Hesione was born in Troy, the great city on the northwestern coast of Asia Minor, the daughter of King Laomedon and his queen Strymo or Leucippe. Her father was a descendant of Dardanus, the founder of the Trojan line, and he ruled a wealthy kingdom that controlled the trade routes between the Aegean and the Black Sea. Laomedon had many children, but Hesione was his eldest daughter, beautiful and proud, and her brother Priam, who would later inherit the throne, was still a young man when the disaster struck. The disaster began with Laomedon's own greed. When Poseidon, the god of the sea, and Apollo, the god of light, were sentenced by Zeus to serve a mortal for one year, they came to Troy and built the city's walls, the massive fortifications that would later withstand the Greek siege for ten years. But when the year was over, Laomedon refused to pay the gods their wages. He dismissed them with insults and threats, and the two gods departed in fury, vowing revenge.

Poseidon's revenge was swift and terrible. He sent a sea monster, a ketos of immense size, to ravage the coast of the Troad, the region around Troy. The monster destroyed ships, devoured fishermen, and laid waste to the fields along the shore. Laomedon consulted an oracle, and the answer was grim: the only way to appease the god was to sacrifice his daughter Hesione to the monster. The king, faced with the destruction of his kingdom, agreed. He had Hesione dressed in bridal garments, as if she were being given in marriage rather than in death, and chained her to a rock on the sea cliffs below the city, where the monster could reach her when the tide came in.

Heracles, the son of Zeus and the mortal woman Alcmene, was travelling through the Troad at this time, returning from one of his labours or perhaps on his way to another. He saw Hesione chained to the rock and learned her story, and he offered to rescue her in exchange for the divine horses that Laomedon had received from Zeus as compensation for the abduction of Ganymede, the Trojan prince whom the king of the gods had carried to Olympus. Laomedon agreed, and Heracles waited for the monster to emerge from the sea. When the ketos rose from the waves, its jaws large enough to swallow a ship, Heracles leaped into its mouth and hacked his way out through the belly, killing it from the inside. He freed Hesione from her chains and brought her back to her father.

Laomedon betrayed Heracles as he had betrayed the gods. When the hero demanded the horses he had been promised, the king refused, calling him a mercenary and a brigand, and threatened to kill him if he did not leave Troy at once. Heracles withdrew, but he did not forget. Years later, after he had completed his twelve labours and been granted immortality, he returned to Troy with a fleet of six ships and an army of volunteers, including his companion Telamon, the king of Salamis, who was one of the most renowned warriors in Greece. They stormed the city, slew Laomedon and all his sons except Priam, who had been away from the city or who ransomed himself with a golden veil, and sacked Troy long before the Trojan War that the world remembers. Heracles gave Hesione to Telamon as a prize of war, and she sailed with him to Salamis, where she became his wife or concubine and bore him a son named Teucer.

Teucer grew up to be the greatest archer among the Greeks who fought at Troy in the later war. He was the half-brother of Ajax, the greater, Telamon's son by his first wife Periboea, and the two brothers fought side by side throughout the war. But when Ajax killed himself in shame after the dispute over the arms of Achilles, Teucer was blamed by his father Telamon for not protecting his brother, or for returning home without him, and he was banished from Salamis. He sailed to Cyprus and founded the city of Salamis there, naming it after the home he had lost. Hesione's fate after this is not recorded in the surviving sources. Some say she died in Salamis, others that she returned to Troy and was present during the later war, but the Greek tradition is silent on her end. What is certain is that her rescue by Heracles and her father's subsequent betrayal of the hero established a pattern of Trojan treachery and Greek vengeance that would culminate in the destruction of her city by Agamemnon's fleet.