Eris

Eris (ERR-iss) is the goddess and personification of strife and discord — the spirit of quarrel itself, made into a person. Her name is simply the ordinary Greek word eris, "contention," and she covers the whole range of it: the bickering of neighbours, the rivalry of craftsmen, the lawsuit and the shouting-match, and at its darkest end the clash of armies on the battlefield. Born of Nyx (Night) without a father, she belongs to the old, deep, abstract powers of the world — the shadowed forces that hem in human life — rather than to the bright company of the Olympians, and like her mother's other children she is more a law of existence than a character with a face.

Two things fix Eris in the memory of everyone who meets her, and Hesiod gives us both. The first is that she is double. In an unforgettable passage of the Works and Days, Hesiod says he was wrong to speak of a single Strife: there are two Erises on earth, as different as night from day. One is the cruel Strife who breeds war, hatred, and ruin, whom no mortal loves but must endure. The other is a good Strife, the elder daughter of Night, whom Zeus set down in the roots of the earth — and she is far kinder to men, for she is honest rivalry, the healthy competition that stirs even the shiftless man to work when he sees his neighbour's full barn. "Potter is angry with potter, and craftsman with craftsman," Hesiod writes, "and beggar is envious of beggar, and singer of singer" — and this envy is good, because it makes the world busy and productive. Eris, then, is the one Greek personification who is deliberately given two faces: the destroyer and the spur.

The second is the story that made her famous far beyond Hesiod: the golden apple. When Eris was left off the guest-list for the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the slighted goddess tossed among the assembled deities a golden apple marked "for the fairest," and the quarrel it set off between Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite led straight through the Judgement of Paris to the Trojan War. From that single act of spite comes the enduring phrase "apple of discord" — any small thing thrown down to start a great and ruinous fight. In Homer she is the constant companion and sister of Ares, walking the battlefield beside slaughter, small at her first rising but soon towering between earth and sky; she is, in every telling, the goddess you least want at your feast.

Daughter of Night and mother of woes

Eris is one of the children born of Nyx (Night) without a father, and in Hesiod's Theogony she stands in the grimmest of company — sister to Doom and Death and Sleep, to Blame and Woeful Distress, to Deceit and Old Age and Nemesis. But Eris is unusual among these dark siblings in that she is herself a parent, and her offspring are a catalogue of everything that makes human life hard. From her, Hesiod says, come Ponos (Toil, painful labour), Lethe (Forgetfulness), Limos (Famine, starvation), and the Algea (Pains and sorrows); the Hysminai (close-quarters battles) and the Makhai (wars); the Phonoi and Androktasiai (murders and manslaughters); the Neikea (quarrels and disputes) and the Pseudea (lies and falsehoods) with their attendant Words and Ambiguities; Dysnomia (lawlessness) and Ate (blind ruin, delusion); and last and heaviest of all, Horkos (Oath), "who most afflicts men on earth when anyone willfully swears a false oath." The list is really a family portrait of strife: it shows what discord produces once it is loosed in the world — not just fighting, but the whole train of toil, hunger, forgetting, lying, and broken faith that follows a quarrel wherever it goes.

The two Erises: the cruel Strife and the good

Hesiod's most influential idea about the goddess is that there are two of her, and he sets it out at the very opening of the Works and Days (11–26) as a correction of his own earlier poem. "So there was not just one kind of Strife after all," he writes, "but two on the earth." The first is the harsh, hateful Eris of the Theogony — the one who "fosters evil war and battle," cruel, loved by no one, endured only because the gods compel it. But the second is a wholly different power: the elder daughter of dark Night, whom Zeus, who dwells on high, set in the roots of the earth, and she is far better for men. This good Eris is honest rivalry — the emulation that spurs people to work. She rouses even the helpless and idle to labour, Hesiod says, for a man grows eager to plough and plant and set his house in order when he looks across at another man who is rich and busy: "and neighbour vies with neighbour as he hurries after wealth. This Strife is wholesome for men." He drives the point home with a line that became proverbial — "Potter is angry with potter, and craftsman with craftsman; beggar is envious of beggar, and singer of singer" — meaning that competition, jealousy of a rival's success, is exactly what keeps a community productive and alive. It is a remarkable moment in early Greek thought: the same force that, unchecked, tears the world apart is, rightly channelled, the engine of all its industry. Eris thus becomes the personification of a double truth the Greeks felt deeply — that competition can destroy or create, and that the difference lies entirely in how it is turned.

The golden apple and the wedding of Peleus and Thetis

The single most consequential thing Eris ever did began with a snub. When the gods gathered on Mount Pelion for the marriage of the mortal hero Peleus to the sea-goddess Thetis — the wedding at which, the poets said, the whole plan for the coming age of heroes was set in motion — every divinity was invited except Eris, whom no host wants at a feast. Furious at the slight, the goddess of discord came anyway, or contrived her revenge from the threshold: she threw down among the celebrating goddesses a golden apple inscribed with a single word — tēi kallistēi, "for the fairest." At once three goddesses claimed it as their own: Hera, queen of the gods; Athena, goddess of wisdom and war; and Aphrodite, goddess of love. Their quarrel could not be settled on Olympus — no god dared judge between them — and so Zeus sent them, led by Hermes, to a mortal shepherd on Mount Ida, the Trojan prince Paris (Alexander), to decide. Each goddess offered him a bribe: Hera offered power and empire, Athena offered wisdom and victory in war, and Aphrodite offered the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris chose Aphrodite — and the woman he was promised was Helen, already the wife of Menelaus of Sparta. His carrying her off to Troy set in motion the whole ten-year catastrophe of the Trojan War. From Eris's one act of spite, in the Greek reckoning, sprang the greatest war in their legend; and her golden apple has given the world its lasting phrase, the "apple of discord," for any trifle thrown down to start a ruinous fight.

(A note on the sources: the early epic Cypria, our oldest account of the war's origins, already made Eris the spark — its summary tells how Strife arrived while the gods feasted at Peleus's wedding and set Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite quarrelling over their beauty, so that Zeus's long-laid plan to bring about the Trojan War could unfold. The vivid detail of the inscribed golden apple — the word "for the fairest" and Eris's exclusion from the guest-list — is elaborated most fully in later writers such as the mythographer Hyginus and the satirist Lucian, and it is through them that the scene reached its familiar form. The heart of the tradition, Eris igniting the fatal quarrel of the three goddesses, is genuinely old.)

Sister and companion of Ares

On the battlefield Eris is inseparable from war itself, and Homer makes her the close kin and comrade of the war-god. In the Iliad she is the sister and companion of Ares, "insatiable in her fury," the only deity who stays on the field when the other gods have withdrawn. Homer gives her one of his most memorable images: Eris rises small and slight at first, but she keeps growing until "she strides upon the earth with her head striking the heavens" — a perfect picture of how a quarrel begins as a little thing and swells, unchecked, until it fills the whole sky. She marches among the front ranks with Terror (Deimos) and Rout (Phobos), spurring the armies against each other and rejoicing in the groans of dying men. Where Ares embodies the fury and bloodlust of battle, Eris embodies the contention that starts it and the discord that keeps it burning — the two of them together are war's cause and war's rage, walking side by side.

A power to be kept away, not courted

Eris had almost no formal cult in the Greek world, and for a very understandable reason: she is the goddess of the one thing no household, city, or army ever wished to invite. Unlike gods who bring blessings that people gather to seek, Eris brings quarrel and ruin, and the natural human relationship with her is not worship but avoidance — the wish to keep her from the door. She belongs to that class of Greek divine figures who are personifications (abstractions given a name and a story by the poets) rather than gods with temples, priesthoods, and festival calendars: like her mother Night's other children — Death, Sleep, Blame, Doom — she was profoundly real to the Greek imagination and vividly present in poetry and art, yet she was honoured chiefly in the telling of her stories and in the fear of her power, not in regular sacrifice.

Where she was felt: the battlefield and the poets

What cult-presence Eris did have clustered where strife naturally lives — around war. She walks the Homeric battlefield as a living force, and the invocations and dread of soldiers going into combat are the nearest thing she had to worship: an acknowledgement, not an appeal for favour. She appears too on painted vases and in the great mythological scenes — most of all in depictions of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis and the throwing of the golden apple, and in battle-friezes where she stands amid the fighting. Her chief home, in truth, was the poets: it is Hesiod who gives her a genealogy and her doubled nature, and Homer who gives her a body and a voice, and it is through their verses, rather than through any altar, that the Greeks knew and reckoned with her.

An idea that outlived her cult

Eris never had much of an ancient cult, and she has little formal one today — but few Greek figures have had a livelier afterlife as an idea. The phrase her golden apple gave the world, the "apple of discord," is still in everyday use for any small provocation that ignites a large and bitter dispute, and the scene of the slighted goddess tossing her golden fruit among the guests has been painted, sculpted, and retold for two and a half thousand years as the very image of how great catastrophes spring from petty grievances.

Hesiod's good Eris and the modern eye

Hesiod's insight into the two Erises — that the same competitive drive can either wreck a community or power it — has found new admirers in the modern world, where it is read as an early and remarkably clear articulation of the value of healthy rivalry and honest emulation: the recognition that envy of a neighbour's success, rightly turned, becomes ambition, industry, and craft. Among contemporary Hellenic polytheists (Hellenists) who honour the old gods, Eris is approached with care and usually in her better aspect — acknowledged as the necessary tension and challenge in life, the spur that pushes one to grow, rather than invited as the bringer of ruin. And in wider modern culture she has taken on a mischievous second life of her own, embraced by some as a playful patron of chaos and creative disruption — a distant, ironic echo of the goddess who proved, with a single golden apple, that a little well-aimed discord can change the whole course of the world.