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In Greek mythology, the Hesperides (pronounced /hɛˈspɛrɪdiːz/, Ancient Greek: Ἑσπερίδες) are nymphs who tend a blissful garden in a far western corner of the world, located near the neighbourhood of Cyrene[1] or Benghazi[2] in Libya or the Atlas mountains in North Africa at the edge of the encircling Oceanus, the world-ocean.[3] In some sources, the nymphs are said to be the daughters of Hesperus.[4]
According to the Sicilian Greek poet Stesichorus, in his poem the "Song of Geryon", and the Greek geographer Strabo, in his book Geographika (volume III), the garden of the Hesperides is located in Tartessos, a location placed in the south of the Iberian peninsula.
By Ancient Roman times[when?], the garden of the Hesperides had lost its archaic place in religion and had dwindled to a poetic convention, in which form it was revived in Renaissance poetry, to refer both to the garden and to the nymphs that dwelt there.
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Etymology [edit]
The name means originating from Hesperus, the evening star Venus, equivalent to vesper.
The Nymphs of the Evening [edit]
Ordinarily the Hesperides number three, like the other Greek triads (the Three Graces and the Moirai). "Since the Hesperides themselves are mere symbols of the gifts the apples embody, they cannot be actors in a human drama. Their abstract, interchangeable names are a symptom of their impersonality," Evelyn Harrison has observed.[5]
Nevertheless, among the names given to them, though never all at once, are Aegle ("dazzling light"), Arethusa, Erytheia (or Erytheis) and Hesperia (alternatively Hespereia, Hespere, Hespera, Hesperusa or Hesperethoosa). Lipara, Asterope and Chrysothemis are named in a Hesperide scene of the apotheosis of Heracles (romanised to Hercules) on a late fifth-century hydria by the Meidias Painter in London[7] They are sometimes called the Western Maidens, the Daughters of Evening or Erythrai, and the "Sunset Goddesses", designations all apparently tied to their imagined location in the distant west. Hesperis is appropriately the personification of the evening (as Eos is of the dawn) and the Evening Star is Hesperus. 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 (Nyx) either alone,[8] or with Darkness (Erebus),[9] in accord with the way Eos in the farthermost east, in Colchis, is the daughter of the titan Hyperion. Or they are listed as the daughters of Atlas, or of Zeus, and either Hesperius or Themis, or Phorcys and Ceto.
Erytheia ("the red one") is one of the Hesperides. The name was applied to an island close to the coast of southern Hispania, which was the site of the original Punic colony of Gades (modern Cadiz). Pliny's Natural History (4.36) records of the island of Gades: "On the side which looks towards Spain, at about 100 paces distance, is another long island, three miles wide, on which the original city of Gades stood. By Ephorus and Philistides it is called Erythia, by Timæus and Silenus Aphrodisias, and by the natives the Isle of Juno." The island was the seat of Geryon, who was overcome by Heracles.
The Garden of the Hesperides [edit]
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 a never-sleeping, hundred-headed dragon named Ladon as an additional safeguard. However, in the mythology surrounding the Judgement of Paris, the Goddess of Discord Eris managed to enter the garden, pluck a golden apple, inscribe it "To the most beautiful" (Ancient Greek: Kallistei) and roll it into the wedding party (which she had not been invited to), in effect causing the Trojan Wars.
In later years it was thought that the "golden apples" might have actually been oranges, a fruit unknown to Europe and the Mediterranean before the Middle Ages. Under this assumption, the Greek botanical name chosen for all citrus species was Hesperidoeidē (Ἑσπεριδοειδῆ, "hesperidoids").
The Eleventh Labour of Heracles [edit]
After Heracles completed his first ten Labours, Eurystheus gave him two more claiming that neither the Hydra counted (because Iolaus helped Heracles) nor the Augean stables (either because he received payment for the job or because the rivers did the work). The first of these two additional Labours was to steal the apples from the garden of the Hesperides. Heracles first caught the Old Man of the Sea,[10] the shape-shifting sea god, to learn where the Garden of the Hesperides was located.[11]
In some variations, Heracles, either at the start or at the end of his task, meets Antaeus, who was invincible as long as he touched his mother, Gaia, the earth. Heracles killed Antaeus by holding him aloft and crushing him in a bearhug.[12]
Herodotus claims that Heracles stopped in Egypt, where King Busiris decided to make him the yearly sacrifice, but Heracles burst out of his chains.
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Finally making his way to the Garden of the Hesperides, Heracles tricked Atlas into retrieving some of the golden apples for him, by offering to hold up the heavens for a little while (Atlas was able to take them as, in this version, he was the father or otherwise related to the Hesperides). This would have made this task – like the Hydra and Augean stables – void because he had received help. Upon his return, Atlas decided that he did not want to take the heavens back, and instead offered to deliver the apples himself, but Heracles tricked him again by agreeing to take his place on condition that Atlas relieve him temporarily so that Heracles could make his cloak more comfortable. Atlas agreed, but Heracles reneged and walked away, carrying the apples. According to an alternative version, Heracles slew Ladon instead.
There is another variation to the story where Heracles was the only person to steal the apples, other than Perseus, although Athena later returned the apples to their rightful place in the garden. They are considered by some to be the same "apples of joy" that tempted Atalanta, as opposed to the "apple of discord" used by Eris to start a beauty contest on Olympus (which caused "The Siege of Troy").
On Attic pottery, especially from the late fifth century, Heracles is depicted sitting in bliss in the Gardens of the Hesperides, attended by the maidens.
The Hesperides in the Renaissance [edit]
With the revival of classical allusions in the Renaissance, the Hesperides returned to their prominent position, and the garden itself took on the name of its nymphs: Robert Greene wrote of "The fearful Dragon... that watched the garden called Hesperides".[13] Shakespeare inserted the comically insistent rhyme "is not Love a Hercules, Still climbing trees in the Hesperides" in Love's Labours Lost (iv.iii) and John Milton mentioned the "ladies of the Hesperides" in Paradise Regained (ii.357). 'Hesperides' (published 1647) was the title of a collection of pastoral and religious verse by the Royalist poet Robert Herrick.
See also [edit]
Notes [edit]
- ^ Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology
- ^ theoi.com
- ^ A confusion of the Garden of the Hesperides with an equally idyllic Arcadia is a modern one, conflating Sir Philip Sidney's Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia and Robert Herrick's Hesperides: both are viewed by Renaissance poets as oases of bliss, but they were not connected by the Greeks. The development of Arcadia as an imagined setting for pastoral is the contribution of Theocritus to Hellenistic culture: see Arcadia (utopia).
- ^ Servius. ad Aen. 4,484.
- ^ Evelyn B. Harrison, "Hesperides and Heroes: A Note on the Three-Figure Reliefs", Hesperia 33.1 (January 1964 pp. 76–82) pp 79–80.
- ^ "Circular Pyxis". The Walters Art Museum.
- ^ Illustrated in Harrison 1964:plate 13. Beyond the group sits Hygeia, perhaps giving rise to a mistaken impression that there might be four Hesperides. Sometimes two of the three are represented with Heracles when the symmetry of a composition requires it, as in the so-called "Three-Figure Reliefs". A good survey of the Hesperides' representations on fourth-century vases is Dieter Metzler, Les representations dans la céramique attique du IVe siècle (1951) pp 204–10.
- ^ Hesiod, Theogony 215
- ^ Hyginus, Fabulae Preface; Cicero De Natura Deorum 3.44
- ^ Kerenyi, The Heroes of the Greeks, 1959, p.172, identifies him in this context as Nereus; as a shape-shifter he is often identified as Proteus.
- ^ In some versions of the tale, Heracles was directed to ask Prometheus. As payment, he freed Prometheus from his daily torture. This tale is more usually found in the position of the Erymanthian Boar, since it is associated with Chiron choosing to forgo immortality and taking Prometheus' place.
- ^ Apollodorus ii. 5; Hyginus, Fab. 31
- ^ Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (published 1594)
References [edit]
- Grimal, Pierre, The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Wiley–Blackwell, 1996, ISBN 978-0-631-20102-1. "Hesperides" p. 213
- Smith, William; Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, London (1873). "Hespe'rides"
External links [edit]
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Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Hesperides. |
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Apples of the Hesperides |
- The Theoi Project, "The Hesperides"
- 'The Garden of the Hesperides' in the Lady Lever Art Gallery
- JC Loudon on the Gardens of Hesperides (1835)
- Ms.Julia Delphine Parkinson
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