the north by the Caucasus. The name of Colchis first appears in Aeschylus and Pindar. It was inhabited by a, is the daughter of the sun titan HyperionIn the Homer's Iliad and Odyssey the sun god is called Helios Hyperion 'Sun High-one'. But in the Odyssey Hesiod's Theogony and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter the sun is once in each work called Hyperonides 'son of Hyperion' and Hesiod certainly imagines Hyp. Or they are listed as the daughters of Atlas, or of Zeus and either Hesperius or Themis, or Phorcys and Ceto.
Heracles was the only one who ever managed to steal any of the golden apples from the Hesperides. As part of one of his Twelve Labors, Heracles tricked Atlas into finding and retrieving the golden apples for him, shouldering Atlas's burden of carrying the Earth in the meantime. Alternatively, Heracles was said to have slain Ladon. Athena later returned the apples to their rightful place in the garden.
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.)
