Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Hesiod names the Hesperides among Night’s children: nymphs beyond Ocean who guard the golden apples and the trees that bear them, together with the dread serpent Ladon (elsewhere Typhon’s offspring). That Night-born line makes them sisters, in a broad sense, of other cosmic abstractions and monsters, not of Atlas’s starry daughters. Later mythography often reparents them as daughters of Atlas—sometimes by Hesperis (eponym of evening), sometimes aligned with the far-western seat where Atlas holds the sky. Apollodorus, recounting the labor, lists four: Aegle, Erythia (Erytheia), Hesperia, and Arethusa, guardians with the hundred-headed serpent of the apples Earth gave Hera at her wedding to Zeus. Diodorus and others play on Atlas as a western king or Titan whose daughters keep golden flocks or fruit; Hesperus and the evening star enter the same onomastic field. The Atlasid genealogy thus knits the apple-guardians to the same Titan father as the Pleiades and Hyades, relocating Hesiod’s Night-born orchard-nymphs into the family of the sky-bearer at the world’s edge. Both lines remain classical: Night for Hesiodic cosmogony; Atlas (and Hesperis) for handbook geography of the labor and the western sunset.