Hesperides
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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In Greek mythology, the Hesperides are nymphs who tend a blissful garden in a far western corner of the world, located near the Atlas mountains in Tanger, Morocco at the edge of the encircling Oceanus, the world-ocean. (A confusion of the Garden of the Hesperides with an equally idyllic Arcadia is a modern one, conflating Sir Philip Sidney's Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia and 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).)
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 Hesperides are in Tartessos, a location placed in the south of the Iberian peninsula.
By 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.
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