Atlas placed the apples on the ground and picked up the globe. He begged Atlas to take the globe for a moment while he put some padding on his head. Heracles agreed but asked Atlas if he could get more comfortable. At his return Atlas found he could go on living quite happily without the weight of the world on his shoulders, so he asked Heracles,if he could carry the worldly globe another few months. While Heracles hoisted up the globe, Atlas trotted off to retrieve the three golden apples. ![]() ![]() Heracles killed the dragon with an arrow over the garden wall and took the burden over his shoulders. Atlas was willing to steal the apples if Heracles relieved him of his burden of holding up the heavens, but only if the hero first did something about Ladon. When Heracles as one of his Labors sought the golden apples, he had to enlist the aid of the Titan Atlas to overcome the mighty Ladon. So Ladon would lay in the garden, coiling himself around the tree, and Hera feared no one would steal her apples. Hera had chosen Ladon, a monstrous dragon with a hundred heads, to guard the precious tree which Gaia (Mother Earth) had given to her, Queen of the Heavens, at her wedding to Zeus. Ladon might be given multiple heads, a hundred in Aristophanes' The Frogs (a passing remark in line 475), which might speak with different voices. In the second century CE, Pausanias saw among the treasuries at Olympia an archaic cult image in cedar-wood of Heracles and the apple-tree of the Hesperides with the dragon coiled around it. ![]() The image of the snake-dragon coiled round the tree, originally adopted by the Hellenes from Near Eastern and Minoan sources, is familiar from surviving Greek vase-painting. Ladon is the Greek version of the West Semitic serpent Lotan, or the Hurrian serpent Illuyanka.He is variously described as the offspring of or of. In one version, Heracles did not kill Ladon. Ladon was given several parentages, each of which placed him at an archaic level in Greek myth: the offspring of Phorcys and Ceto or of Typhon and Echidna or of Gaia herself, or in her Olympian manifestation, Hera: "The Dragon which guarded the golden apples was the brother of the Nemean lion" asserted Ptolemy Hephaestion.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |