Editing Hesperides (section)

=== Land of Hesperides ===
[[File:Byzantine - Circular Pyxis - Walters 7164 - View A.jpg|right|thumb|This circular Pyxis or box depicts two scenes. The one shown presents the Olympian gods feasting around a tripod table holding the golden Apple of the Hesperides.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://art.thewalters.org/detail/28991|title=Circular Pyxis|publisher=[[The Walters Art Museum]]}}</ref> The Walters Art Museum.]]
The Hesperides tend a blissful garden in a far western corner of the world, located near the [[Atlas Mountains]] in [[North Africa]] at the edge of the encircling [[Oceanus]] the [[world ocean]].<ref>A confusion of the Garden of the Hesperides with an equally idyllic [[Arcadia (utopia)|Arcadia]] is a modern one, conflating Sir [[Philip Sidney]]'s ''[[Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia]]'' and [[Robert Herrick (poet)|Robert Herrick]]'s ''Hesperides'': both are viewed by Renaissance poets as oases of bliss, but they were not connected by the Greeks. The development of ''Arcadia'' as an imagined setting for [[pastoral]] is the contribution of [[Theocritus]] to [[Hellenistic]] culture: see [[Arcadia (utopia)]].</ref>

According to the Sicilian Greek poet [[Stesichorus]], in his poem the "Song of [[Geryon]]", and the Greek geographer [[Strabo]], in his book ''Geographika'' (volume III), the garden of the Hesperides is located in [[Tartessos]], a location placed in the south of the [[Iberian Peninsula]]. The 1st-century AD Roman author [[Pliny the Elder]], in the fifth book of his ''[[Natural History (Pliny)|Natural History]]'', places the garden in [[Lixus (ancient city)|Lixus]] (in modern-day [[Morocco]]), which he describes as the location of the combat between [[Antaeus]] and [[Hercules]];<ref>{{Cite book|title=Historia Naturalis - Book V|author=Pliny the Elder|translator=H. Rackham|pages=220–221|publisher=Harvard University Press|url=https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D5%3Achapter%3D1|quote=Thirty-two miles distant from Julia Constantia is Lixos, which was made a Roman colony by Claudius Cæsar, and which has been the subject of such wondrous fables, related by the writers of antiquity. At this place, according to the story, was the palace of Antaeus; this was the scene of his combat with Hercules, and here were the gardens of the Hesperides. An arm of the sea flows into the land here, with a serpentine channel, and, from the nature of the locality, this is interpreted at the present day as having been what was really represented by the story of the dragon keeping guard there.}}</ref> later, in the sixth book of the work, he states that the Hesperides live on two islands in the [[Atlantic]].<ref>Ambühl, para. 1; [[Pliny the Elder]], ''[[Natural History (Pliny)|Natural History]]'' [http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0978.phi001.perseus-eng1:6.36 6.36].</ref>

[[Euesperides]] (in modern-day [[Benghazi]]) which was probably founded by people from [[Cyrene, Libya|Cyrene]] or [[Barca (ancient city)|Barca]], from both of which it lies to the west, might have mythological associations with the garden of Hesperides.<ref>Ham, Anthony, ''Libya'', 2002, p.156</ref>

By [[Ancient Roman]] times, the garden of the Hesperides had lost its archaic place in religion and had dwindled to a poetic convention, in which form it was revived in [[Renaissance]] poetry, to refer both to the garden and to the nymphs that dwelt there.