Eris

Hesiod opens Works and Days by correcting his own earlier poem: there is not one Eris but two. The bad Eris, the one the Theogony already named among the children of Night, fosters war, quarrel and cruelty for their own sake, and no one loves her. The good Eris, whom Hesiod says Zeus set in the roots of the earth, is a harder and more useful power: she is the envy that sets a poor man to watch his rich neighbour plough and plant, and drives him to work his own land well in turn. Potter competes with potter, craftsman with craftsman, singer with singer, beggar with beggar, and the whole of human industry runs on that friction. Hesiod's two Erides are best read as one goddess split by a moral argument rather than as two separate figures with separate myths: the poet wants strife to be real and dangerous and, in one of its forms, also productive, and giving it two names lets him say both things about the same underlying force without contradiction.

The Homeric Eris, by contrast, keeps to the single, darker reading. In the Iliad she is Ares' sister, walking the battlefield beside him, small when she first appears and growing until she plants one foot on the earth and her head in the clouds, spreading Kakos Andrasi Neikea, evil strife, among the fighting men. This Eris has no interest in honest competition; she exists to make an already violent scene worse, and Homer never asks the audience to admire her the way Hesiod's good Eris asks to be admired. The two portraits were composed for different purposes and were never reconciled by any ancient source into a single consistent biography, and the atlas records them side by side rather than collapsing one into the other.

The story that made Eris famous outside the two early poems does not survive complete in either of them. It is known mainly through later summaries and allusions, tracing back to the lost epic the Cypria, part of the wider Trojan War cycle: every god and goddess was invited to the wedding of the mortal Peleus and the sea nymph Thetis except Eris, deliberately left off the guest list because her presence at any gathering was expected to end badly. She came anyway and threw a golden apple among the assembled goddesses inscribed simply "for the fairest," a single small object designed to produce exactly the argument it did. Hera, Athena and Aphrodite each claimed the apple, and rather than settle the dispute themselves the gods handed the choice to a mortal, the Trojan prince Paris, who judged Aphrodite the fairest after she promised him the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta. That judgment, and the abduction of Helen that followed it, is the mythic spark later tradition gives for the Trojan War itself.

The episode is often read as Eris doing exactly what her name says without lifting a weapon: she does not fight the war, she only supplies the occasion for a rivalry that others carry to its conclusion, which fits both the Homeric Eris who spreads strife among people already inclined to conflict and Hesiod's bad Eris who delights in quarrel for nothing but itself. The Iliad itself never narrates the apple story directly, which is part of why scholars treat it as belonging to the wider Cycle tradition growing up around Homer's poems rather than to Homer's own text, but later Greek and Roman writers took the connection between Eris, the apple and the war's origin as settled background, and it is in that later, fuller form that the story is now best known.