Short answer: Eris is the Greek goddess of strife and discord, Discordia to the Romans. Left off the guest list at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, she took revenge with a single object: a golden apple inscribed "to the fairest" (kallisti). Hera, Athena and Aphrodite all claimed it, Paris had to judge, and the winner's prize was Helen. One word on one apple: the cheapest declaration of war in history.
What the apple set in motion
| Step | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1. The snub | Every god is invited to the wedding except Eris |
| 2. The apple | She throws it among the guests: "to the fairest" |
| 3. The claim | Hera, Athena and Aphrodite each reach for it |
| 4. The dodge | Zeus refuses to choose and hands the verdict to Paris |
| 5. The judgement | Aphrodite wins by offering Paris the most beautiful woman alive |
| 6. The war | That woman is Helen, wife of Menelaus. Troy burns |
Eris never lifts a weapon in the whole story. She understands something the war gods don't: you don't need to start a fight if you can make everyone else need to win one.
Her children: everything that follows a quarrel
In Hesiod, Eris is a daughter of Nyx, the Night, with no father at all. Her children read like a diagnosis of what strife leaves behind: Ponos (Toil), Lethe (Oblivion), Limos (Famine), the Algea (Pains), and Horkos, the Oath who hunts down perjurers. It is genealogy as psychology: after the quarrel come pain, hunger, forgetting and broken promises. Homer gives her a different family, making her the sister of Ares who rides beside him into battle: small when she first appears, and walking with her head against the sky once she has grown among men.
The good Eris
Hesiod's Works and Days opens with a correction: there is not one Strife but two. One breeds war and cruelty. The other is rivalry, the itch that makes a potter work harder because his neighbour's pots are selling, and it is this Eris, says Hesiod, that gets fields ploughed and houses built. The Greeks put competition and conflict in the same family and dared you to tell them apart.
From Olympus to the edge of the solar system
In 2005 astronomers found a world beyond Pluto and named it Eris. The choice was perfect: its discovery forced the definition of the word "planet", demoted Pluto, and set off the loudest quarrel modern astronomy has ever had. Her moon is named Dysnomia, after Eris's daughter Lawlessness. Somewhere, the uninvited guest is smiling.
Quick questions
What does kallisti mean?
Greek for "to the fairest" (τῇ καλλίστῃ), the inscription on the golden apple. It works because it is an award with no jury: any goddess who reaches for it declares herself a candidate, and every other one an enemy.
Why wasn't Eris invited to the wedding?
For exactly the reason she proved right: she is discord, and nobody wants discord at a wedding. The myth's joke is that excluding her is what let her in. The wedding of Peleus and Thetis becomes the first domino of the Trojan War, at the marriage of the parents of Achilles.
Is Eris the sister of Ares?
In Homer, yes: she is the war god's companion and sister, delighting in the noise of battle. In Hesiod she is older and darker, a daughter of Night. Both traditions agree on what matters: where armies clash, she is there.
Who ended up with the golden apple?
Aphrodite, by bribing the judge with Helen. Whether anyone would call that winning is another question: her prize package included the Trojan War.
You can hear how the apple rolls into the war in MythologyNow: The Judgement of Paris and the Road to Troy.
