in the ancient mythology, were the daughters of Hesper or Hesperus, the brother of Atlas. According to Diodorus, Hesperus and Atlas were two brothers, who possessed great riches in the western parts of Africa. Hesperus had a daughter called Hesperia, who married her uncle Atlas, and from this marriage proceeded seven daughters, called Hesperides from the name of their mother, and Atlantides from that of their father. According to the poets, the Hesperides were three in number, Ægle, Arethusa, and Hesperidusa. Hefiod, in his Theogony, makes them the daughters of Nox, Night, and seats them in the same place with the Gorgons; viz. at the extremities of the west, near mount Atlas: it is on that account he makes them the daughters of Night, because the sun sets there. The Hesperides are represented by the ancients as having the keeping of certain golden apples, on the other side the ocean. And the poets give them a dragon to watch the garden where the fruit grows: this dragon they tell us Hercules slew, and carried off the apples.—Pliny and Solinus will have the dragon to be no other than an arm of the sea, wherewith the garden was encompassed, and which defended the entrance thereof. And Varro supposes, that the golden apples were nothing but sheep. Others, with more probability, say they were oranges.

The Gardens of the Hesperides are placed by some authors at Larach, a city of Fez; by others, at Bernech, a city of Barca, which tallies better with the fable. Others take the province of Sufa in Morocco for the island wherein the garden was seated. And, lastly, Rudbeck places the Fortunate Islands, and the gardens of the Hesperides, in Sweden.

HESPERIDUM INSULÆ (anc. geog.), islands near the Hesperi Cornu; but the accounts of them are so much involved in fable, that nothing certain can be affirmed of them.