Eris (mythology)

• 1. Introduction

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  Eris, the Greek goddess of strife, plants herself beside the ship of Odysseus and lets out a scream. In Book 11 of the Iliad, Zeus sends her to the Achaean camp carrying a portent of war. Odysseus's black ship sits in the middle of the line, so her voice can carry in both directions. At one far end are the huts of Aias, son of Telamon. At the other end are those of Achilles. Her cry reaches every man, and Homer says war then felt sweeter to them than sailing home.

  The Greeks wrote her name as Ἔρις, and the Romans called her Discordia. She personifies strife and discord in general, and the kind that comes with war in particular. Yet she is oddly hard to pin down. Poets disagree about who her parents were. The one story most tied to her name began at a party. At least one ancient poet insisted there were two goddesses with her name. This documentary follows her through the poems that mention her, the children she is said to have borne, the few images that survive, and the unlikely places her name appears today.

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• 2. Daughter of Night

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  Homer's Iliad calls Eris the "sister and comrade" of Ares, the god of war. The scholar Geoffrey Kirk doubts that this means much. He argues that she is "not fully personified" in the poem, and he calls the kinship a "purely ad hoc description." Other scholars take the line literally. On that reading she is a daughter of Zeus and Hera, who are the parents of Ares.

  Hesiod's Theogony tells a darker story. There Eris is a daughter of Nyx, the goddess Night, who produced many children without a partner. Her brothers and sisters are a gloomy company. They include Moros (Doom), Thanatos (Death), the Moirai (Fates), Nemesis (Indignation), Apate (Deceit) and Geras (Old Age). Hesiod's Greek word for the whole group is stugerós, which means loathsome.

  Of all the children of Nyx, Eris alone is credited with offspring of her own. Like her mother, she bears them with no father named.

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• 3. Children of Strife

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  Ponos, whose name means Toil, heads Hesiod's list of the children of Eris, and he calls him painful. Cicero, writing in Latin, gives the matching figure labor a different pair of parents, Erebus and Night. Lethe follows. She is Forgetfulness, and she shares her name with the river of oblivion in the Underworld. Next comes Limos, or Famine, whose sex is uncertain. Limos was held in special regard at Sparta, and the Romans had an equivalent named Fames. Then come Algea, the Pains, whom Hesiod calls tearful.

  The list then turns to violence. The Hysminai are Combats, and the Machai are Battles or Wars. The Phonoi are Murders, and the Androktasiai are the slayings of men. Quintus Smyrnaeus, in the Posthomerica, pictures the Hysminai on the shield of Achilles. The Shield of Heracles carries a single Phonos and a single Androktasia.

  The remaining children belong to the world of words and law. The Neikea are Quarrels, and the Pseudea are Lies. The Logoi are Tales or Words, and the Amphillogiai are Disputes or unclear words. Dysnomia means Lawlessness. The Athenian statesman Solon set her against Eunomia, who stands for ideal government.

  Two names come with a little more detail. Ate, meaning Delusion, Recklessness or Ruin, was banished from Olympus by Zeus. She had blinded him to Hera's trickery, and that denied Heracles his birthright. Horkos, the Oath, is the curse that falls on anyone who swears a false oath.

  Almost none of these children has a story beyond the meaning of the name. Their mother is different, because one myth gives Eris a crucial role.

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• 4. The Golden Apple

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  At the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, every god received an invitation except Eris. She came anyway and was refused admission. In anger, she threw a golden apple among the guests. It was inscribed "For the fairest," and three goddesses each claimed it. They were Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. Their quarrel was settled by the Judgement of Paris, which led Paris to abduct Helen of Troy and set off the Trojan War.

  The Cypria is the first poem of the Epic Cycle, and it tells events that come before the Iliad, the second poem in the cycle. That poem is now lost, but a prose summary survives. In it, Eris is less a spurned guest than a tool of divine planning. She acts on the designs of Zeus and Themis to bring about the Trojan War. At the wedding feast of Peleus and Thetis, who would become the parents of Achilles, she stirs a feud among the three goddesses over beauty. Zeus orders them to Mount Ida to be judged by Paris. Aphrodite offers him Helen in return for his vote, and Paris chooses her.

  Other early authors leave Eris out. Homer alludes to the Judgement of Paris without mentioning her. The fifth-century BC playwright Euripides describes the judgement several times, with no Eris and no apple.

  The apple arrives in later retellings, and it may or may not come from the Cypria. The Fabulae of Hyginus, composed sometime between the first century BC and the late second century AD, has Eris throw it through the doorway after she is turned away. The satirist Lucian, who was active in the 2nd century AD, says the apple was solid gold. He gives its inscription as "For the queen of Beauty."

  Eris was never confined to weddings, though, and the Iliad shows what she does on a battlefield.

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• 5. Rouser of Armies

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  In Book 4 of the Iliad, Ares urges on the Trojans, and flashing-eyed Athene urges on the Achaeans. Terror, Rout and Strife join in. Homer says Strife "first rears her crest only a little," but then "her head is fixed in the heavens while her feet tread on earth." As she moves through the crowd, she throws evil strife into their midst, and the groanings of men grow louder.

  Apollo, Athena and several other Olympians fight in this war. Eris does not. She takes no side and strikes no blow. Her role is that of "the rouser of armies," and she urges both sides to fight each other. Book 5 describes her raging without pause. Later in Book 11, she is the last god to leave the battlefield, rejoicing in the fighting she has roused.

  The epics also place her on armor. Athena's battle aegis carries Eris beside Phobos (Rout), Alke (Valor) and Ioke (Assault). Achilles's shield shows her with Kydoimos (Tumult) and Ker (Fate). On the Hesiodic Shield of Heracles, she appears with a longer cast that includes Pursuit and Rally. There she flies above the grim forehead of Phobos, whom the poem describes as made of adamant, with eyes shining like fire. The poet calls her cruel, and says she took away the mind and sense of any man who fought openly against Heracles.

  Later writers kept the same character. Antoninus Liberalis, in his Metamorphoses, tells of Polytechnus and Aëdon, who claimed to love each other more than Hera and Zeus loved one another. Hera was angered and sent Eris to wreak discord on them. In the Posthomerica, which covers the years after the Iliad ends, Quintus Smyrnaeus again makes her an instigator who shouts and delights in the carnage. The Dionysiaca of Nonnus sends Nike (Victory) to lead Zeus into the great battle against Typhon, while Eris leads Typhon. Elsewhere Nonnus pairs her with the war-goddess Enyo to bring "Tumult" to both sides of a fight.

  Hesiod, in Works and Days, adds a surprise to this war-bound picture.

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• 6. The Other Eris

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  Hesiod's Works and Days corrects itself in a single line: "So there was not just one birth of Strifes after all, but upon the earth there are two Strifes." He says a man would praise one of them once he got to know it, while the other deserves blame. Their spirits are thoroughly opposed.

  The blameworthy Strife fosters evil war and conflict. Hesiod calls her cruel, and he says no mortal loves her. People honor her only out of necessity, by the plans of the immortals.

  The other Strife, in Hesiod's account, was borne first by gloomy Night. Zeus, the high-throned son of Cronus, set her in the roots of the earth. She is much better for men, because she rouses even the helpless man to work.

  Hesiod gives an example from farm life. A man who does not work looks at a rich neighbor hurrying to plow and plant and set his house in order. The idle man feels envy, and so does neighbor toward neighbor as each hastens toward wealth. In Hesiod's verdict, "this Strife is good for mortals."

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• 7. Faces in Art

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  The geographer Pausanias described seeing Eris on the Chest of Cypselus, where she stands between Ajax and Hector as they fight. He called her a "most repulsive" woman. That chest and a black-figure cup now in Berlin (F1775) hold her earliest appearances, both from the mid-sixth century BC. The cup shows a different Eris. In its central circle she looks like an ordinary woman, apart from wings and winged sandals.

  Certain representations of her are few. A red-figure calyx krater from the later part of the fifth century BC is one of them. Its upper section shows Eris and Themis facing each other, apparently in animated discussion. Its lower section depicts the Judgement of Paris, which confirms her role in the events as the Cypria tells them.

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• 8. Name and Legacy

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  The Greek noun eris, with the stem erid-, means strife or discord, and nobody knows for certain where it came from. Scholars have suggested links to the verb orínein, "to raise, stir, excite," and to the name of the Erinyes. R. S. P. Beekes sees no strong evidence for that relation. He also rules out a derivation from ereídō, "to prop, to support," because the name originally ended in an i-stem. Watkins proposed instead a Proto-Indo-European root ere-, meaning "to separate, to adjoin." The word gave Ancient Greek several derivatives, including erízō, "to fight," and érisma, "object of a quarrel."

  The classic fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty" appears to echo the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. A malevolent fairy, left off the guest list for a princess's christening, curses the child.

  In 1957, two school friends, Gregory Hill and Kerry Wendell Thornley, invented the modern Discordian religion as an "absurdist joke." Eris is its principal figure of worship. In the satirical text Principia Discordia, written by Hill with Thornley and others, she apparently spoke to the pair in an all-night bowling alley, in the form of a chimpanzee.

  Astronomers named a dwarf planet Eris in 2006. Then in 2019, a New Zealand moth received the name Ichneutica eris in her honour.

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