A friend visiting this site commented: "you know of course that it was not apples but oranges in the story of Atalanta."
Surprising bit of news, that, and from someone whose knowledge in many arcane areas seems on occasion boundless. Doubting not so much my own accreted recollections but their fidelity to varied source materials, I went hunting again, eschewing the net and spear and other usual items of capture for the favoured weapon of the bibliographic huntress: dusty books and Google.
The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature claims it was indeed apples that were used to distract Atalanta in her race, as advised by Aphrodite, and they were three in number. They were obtained somehow from The Hesperides, "Daughters of Evening", who owned the tree that produced golden apples, the same source for Hercules in undertaking his labours. Timothy Gantz in his Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (John Hopkins, 1993) offers all variations on the stories of Atalanta, but one thing is certain: the fruits were apples, and the apples were golden, and Aphrodite was responsible for the idea.
According to a site about "Godesses [sic], women and sex" found with google at a Middlebury college site --
"The 'Apples of the Hesperides' cannot be positively identified, but the phrase makes it clear that new kinds of fruit were being imported into Greece proper from outlying areas, even from as far west as Spain. We have some evidence here for l) fast sea transportation, since fruit rots quickly, 2) for other strains of fruit being produced in the West Mediterranean Basic, strains not found in the East, and 3) for a specific kind of fruit so striking in its appearance that a shrewd, male-phobic girl could be taken in by their striking appearance. One thinks of oranges, found since the fifteenth century in Spain, which produced a striking impression when first imported into central Europe, and were not eaten, but reserved as the playthings of bishops and royalty."
There are at least a couple of obvious problems with this version. The part of the Mediterranean that originated the myth was not called "Greece" at that time, but "Hellas", named for the tribethat settled in a part of Thessaly. In the translations of the Odyssey I've read, the "Greeks" were referred to as the "Achaians". And of course, "Spain" as a country name did not yet exist. Secondly, Atalanta was not "male-phobic" in her reluctance to marry. In Ovid's version, she was not a man-hater, but had been warned by an an oracle to "shun marriage."
This led to my wondering about the possibility of putting oranges and Hellenes in the same basket. One of my favorite books, now suffering from signs of old age (spine problems), is Familiar Studies in Homer (Longmans, Green, and Co, 1892) by Agnes Mary Clerke (d. 1907), "English astronomer and scientist" and an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society, as well as a historian with a love for The Iliad and The Odyssey. In her chapter on "Homeric Meals" she writes of apples, pears, pomegranates, figs, ollives, and grapes being cultivated. No oranges. She comments further:
"The apple evidently excited Homer's particular admiration; he in fact, made it his representative fruit. That it should have been so considered in the North, where competition or the place of honour was small, is less surprising; and apples, accordingly, of an etherealised and paradisaical kind, served to restore youth to the aging gods of Asaheim."
Now we have not only Atalanta and Aphrodite and Hercules in the apple corps, but also Homer, the Norse gods and, perhaps by allusion, the ur-parents in the Eden story. The question remains: were there oranges in the part of the world we now call Greece, pre-dating even Homer, so that they might have found their way into an ancient myth from that area? Harold McGee writes of the citrus family in his On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (1984): "With the exception of the grapefruit and other recent hybrids, the members of the citrus family are native to Southeast Asia and were first cultivated in India (our word orange comes from the Hindi), China, and Japan. . . .but it wasn't until the Middle Ages that the lemon, and in the 15th century the orange, made it to the West, where they were initially treated as ornamentals and spice plants."
The latter detail is in accord with the web site (mentioned above) concerning oranges in 15th c. Spain, but the myth of Atalanta predates that occurrence by many centuries.
Until further notice, I'm staying with apples, and will no more be distracted by unfruitful references to interloping alternative fruits.
