Ares championed the cause of Cycnus and marshalled the combat, but a thunderbolt was hurled between the two and parted the combatants. And Cycnus, son of Ares and Pyrene, challenged him to single combat. So journeying he came to the river Echedorus.
With it the Hesperides also were on guard, to wit, Aegle, Erythia, Hesperia, and Arethusa. They were presented to Zeus after his marriage with Hera, and guarded by an immortal dragon with a hundred heads, offspring of Typhon and Echidna, which spoke with many and divers sorts of voices. These apples were not, as some have said, in Libya, but on Atlas among the Hyperboreans. When the labours had been performed in eight years and a month, Eurystheus ordered Hercules, as an eleventh labour, to fetch golden apples from the Hesperides, for he did not acknowledge the labour of the cattle of Augeas nor that of the hydra. Thus the similarity of the Greek word melon (apple) and melon (sheep) has been cited by scholars such as Joseph Eddy Fontenrose and others as the reason that an ancient legend of rustling flocks (an Indo-European inheritance) had been transformed into the myth of seizing golden apples.
Source: Marcus Porcius Cato and Marcus Terrentius Varro, Roman Farm Management (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 185. That ram which Aeetes sacrificed at Colchis, whose fleece was the quest of those princes known as the Argonauts: or again like those so called golden apples ( mala ) of the Hesperides that Hercules brought back from Africa into Greece, which were, according to the ancient tradition, in fact goats and sheep which the Greeks, from the sound of their voice, called mela. One of these is linguistic, noted by writers dating back at least to the time of Varro in the 1st c. It has long been recognized that the Golden Fleece and the golden apples of the Hesperides share many similarities. Heracles is perhaps the Greek hero of whom the most stories are told (including his trip with Jason on the Argo), and among these are his adventure retrieving the golden apples of the Hesperides from a tree guarded by a serpent at the edge of the river Ocean.
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