A to Z Blogging Challenge 2024 - Villains! E Is For Eris

Eris at the wedding of Thetis and Peleus. After Rubens. Public Domain

 Eris is the Greek goddess of strife. The Romans called her Discordia. In some ways, you’d have to ask if a goddess who was just doing her job should be called a villain at all, really, but there is no question that she did a lot of nasty things - and enjoyed doing them. She was known for hanging around on the battlefield after the other gods left, enjoying the destruction and bloodshed. She appears in Homer and in Hesiod’s work, and if there is anything positive to say about her, I can’t remember it.

Eris was, according to some sources, the daughter of Nyx, the goddess of night, and very, very old. She is the mother of all the evils that plague humanity.

But she is better known as the sister of Ares, the war god, so would be a daughter of Zeus and Hera. It was as this version that she did her most famous - or infamous - deed: starting the Trojan War. 

The story goes that, like the evil fairy in Sleeping Beauty, she was not invited to a party, in this case the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the parents of Achilles, and decided to get revenge. She threw a golden apple between the three goddesses Athena, Hera and Aphrodite, with the inscription “For the most beautiful.” Then,  no doubt chuckling, she left and let them get on with it. She didn’t need a curse or a threat; she knew those goddesses well enough to know they would bicker over it. Even if this was the only effect, she was doing her job, but these were not just three vain women, they were goddesses with a lot of power. They went to see the Trojan Prince Paris and let him judge. Each of them offered him a bribe - political power, wisdom and the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen. 

That sounds like good revenge for not being invited to a party. 

As a matter of fact, I used this myth in my story “Five Ways To Start A War”, published in the anthology Light Touch Paper, Stand Clear, Peggy Bright Press. In my story, she gets the golden apple from the garden of the Hesperides, who are all at the wedding. The dragon guarding it is too scared of her to make any trouble! 

And it might well be scared. She was Trouble, with a capital T.

There is a story in which she was actually commissioned to cause trouble, the story of Polytekhnos and Aedon, when they claimed to love each other more than Zeus and Hera. You can’t get away with that sort of thing in Greek mythology, so Hera sent our girl Eris to come between them and cause trouble. They got into a quarrel over who could finish a job first. There was cheating in the tasks, then  murder, then everyone was turned into a bird. 

She even turns up in an Aesop fable. The story goes that Heracles saw something that looked like an apple on the ground. He hit it with his club several times and it got bigger and bigger, till Athena stopped him and explained that it would just get bigger if he kept doing that. It’s symbolic, of course. It was said of her that she started small and grew till her head was in the clouds; trouble starts small and the more you pay attention to it, the bigger it gets. 

It’s a nice metaphor, isn’t it?