A girl outruns every suitor who would marry her, and the forfeit is death; she loses at last only because she stoops for fruit too bright to leave lying. The fullest witness on our shelf is Apollodorus's The Library (Bibliotheca), a Greek mythography compiled in the first and second centuries CE, which tells the golden apple through Atalanta. She was "exposed by her father" because he wanted sons, and was found by hunters after "a she-bear came often and gave her suck"; grown, she "kept herself a virgin" and hunted the wilderness under arms. When her father pressed marriage on her she devised a killing race, running behind her wooers herself: for a man overtaken, "his due was death on the spot", and only a man she could not catch might have her.

Many had already perished when "Melanion came to run for love of her," carrying golden apples from Aphrodite; pursued, he cast them down, and she, "picking up the dropped fruit," "was beaten in the race." The primary text does not say where such apples grow. That image survives instead in a note by James George Frazer (1854–1941), the Scottish classicist who edited and translated this edition; he reports from Ovid a wondrous tree in a Cyprian field, its "leaves and branches resplendent with crackling gold", from whose boughs the goddess plucked "three golden apples."

The tale does not close at the wedding. Out hunting, the couple "entered into the precinct of Zeus," and there, for their trespass, were "changed into lions." Around this one Greek telling the record files a crowd of unread authorities — a whole tale-type, with Danish, Irish, Icelandic, Jewish, and Indian witnesses — none yet wired to served text. If the apple is the only thing that can halt a woman who cannot be outrun, is it a lure, or a test she was always free to refuse?