Hercules and the Golden Apples of the Hesperides

At a Glance

• Central figures: Hercules, son of Jupiter and Alcmena; Atlas, the Titan who holds up the sky; King Eurystheus, who commands the labors; the Hesperides, nymphs who tend the golden apple tree; and Ladon, the serpent who never sleeps.
• Setting: The labor takes Hercules from Eurystheus’s court at Tiryns to the edges of the known world - Libya, the Atlas Mountains, and the garden of the Hesperides at the western rim of Ocean.
• The turn: Hercules persuades Atlas to retrieve the golden apples by offering to bear the sky in his place, then must outwit the Titan when Atlas refuses to take the burden back.
• The outcome: Hercules secures three golden apples and returns them to Eurystheus, completing the eleventh labor; Minerva later returns the apples to the garden, since no mortal place can hold what belongs to the gods.
• The legacy: The labor established Hercules’s reputation as a figure who could cross boundaries between the mortal world and the divine, and the golden apples became a symbol in Roman art and literature of the unattainable prize that must be returned to its source.

Eurystheus wanted the impossible. That was the whole design of the labors - not punishment alone, but humiliation, the slow grinding down of a man too strong to kill outright. For the eleventh task, the king of Tiryns told Hercules to bring him three golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides. He did not say where the garden was. He did not say what guarded it. He sat on his throne and waited.

The apples had been a wedding gift from Terra to Juno when she married Jupiter. Juno had been so taken with their color - a gold that seemed lit from the inside, as though each fruit held its own sun - that she planted the tree at the far western edge of the world, in a garden tended by the daughters of Atlas. Around its trunk she coiled Ladon, a serpent with a hundred heads, each one watchful, none of them sleeping at the same time. The tree could not be approached by stealth.

Nereus on the Shore

Hercules did not know the way. No one did. The garden sat beyond the mapped world, past Libya, past the pillars he himself would later raise at the strait. He traveled first to the river Eridanus, in the far north, where he found the nymphs of the river. They told him to seek Nereus, the old sea god who could not lie but hated being asked.

He found Nereus sleeping on a beach. The god woke fighting, shifting shape - fire, water, a serpent, a lion, something with too many limbs to count. Hercules held on. He had done this before, with the river god Achelous, and he knew the trick was patience, not strength. Nereus eventually stopped changing. He was old. He was tired.

Go south, Nereus said. Find Prometheus on his rock. He knows where the garden is.

Hercules released him and turned south.

Prometheus on the Caucasus

In the mountains of the Caucasus, Prometheus hung from a cliff face where Jupiter had chained him for giving fire to mortals. Each day an eagle tore out his liver. Each night the liver grew back. The punishment had been going on for generations.

Hercules climbed the rock and killed the eagle with an arrow. He broke the chains. Prometheus stood free for the first time in an age, and the gratitude was immediate and specific. He told Hercules exactly what he needed to know.

Do not pick the apples yourself. You cannot. No mortal hand should touch them, and the serpent will kill you before you reach the tree. Go to Atlas. He is the father of the Hesperides. He alone can walk into the garden without Ladon striking. But you will have to hold the sky while he goes.

Hercules thanked him and walked west.

The Weight of the Sky

Atlas stood at the western edge of the world with the vault of heaven on his shoulders. He was enormous - not merely tall but vast, a figure that seemed continuous with the mountains around him. His face was set, not in agony exactly but in the fixed expression of someone who had been carrying something so long that the carrying had become the whole of his identity.

Hercules told him what he needed. Atlas was cautious but not unwilling. He missed his daughters. He missed the garden. He had not seen either since Jupiter sentenced him to hold up the sky after the war with the Titans.

I will get the apples, Atlas said. But you must take the sky.

Hercules braced himself. Atlas shifted the weight onto Hercules’s shoulders and stepped away. The sky was not heavy the way a stone is heavy. It was heavy the way the sea is heavy - a pressure that came from everywhere, that had no edges, that pressed down on the spine and the knees and the bones of the feet and did not stop pressing. Hercules locked his legs. His teeth clenched. He held.

Atlas walked into the garden. Ladon let him pass. He picked three apples from the tree, golden and warm, and walked back.

Then he stopped.

The Trick

Atlas looked at Hercules under the sky. He looked at the apples in his own hand. He looked at the open ground in front of him, the ground he had not walked on freely in an eternity. He did not want to take the sky back.

I will carry the apples to Eurystheus myself, Atlas said. His voice was casual in the way that a liar’s voice is casual. You stay here. Hold the sky. I will return when the errand is done.

He would not have returned. Hercules knew this immediately.

Of course, Hercules said. But let me shift the weight for a moment. My shoulders are raw. Let me fold my cloak into a pad so the sky does not cut into my skin. Just hold it for one moment while I adjust.

Atlas set the apples on the ground and took the sky back. The weight settled onto him with the familiarity of something that had been there for thousands of years.

Hercules picked up the apples and walked away. Atlas shouted after him. There was nothing else he could do.

The Return to Tiryns

Hercules brought the three golden apples to Eurystheus. The king looked at them and did not know what to do with them. He had not expected Hercules to succeed. He had not prepared a place to keep divine objects. The apples sat on a table in the palace, glowing faintly, belonging to somewhere else.

They could not stay. Sacred things taken from their proper place do not rest. The apples were Juno’s, planted in Juno’s garden, tended by Juno’s chosen nymphs. Minerva understood this. She took the apples from Eurystheus’s palace and carried them back to the garden at the edge of the world, where the Hesperides set them on the branches again and Ladon coiled tighter around the trunk.

Eurystheus marked the labor as complete. He had one task left to assign. He was running out of impossible things.