The golden apple, the golden apple, the hallowed fruit, Atlas, clearly not the brightest of Titans, agreed, whereupon Heracles strolled off with the apples Atlas had retrieved for him. He tricked Atlas by initially agreeing to the request, but asking that Atlas take the heavens back onto his shoulders for just a moment while Heracles adjusted his cloak. When Atlas came back, he declined to take back the heavens onto his own shoulders, but Heracles was having none of this. Heracles tricked Atlas into retrieving some of the golden apples for him, while he offered to help shoulder Atlas’ burden (shouldering the heavens). The powerful and divinely guarded ‘Golden Apples’ of Hera’s orchard may have been nothing more than oranges.Īs part of his famous Twelve Labours, Heracles was tasked with stealing the Golden Apples of the Hesperides. And a theory arose that the Golden Apples of the Hesperides were not apples at all, but oranges, which were unknown to Europe and the Mediterranean until the Middle Ages. One of our favourite lines of enquiry here at Interesting Literature is the field of study known as euhemerism, a branch of literary analysis which seeks to explain the origins of fanciful myths in more mundane or ordinary occurrences.
This led to Paris being given permission to abduct Helen of Troy, the event which, in turn, led to the outbreak of the Trojan War. (Norse myth had its own variation on this: the goddess Iduna guarded apples which brought eternal youth to anyone who ate them.) In the myth of the Judgement of Paris, it was from the Garden of the Hesperides that Eris, the goddess of discord, plucked the Apple of Discord. The Hesperides – nymphs of the evening (the name Hesperides is etymologically related to the word Vespers, for evensong) – tended and looked after the grove of golden apples. Once again, apples are linked to fertility and sexuality – perhaps because the shape of the fruit suggests women’s breasts (as Hans Biedermann notes in The Wordsworth Dictionary of Symbolism: Cultural Icons and the Meanings Behind Them (Wordsworth Reference)).
When Hera and Zeus were married, branches bearing golden apples were said to be among the wedding gifts. The Garden of the Hesperides was the goddess Hera’s orchard. The most famous apples in classical myth are undoubtedly the Golden Apples of the Hesperides.
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