They are sometimes portrayed as the evening daughters of Night ( Nyx) and Darkness ( Erebus), in accord with the way Eos in the farthermost east, in Colchis, is the daughter of the titan Hyperion. In addition to their tending of the garden, they were said to have taken great pleasure in singing. They are also called the African Sisters, perhaps when thought to be in Libya. 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 Eos is of the dawn) and the Evening Star is Hesperus. Among the names given to them are Aegle ("dazzling light"), Arethusa, Erytheia (or Erytheis), Hesperia (or Hespereia), Hespere (or Hespera), Hestia, and Hesperusa. These may have included the Canary Islands, the Madeira Islands and Cape Verde.Īccording 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 Moirae). The Greek poet Hesiod said that the ancient name of Cádiz was Erytheia, another name for the Hesperides.Īdditionally, 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. According to the Greek poet Stesichorus, in his poem the "song of Geryon", and the Greek geographer Strabo, in his book Geographika (volume III), the Hesperides are in Tartessos, a location placed to the south of Iberia (Spain). 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.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. 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. 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. 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, 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
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