Who was hesperides3/1/2024 And it’s one of these that sparked the interest of those 17thc garden writers.Īthenaeus writes that “Juba, king of Mauretania mentions the citron in his History of Libya, asserting that among the Libyans it is called the Apple of Hesperia, whence Herakles brought to Greece the apples called, from their colour, golden.” Athenaeus’s text was “rediscovered” in the 16thc and republished several more times between then and the late 17thc. He was often considered a monster with three heads and one body, while other sources describe him as having three bodies as well. He was the son of Chrysaor and Callirrhoe. While this might sound a bit bizarre it is very useful to historians because not only does Athenaeus include a wealth of information about daily life but most usefully of all he includes extracts from earlier, often lost, Greek literature. Geryon was a giant (not to be confused with the Gigantes) in Greek mythology, who lived on the island Erytheia of the Hesperides. His Deipnosophistae professes to be an account of the conversations held at series of banquets. One of these authors was Athenaeus, who lived in the 3rd century AD. Some authors of late antiquity attempted to rationalise the myth of the Hesperides and decided the golden apples might not be apples after all – since apples were generally red or green – perhaps they were actually another fruit. Hera had given these apples to Zeus as a wedding gift, so. The Garden of the Hesperides is the setting for several well known myths, before, in the 17thc it was picked up and reinvented by artists and garden writers writing about “golden apples” of a different sort.įrontispiece to the 1657 edition of the Deipnosophists, Eurystheus commanded Hercules to bring him golden apples which belonged to Zeus, king of the gods. ![]() The golden glow from these apples was also thought to be the source of sunsets. The job of looking after the garden was given to the Hesperides who were the nymphs of the sunset, but because Hera didn’t entirely trust them she installed another guardian as well – Ladon, the multi-headed dragon who somehow never needed to sleep. In it grew a tree which bore golden apples said to give immortality to those who ate them. The garden belonged to the queen of the gods – Hera in Greek, and lay somewhere at the western edge of the known Mediterranean world. Greek myths are eternally popular, so after a recent post on the story behind aquilegias today I’m turning my attention to another garden-related classical legend, that of the Garden of the Hesperides. The frontispiece of Ferrari’s Hesperides, 1646 Helen Mirren is a goddess already, so I'm sure she knows that.Hercules and the 3 Hesperides. ![]() For example, we have Persephone, the maiden, Demeter, the mother, and Hecate, the crone. ![]() Having all three goddesses in this film be of different ages echoes the concept of the triple goddess: maiden, mother, and crone. (This happens to the patrons of the Athens Museum at the beginning of the film.) It's interesting to note that in the end, Hespera is the one who is focused on returning to the Realm of the Gods with the apple, despite Kalypso wanting to use it to destroy the human realm. He had to get Atlas to retrieve an apple (or several) and was almost tricked into taking the burden of the sky from the Titan.Īnother hero, Perseus, had to get weapons from the Hesperides to take down Medusa, the snake-headed goddess whose gaze turned humans to stone. If this sounds familiar, it might be because getting some of those apples was one of the labors of the mythological hero Heracles (also known by the Latin name Hercules). The tree and its fruit are guarded by the dragon Ladon (more on him later). Hespera is one of the Hesperides, or the nymphs of the evening, who take care of a tree of magical golden apples in Hera's garden.
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