Draco and Ladon, the serpent of the Hesperides' golden apples
The serpent that guarded the golden apples of the Hesperides, the labour of Heracles and Thuban, the star of Draco that was the pole star in pyramid times.
A long, winding figure stretches across the northern sky between the two Bears: its tail passing between the stars of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor and its head, formed by a small quadrilateral, looking out near Hercules and Lyra. It is Draco, the Dragon, a circumpolar constellation that never sets at our latitudes. The Greeks recognised in it the guardian serpent par excellence, keeper of a treasure that only a hero could win.
The garden at the edge of the world
The myth tells that at the wedding of Zeus and Hera, the Earth gave the bride trees bearing golden apples. Hera had them planted in a garden at the far west of the world, near the mountain on which Atlas holds up the vault of heaven, and entrusted their care to the Hesperides, nymphs of the evening. To guard the tree she set a serpent that never slept, so that no one could steal the fruit.
Hesiod, in the Theogony, already mentions a terrible serpent that guards the golden apples at the ends of the earth, offspring of the sea deities Phorcys and Ceto. The name Ladon appears in later authors, such as Apollonius of Rhodes. Apollodorus instead calls it a son of Typhon and Echidna and gives it a hundred heads, each able to utter different voices.
Heracles and the golden apples
Obtaining the apples of the Hesperides was one of the last labours imposed on Heracles by Eurystheus. The versions diverge: according to Apollodorus, the hero persuaded Atlas to pick the fruit for him, meanwhile holding up the sky on his own shoulders; according to other sources, Heracles killed the serpent directly with his arrows. Apollonius of Rhodes, in the Argonautica, relates that the Argonauts reached the garden the next day, finding Ladon dead and the Hesperides in tears.
Hera, according to tradition, placed the serpent among the stars in memory of its loyalty. Beside Draco lies the constellation of Hercules, which the Greeks called Engonasin, “the kneeler”: a mysterious figure, already without a certain identity in Aratus, depicted with one knee on the ground and a foot resting right on the dragon's head, as if to represent the hero's victory.
The dragon of the Gigantomachy and the forgotten pole star
Another tradition, reported by Hyginus, links Draco to the war between the gods and the Giants. During the battle a serpent was hurled at Athena, who seized it and flung it into the sky, where it remained coiled around the pole as if frozen. Its coils do in fact surround the pole of the ecliptic, the centre around which the Earth's axis slowly turns.
Because of precession, in the third millennium BC the star closest to the north celestial pole was not today's Polaris but Thuban, in the tail of Draco. At that time the great pyramids were being built in Egypt, and some scholars have suggested a link between the orientation of certain passages and this star, a hypothesis still debated. The name Thuban derives from Arabic and simply means “serpent”.
Draco embodies the very ancient figure of the guardian: the serpent that does not sleep, set to defend what is precious and forbidden. Defeated by Heracles but made eternal by Hera, it represents the obstacle the hero must overcome to reach an immortal fruit. And its position around the pole makes it, even today, one of the most constant and watchful figures of the night sky.