The Hesperides were born at the edge of the world, in the twilight land where the sun sinks into the ocean each evening. Their parentage is disputed among the ancient sources, and the Greeks told several versions of their birth. In Hesiod's Theogony, the great poem of divine genealogy composed around 700 BCE, they are the daughters of Nyx, the Night, born without a father in the darkness before the dawn of the world. In other accounts, they are the daughters of Atlas, the Titan condemned to hold up the heavens, and of Hesperis, the personification of the evening, or of Zeus himself and Themis, the goddess of divine law. The most common tradition names three Hesperides - Aegle, Erytheia, and Hesperethusa - though some poets name four or even seven, as if the number of sunset maidens were as variable as the colours of the sky at dusk.

Their garden lay at the westernmost edge of the earth, beyond the pillars of Heracles, the two great rocks that marked the boundary of the Mediterranean world. The garden was not merely an orchard. It was a sacred precinct, a paradise of golden light where the apples grew on a tree that was itself a work of wonder. Gaia, the primordial earth-goddess, had given the tree to Hera, the queen of Olympus, as a wedding gift when she married Zeus, and Hera had planted it in the far west where no mortal could reach it without divine aid. The apples were not fruit in the ordinary sense. They were solid gold, or they glowed with a golden light, or they conferred immortality upon whoever ate them, and their loss would be a catastrophe for the divine order. To guard them, Hera set the serpent Ladon, a dragon of immense size with a hundred heads, or in some accounts a single head but a body that coiled around the tree in endless loops, his eyes never closing, his hiss the sound of a thousand rattlesnakes.

The most famous visitor to the garden was Heracles, the hero who was forced to complete twelve labours as penance for killing his wife and children in a fit of madness sent by Hera herself. The eleventh labour required him to fetch the golden apples, a task that seemed impossible because no mortal knew the way to the western garden and no mortal could defeat the serpent Ladon. Heracles wandered for years, crossing Libya and Egypt, fighting monsters and consulting oracles, until he finally reached the land of the Hyperboreans, the people who lived beyond the north wind, and from there turned westward toward the sunset. When he arrived at the garden, he found the Hesperides dancing in the twilight, their voices like the sound of distant bells, and the serpent Ladon coiled around the tree with all his hundred heads raised in warning.

Heracles did not fight the Hesperides. He asked them for the apples, and they refused, as they had been bound by Hera to refuse every request. But they told him that only Atlas, their father, could pluck the apples without arousing the serpent's full fury, for the Titan was the only being strong enough to hold the heavens and calm the guardian beast at the same time. Heracles offered to hold up the sky in Atlas's place if the Titan would fetch the apples for him. Atlas agreed, and for a brief moment the burden of the heavens passed from the Titan's shoulders to the hero's. Atlas entered the garden, plucked three golden apples, and returned. But then he refused to take the sky back, declaring that he would deliver the apples himself and leave Heracles holding up the heavens forever. Heracles, forced to use cunning where strength had failed, pretended to agree and asked Atlas to hold the sky just a moment longer while he padded his shoulders with a cushion. The moment Atlas took the weight back, Heracles seized the apples and fled, leaving the Titan condemned once more.

The Hesperides appear in other myths as well. Perseus, the hero who slew the Gorgon Medusa, passed their garden on his way to the land of the Hyperboreans, and they gave him shelter and directions. The Argonauts, the crew of the ship Argo who sailed in search of the Golden Fleece, heard their singing from the western ocean but did not land. In the Orphic tradition, the Hesperides were identified with the evening stars, the planets Venus and Mercury that appear in the west after sunset, and their garden was placed in the underworld, a paradise of the blessed dead who ate the golden apples and lived forever in the twilight. The Romans called them the Hesperides too, and their garden became the model for every later paradise, from the Garden of Eden to the Isles of the Blessed.