• Nymph Calypso (Καλυψώ), Mythic
• Archer Hyas (Υάς), Mythic
• Nymphs Hyades (Υάδες), Mythic
• Nymphs Hesperides (Εσπερίδες), Mythic

Hesiod mentions either different Calypsos or the same Calypso as one of the Oceanid daughters of Tethys and Oceanus, and Pseudo - Apollodorus as one of the Nereid daughters of Nereus and Doris.

Calypso is remembered most for her role in Homer's Odyssey, in which she keeps the fabled Greek hero Odysseus on her island so she could make him her immortal husband. According to Homer, Calypso kept Odysseus hostage at Ogygia for seven years, while Pseudo - Apollodorus says five years and Hyginus says one. Calypso enchants Odysseus with her singing as she strolls to and fro across her weaving loom, with a golden shuttle. During this time they sleep together, although Odysseus soon comes to wish for circumstances to change.

Odysseus cannot be away from his wife Penelope any longer and wants to go to Calypso to tell her. His patron goddess Athena asks Zeus to order the release of Odysseus from the island, and Zeus sends the messenger Hermes, to tell Calypso to set Odysseus free, for it was not his destiny to live with her forever. She angrily comments on how the gods hate goddesses having relationships with mortals. Then being worried for her not - meant - to - be love Odysseus, Calypso sends him on his way with a boat, wine and bread.

Homer does not mention any children by Calypso. By some accounts, which come after the Odyssey, Calypso bore Odysseus a son, Latinus, though Circe is usually given as Latinus's mother. In other accounts Calypso bore Odysseus two children, Nausithous and Nausinous.

The etymology of Calypso's name is from καλύπτω (kalyptō), meaning "to cover", "to conceal", "to hide". According to Etymologicum Magnum her name means καλύπτουσα το διανοούμενον, i.e. "concealing the knowledge", which combined with the Homeric epithet δολόεσσα, meaning subtle or wily, justifies the hermetic character of Calypso and her island.

The spelling of "Calypso music" reflects a later folk - etymological assimilation with the mythological name and is not otherwise related to the character in the Odyssey.

Jacques - Yves Cousteau named his research ship after Calypso.

The mythological use for a Hyas, apparently a back formation from Hyades, may simply have been to provide a male figure to consort with the archaic rain nymphs, the Hyades, a chaperone responsible for their behavior, as all the archaic sisterhoods — even the Muses — needed to be controlled under the Olympian world-picture (Ruck and Staples). In fact among the poets it is immaterial whether Hyas is described as their father or their brother. And his death gave these weepy rain nymphs a cause for their weeping, mourning for a male being an acceptably passive female role in the patriarchal culture of the Hellenes. Hyas had no separate existence except as progenitor / guardian of the Hyantes, neither in mythic narrative nor in rite, even the alternative accounts of his demise being somewhat conventional and interchangeable: compare the death of Meleager or Actaeon.

The Hyantes, descendants of Hyas — or rather of the Hyades, for the fertility of rain-nymphs needs no male consort — were the original ("Pelasgian") inhabitants of Boeotia, from which country they were expelled by the followers of Cadmus (Peck; Pliny's Natural History, iv.12). Into late Classical times (as by Pausanias, for example), Cadmus was remembered as having been a Phoenician, or at least backed by a Phoenician army, and there may be a nugget of political reality at the heart of the myth, that a Phoenician colony established along the Boeotian coast had displaced some of the area's aboriginal inhabitants while absorbing others.

Some of the Hyantes are said to have emigrated to isolated and pastoral Phocis, where they founded Hyampolis, or at least that gave a good etiological explanation for the city's name. Others supposedly fled to Aetolia, another region that retained a primitive character into Classical times. The poets used the adjective Hyantius as equivalent to Boeoticus, or "rural", partly as a demonstration of how conversant they were with such arcane details:

"Thus, then, Hyantius to his Partners spake,

That trod the Mazes of the pathlesse Wood:

My Friends our nets and javelins reake with blood:

Enough hath been the fortune of this day:" (Ovid)

The speaker is Actaeon, grandson of Cadmus, who came to an end somewhat similar to that of Hyas.

The Hyades were daughters of Atlas (by either Pleione or Aethra, one of the Oceanides) and sisters of Hyas in most tellings, although one version gives their parents as Hyas and Boeotia. The Hyades are sisters to the Pleiades and the Hesperides.

The main myth concerning them is envisioned to account for their collective name and to provide an etiology for their weepy raininess: Hyas was killed in a hunting accident and the Hyades wept from their grief. They were changed into a cluster of stars, the Hyades set in the head of Taurus.

Their number varies from three of the earliest sources to fifteen of the late ones. The names are also variable, according to the mythographer, and include: Aesyle or Phaesyle; Ambrosia; Cleeia; Coronis; Eudora; Pedile; Phaeo or Phaeote; Phyto; Polyxo.

Servius gives a set of five names that doesn't match any other known lists: Pytho, Synecho, Baccho, Cardie, Niseis.

Additionally, Thyone and Prodice were supposed to be daughters of Hyas by Aethra, and have been added to the group of stars.

The Greeks believed that the heliacal rising and setting of the Hyades star cluster were always attended with rain, hence the association of the Hyades (sisters of Hyas) and the Hyades (daughters of ocean) with the constellation of the Hyades (rainy ones).

The Hyades are also thought to have been the tutors of Dionysus, in some tellings of the latter's infancy, and as such are equated with the Nysiads, the nymphs who are also believed to have cared for Dionysus, as well as with other reputed nurses of the god - the Lamides, the Dodonides and the nymphs of Naxos. Some sources relate that they were subject to aging, but Dionysus, to express his gratitude for having raised him, asked Medea to restore their youth.

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 Ancient 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.

Ordinarily the Hesperides number three, like the other Greek triads (the Three Graces and the Moirai). "Since the Hesperides themselves are mere symbols of the gifts the apples embody, they cannot be actors in a human drama. Their abstract, interchangeable names are a symptom of their impersonality," Evelyn Harrison has observed. Nevertheless, among the names given to them, though never all at once, are Aegle ("dazzling light"), Arethusa, Erytheia (or Erytheis) and Hesperia (alternatively Hespereia, Hespere, Hespera, Hesperusa or Hesperethoosa). Lipara, Asterope and Chrysothemis are named in a Hesperide scene of the apotheosis of Heracles (romanized to Hercules) on a late fifth century hydria by the Meidias Painter in London They are sometimes called the Western Maidens, the Daughters of Evening or Erythrai, and the "Sunset Goddesses", designations all apparently tied to their imagined location in the distant west. Hesperis is appropriately the personification of the evening (as Eos is of the dawn) and the Evening Star is Hesperus. In addition to their tending of the garden, they were said to have taken great pleasure in singing.

They are sometimes portrayed as the evening daughters of Night (Nyx) either alone, or with Darkness (Erebus), in accord with the way Eos in the farthermost east, in Colchis, is the daughter of the titan Hyperion. Or they are listed as the daughters of Atlas, or of Zeus, and either Hesperius or Themis, or Phorcys and Ceto.

Erytheia ("the red one") is one of the Hesperides. The name was applied to an island close to the coast of southern Hispania, which was the site of the original Punic colony of Gades (modern Cadiz). Pliny's Natural History (4.36) records of the island of Gades: "On the side which looks towards Spain, at about 100 paces distance, is another long island, three miles wide, on which the original city of Gades stood. By Ephorus and Philistides it is called Erythia, by Timæus and Silenus Aphrodisias, and by the natives the Isle of Juno." The island was the seat of Geryon, who was overcome by Heracles.

The Garden of the Hesperides is Hera's orchard in the west, where either a single tree or a grove of immortality giving golden apples grew. The apples were planted from the fruited branches that Gaia gave to her as a wedding gift when Hera accepted Zeus. The Hesperides were given the task of tending to the grove, but occasionally plucked from it themselves. Not trusting them, Hera also placed in the garden a never - sleeping, hundred - headed dragon named Ladon as an additional safeguard. However, in the mythology surrounding the Judgement of Paris, the Goddess of Discord Eris managed to enter the garden, pluck a golden apple, inscribe it "To the most beautiful" (Ancient Greek: Kallistei) and roll it into the wedding party (which she had not been invited to), in effect causing the Trojan Wars.

In later years it was thought that the "golden apples" might have actually been oranges, a fruit unknown to Europe and the Mediterranean before the Middle Ages. Under this assumption, the Greek botanical name chosen for all citrus species was Hesperidoeidē (Ἑσπεριδοειδῆ, "hesperidoids").

After Heracles completed his first ten Labors, Eurystheus gave him two more claiming that neither the Hydra counted (because Iolaus helped Heracles) nor the Augean stables (either because he received payment for the job or because the rivers did the work). The first of these two additional Labors was to steal the apples from the garden of the Hesperides. Heracles first caught the Old Man of the Sea, the shape - shifting sea god, to learn where the Garden of the Hesperides was located.

In some variations, Heracles, either at the start or at the end of his task, meets Antaeus, who was invincible as long as he touched his mother, Gaia, the earth. Heracles killed Antaeus by holding him aloft and crushing him in a bearhug.

Herodotus claims that Heracles stopped in Egypt, where King Busiris decided to make him the yearly sacrifice, but Heracles burst out of his chains.

Finally making his way to the Garden of the Hesperides, Heracles tricked Atlas into retrieving some of the golden apples for him, by offering to hold up the heavens for a little while (Atlas was able to take them as, in this version, he was the father or otherwise related to the Hesperides). This would have made this task – like the Hydra and Augean stables – void because he had received help. Upon his return, Atlas decided that he did not want to take the heavens back, and instead offered to deliver the apples himself, but Heracles tricked him again by agreeing to take his place on condition that Atlas relieve him temporarily so that Heracles could make his cloak more comfortable. Atlas agreed, but Heracles reneged and walked away, carrying the apples. According to an alternative version, Heracles slew Ladon instead.

There is another variation to the story where Heracles was the only person to steal the apples, other than Perseus, although Athena later returned the apples to their rightful place in the garden. They are considered by some to be the same "apples of joy" that tempted Atalanta, as opposed to the "apple of discord" used by Eris to start a beauty contest on Olympus (which caused "The Siege of Troy").

On Attic pottery, especially from the late fifth century, Heracles is depicted sitting in bliss in the Gardens of the Hesperides, attended by the maidens.

With the revival of classical allusions in the Renaissance, the Hesperides returned to their prominent position, and the garden itself took on the name of its nymphs: Robert Greene wrote of "The fearful Dragon... that watched the garden called Hesperides". Shakespeare inserted the comically insistent rhyme "is not Love a Hercules, Still climbing trees in the Hesperides" in Love's Labours Lost (iv.iii) and John Milton mentioned the "ladies of the Hesperides" in Paradise Regained (ii.357). 'Hesperides' (published 1647) was the title of a collection of pastoral and religious verse by the Royalist poet Robert Herrick.