Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

When the labors had been performed in eight years and a month, Eurystheus—refusing to count the Hydra and the Augean stables—ordered as an eleventh labor the golden apples of the Hesperides. Apollodorus places them not in Libya but with Atlas among the Hyperboreans. Earth had presented the apples to Zeus after his marriage to Hera; an immortal hundred-headed dragon, offspring of Typhon and Echidna, speaking with many voices, guarded them together with the Hesperides Aegle, Erythia, Hesperia, and Arethusa. On the journey Heracles met Cycnus, son of Ares and Pyrene, at the river Echedorus; Ares backed his son until a thunderbolt parted the fighters. Through Illyria to the Eridanus he found nymphs, daughters of Zeus and Themis, who showed him Nereus. He seized the Old Man of the Sea asleep; though Nereus shifted through every shape, Heracles held him until he learned where the apples and the Hesperides were. Informed, he crossed Libya and killed Antaeus, son of Poseidon (some said of Earth), who grew stronger whenever he touched the ground—Heracles hugged him aloft and crushed him. In Egypt he was seized for Busiris’s altar of Zeus, where strangers were sacrificed after a nine-year dearth on the advice of the seer Phrasius (whom Busiris had first killed); Heracles burst his bonds and slew Busiris and his son Amphidamas. At Thermydrae, harbor of Lindos, he took a cowherd’s bullock for sacrifice; the cowherd cursed from a mountain, whence Lindian sacrifice to Heracles is still done with curses. Passing Arabia he killed Emathion son of Tithonus. Crossing again with Helios’s goblet to the far mainland, he shot the eagle that ate Prometheus’s liver on the Caucasus, released the Titan—choosing an olive bond for himself—and gave Zeus Chiron, who though immortal consented to die in Prometheus’s stead. Prometheus had already advised him not to fetch the apples himself but to send Atlas, first taking the sky upon his own shoulders. At Atlas among the Hyperboreans Heracles relieved the Titan. Atlas obtained three apples from the Hesperides, then tried to leave the sky forever on Heracles and carry the fruit to Eurystheus himself. Heracles agreed in appearance, then—again on Prometheus’s counsel—asked Atlas to take the sphere only a moment while he settled a pad on his head. Atlas set the apples down and resumed the sky; Heracles picked up the fruit and departed. He gave the apples to Eurystheus, who returned them to Heracles; Athena carried them back to their place, for it was not lawful that they remain anywhere else. In this primary Apollodorean line Ladon remains the speaking guardian of the garden, but the hero never enters to kill him: Atlas is the intermediary, and the sky-burden trick is the climax.