At the very edge of the world, in the far west where the sun goes down into the streams of Ocean, there was a garden — the garden of the Hesperides, the daughters of the Evening. There were three of them, or four, or seven; the ancients differed. Aegle and Erytheia and Hesperia and Arethusa are the names that survive most often. They were the daughters of Atlas (some said), or of Nyx the Night herself, and they kept watch over a tree that bore golden apples — a wedding gift, said the older mythographers, that Gaia had given to Hera at her marriage to Zeus.

The tree was tended by the nymphs and guarded also by a hundred-headed dragon called Ladon, who never slept; and the place was beyond the reach of mortals — beyond the Atlas mountains, at the western horizon, where the world ended. There the Hesperides sang in the cool of evening among the trees, and gathered the golden apples each year, and the dragon coiled at the foot of the tree.

Twice was the garden visited by heroes. Heracles came thither in his eleventh labor, and slew the dragon (or, in another version, persuaded Atlas to fetch the apples while he himself held up the heavens); and Perseus passed by it on his way to the Gorgons. After Heracles took the apples, they were eventually returned by Athena to the garden, for they were sacred and could not abide outside it.

The Hesperides, like the Muses and the Charites, were a sister-company who acted in concert and were not individuated in cult; they were the personifications of the evening glow, of the western light upon the apples in their garden, of the moment of stillness before night closes. Where the Sirens were the danger that draws and destroys, the Hesperides were the prize at the world's end — beautiful, distant, and dangerous to seek but not, in themselves, malicious.