The Golden Apples grew from a tree that Gaia, the primordial earth, produced as a wedding gift for Hera when she married Zeus, the king of the gods. Gaia had given birth to the sky, the mountains, and the sea, and she had mothered the Titans, the Cyclopes, and the hundred-handed Hecatoncheires, and her wedding gift was no ordinary plant. The tree bore fruit of solid gold, three apples that glowed with their own light and conferred immortality upon any who tasted them. Hera, delighted, planted the tree in a garden at the far western edge of the world, beyond the sunset, where the sky met the earth and the River Oceanus flowed around the rim of the world. She set the Hesperides to tend it, the nymphs of evening who were daughters of the Titan Atlas, and she placed a dragon to guard it who would never sleep.

The Hesperides were beautiful nymphs whose names mean the Daughters of Evening, and their garden was a place of perpetual twilight, where the sun never fully set and the stars hung low in a sky the colour of amber. Some said there were three Hesperides, some four, and some seven, and their names were as various as the poets who sang of them: Aegle, Erytheia, Hespera, and Arethusa among them. They were gentle creatures who sang to the tree and wove garlands of its golden leaves, but they were not its true guardians. That role fell to Ladon, the dragon who coiled around the tree trunk and among its roots, a beast born of the monstrous parents Typhon and Echidna in some accounts, or sprung from the earth itself in others. Ladon had a hundred heads, or some said a single head but a hundred tongues, and his eyes never all closed at once. While half his heads slept, the other half watched, and no thief could approach the tree without being seen.

For generations the apples hung in the garden, untouched and legendary, until King Eurystheus of Tiryns and Mycenae set Heracles the eleventh of his twelve impossible labors. Heracles had been driven mad by Hera, the queen of Olympus and wife of Zeus, who hated him because he was the son of her husband and the mortal woman Alcmene, and in his madness he had killed his own wife and children. To atone, he served Eurystheus for twelve years, performing whatever labors the king demanded. The first ten had included the Nemean Lion, the Lernaean Hydra, and the capture of the three-headed dog Cerberus from the Underworld, and Eurystheus had grown desperate to find a task that would finally destroy the hero. He commanded Heracles to bring him the Golden Apples of the Hesperides, believing that the garden was beyond the reach of any mortal and that Ladon would kill any man who approached.

Heracles set out on the longest journey of his life. He travelled west across the known world, through Libya and beyond, until he came to the place where the Titan Atlas stood, holding up the broad sky upon his shoulders to keep heaven and earth from collapsing into one another. Atlas was the father of the Hesperides, and he knew the way to the garden. Heracles offered to hold the sky for a while if Atlas would fetch the apples himself, for Heracles knew he could not fight Ladon and win. Atlas agreed, and for a brief moment the Titan was free. He walked to the garden, spoke to his daughters, and plucked three golden apples from the tree while Ladon, recognising the father of the Hesperides, did not strike. Atlas returned with the apples, but then he refused to take the burden back, declaring that he would deliver the apples to Eurystheus himself and leave Heracles holding the sky forever.

Heracles, forced to use cunning where strength had failed, pretended to agree. He asked Atlas to hold the sky just a moment longer while he padded his shoulders with a cushion, so that the weight would not crush him. Atlas, eager to be free of the burden once more, took the heavens back upon his shoulders, and the moment he did, Heracles seized the apples and fled, leaving the Titan condemned once more. Some accounts say that Heracles killed Ladon on his way out, shooting the dragon with arrows dipped in the venom of the Hydra, but other versions say Ladon survived and continued to guard the tree. Either way, Heracles brought the apples back to Eurystheus, and the king, fearing the wrath of Hera, returned them to the hero, who in turn gave them to Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, who restored them to the garden. The apples had travelled to Greece and back, and the tree still bore fruit at the edge of the world.

But the apples were not finished with the affairs of gods and mortals. In another story, entirely separate from the labors of Heracles, the goddess Eris, whose name means Strife, was not invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the sea nymph mother of Achilles. Eris was the personification of discord, a spirit who delighted in quarrels, and in her anger she crafted a single golden apple from the garden of the Hesperides, or so some poets said, and inscribed upon it the words "To the Fairest." She threw it among the assembled gods, and Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite each claimed it. The Trojan prince Paris was chosen to judge the contest, and he awarded the apple to Aphrodite, who had promised him the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta. Helen was already married to King Menelaus, and her abduction by Paris began the Trojan War, the ten-year siege that destroyed Troy and shaped the destiny of Greece. The apple that conferred immortality in the western garden had brought death to thousands in the east.