#hercworks #heracles #hercules #hesperides #greekmythology
Poor #Heracles
He gets back to Greece from that cattle raid and gets sent back to the farthest reaches of the world and beyond to retrieve the golden apples of the Hesperides!
Some people think these were oranges tho since apples in ancient Greece seem to have been red they may have been some variant with yellow coloring?
Now these apples came from an orchard tended by the daughters of Atlas and guarded by a creature described as a dragon but usually depicted as a rather friendly looking snake ?
Being Heracles he has several adventures on the way, killing a son of Ares, catching and interrogating Nereus, wrestling Antaios, slaying a tyrant called Busiris, freeing Prometheus, and then he cons his cousin Atlas into picking and fetching the apples for him or in some versions killing the serpent whose name was Ladon. Hera created the constellation Serpens in memory of the faithful guardian of the tree.
No stories record how the Hesperides felt about all this!
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