Page:Greek and Roman Mythology.djvu/125

 THE GREEK HEROES 111 journeys into the lower world and into the garden of the gods. These ideas, to be smre, were afterwards, with the union of the Argive and the Thessalian-Oetaean legends, supplanted by the myth that he destroyed himself by fire. (11) On the way to the garden of the Hesperides (' western '), who guarded the golden apples of rejuve- nation, and dwelt where the edge of the western sky is gilded by the setting sun, he throttled the giant An- taeus, lifting him up from the Earth, his mother, who was constantly supplying him with new strength. Then he slew king Buslris in Egypt, who cruelly sacrificed all strangers cas*t upon the coast of his country. In the name Busiris certainly lurks that of the Egyptian god Osiris. Finally, after liberating Prometheus, who had been chained on Caucasus by Zeus, he came to Atlas, who bore the heavens upon his shoulders (as every mountain apparently does). Hercules begged him to pluck three apples from the tree of the Hesperides. Meanwhile he himself took Atlas's place in bearing up the heavens, or, in his own person went into the garden of the gods and slew the dragon that guarded the tree. 143. (12) The bringing up of the hellhound Cerberus from the lower world was put last, on the ground of its being the most difficult labor. Evidently it had been for- gotten that the fetching of the apples that bestow eternal youth out of the land imagined to be in the extreme west properly signified the reception of Hercules among the gods. This latter thought was certainly represented in the later idea (which likewise probably belongs to the Argive legend) of the marriage of Hercules with Hebe ('bloom of youth 7 ). She was the daughter and counterpart of Hera (who by this time had been appeased), while the