One could not speak about apple without referring to Adam and Eve, and to this unhappy day where they crunched into the prohibited fruit coming from the knowledge tree of good and evil; this transgression led God to drive them out earthly paradise for ever.

Actually, nothing designates the prohibited fruit as being an apple. The existing common lexicon between the fruit and the apple certainly contributed to allot to apple the not very enviable role of fruit of the sin.

For his 11th work, Hercules was sent to pick gold apples of the Hesperides garden, miraculous fruits providing immortality to those who would crunch them. Hercules tricked the giant Atlas, who supported the sky from a close mountain, and convinced him to steal them for him. He would have proposed to hold himself the sky while Atlas went to the orchard. Pleased to have a rest, the giant accepted and went to pick the apples - as the Hesperides were his daughters, he obtained them easily. When Atlas went back to Hercule, he refused to take again its burden and proposed to go and carry himself the fruits to Eurysthée.

Hercules shammed to accept; he asked Atlas to hold the sky a few moments, time to take a pillow and to put it on his neck… While the giant was carrying out, the hero took the apples and fled. When he had brought the apples back to Eurysthée, this one did not know what to do with them. He offered them to the goddess Athéna, who, carefully, brought them back to the Hesperides garden.

MODERN LEGEND

One summer day 1665, sleeping under an apple tree in the orchard of his mother, the famous scientist Isaac Newton would have worked out his theory of the gravitation by seeing an apple being detached from the tree and falling on the ground.