Judgement of Paris

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Judgement of Paris begins not with armies or heroes, but with a snub at a wedding. Eris, the goddess of discord, was left off the guest list for the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. Her response was to arrive uninvited, carrying a golden apple inscribed with the words "To the fairest one," and throw it into the celebration. That single act set in motion a chain of events leading to the Trojan War, and in later versions of the story, to the very founding of Rome. Three goddesses, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, each claimed the apple as their own. Zeus, unwilling to pick a favorite, handed the decision to a mortal Trojan prince named Paris. What Paris chose, and what he was promised in return, would bring two worlds into collision. The question that hangs over the whole story is not just which goddess was most beautiful. It is what beauty is worth, and what a man will sacrifice to possess it.

• 2. The Apple and the Snub

  ›

  Eris brought her golden apple from the Garden of the Hesperides. According to some later versions of the myth, the apple carried the inscription kallistei, the Greek word meaning "to the fairest one." The Greek is rendered as kallistei, the dative singular of the feminine superlative of kalos, meaning beautiful. The snub itself, Zeus's failure to invite Eris, is given a name in Discordian mythology: The Original Snub. The word kallisti, in its modern Greek spelling written on a golden apple, later became a principal symbol of Discordianism, a post-modernist religion. The 1979 Loompanics edition of Principia Discordia contains a note in its afterword from Gregory Hill explaining that most versions of the text misspell the inscription as kallixti rather than kallisti, a mistake Hill traced to the limitations of the IBM typewriter he used, on which not all Greek letters corresponded to their Latin equivalents. The apple's inscription thus traveled from ancient Greece into a modern religious movement, still carrying its ancient controversy about who deserves to be called the fairest.

• 3. The Mountain Judgment

  ›

  Zeus chose Paris for the role of judge on the basis of a demonstration of fairness. Paris had recently presided over a contest in which Ares, appearing in the form of a bull, had defeated Paris's own prize bull. Paris awarded the victory to the god without hesitation, and this impartiality caught Zeus's attention. With Hermes as their guide, the three goddesses bathed in the spring of Ida and then met Paris on Mount Ida. Each attempted to bribe him. Hera offered to make him king of Europe and Asia. Athena offered wisdom and skill in war. Aphrodite offered the world's most beautiful woman. According to a fragment of the Cypria quoted by Athenagoras of Athens, Aphrodite was aided by the Charites and the Horai, who enhanced her charms with flowers and song. The scholar Alfred J. Van Windekens has suggested a tradition in which Hera was actually the most beautiful goddess before Aphrodite arrived, though Hera's modesty during the inspection worked against her, since she held fidelity and chastity in high regard. Athena's beauty goes largely unremarked in the myths, possibly because the Greeks regarded her as an asexual figure who had transcended what they saw as womanly traits to master wisdom and the arts of war, both considered male domains. Aphrodite, as the goddess of sexuality, simply outpaced them both.

• 4. Helen and the War

  ›

  Helen of Sparta was the wife of the Greek king Menelaus when Aphrodite offered her to Paris as a prize. Euripides references her in Andromache at line 284 and in Helena at line 676. Paris accepted Aphrodite's offer, awarded the apple to her, and received Helen along with the lasting enmity of the Greeks, and especially of Hera. What followed is one of mythology's most contested details: some versions say Paris kidnapped Helen, while others hold that she followed him willingly out of genuine affection. Athena's fury at losing the judgment drove her to join the Greek side in the war against Troy, a pivotal shift in the battle's momentum. Eris's apple is described in the source tradition as the instrumental casus belli of the Trojan War, the formal cause for which war was declared. A brief allusion to the Judgement appears in the Iliad at lines 24.25-30, indicating that Homer's audience already knew the episode well. A fuller version was told in the Cypria, a now-lost work of the Epic Cycle, surviving only in fragments and a reliable summary.

• 5. Ancient Sources and Art

  ›

  The Judgement of Paris appeared wordlessly on the ivory and gold votive chest of the 7th-century BC tyrant Cypselus at Olympia. Pausanias described its inscription as reading: "Here is Hermes, who is showing to Alexander, that he may arbitrate concerning their beauty, Hera, Athena and Aphrodite." Ancient Greek vase painters took up the subject as early as the sixth century BC. The later writers who retold the story, among them Ovid in Heroides, Lucian in Dialogues of the Gods, Pseudo-Apollodorus in Bibliotheca, and Hyginus in Fabulae 92, brought their own skeptical, ironic, or popularizing agendas to the material. In Renaissance and post-Renaissance art, the subject enjoyed a significant revival, driven largely by the opportunity to depict three female nudes. In ancient art only Aphrodite was ever shown unclothed, and not always; Renaissance painters showed all three goddesses nude, and commonly arranged them to display the female body from three different angles, typically front, back, and side view. Lucas Cranach the Elder painted the subject a supposed twenty-three times. Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving of around 1515, probably based on a drawing by Raphael and derived from a Roman sarcophagus composition, introduced Paris's Phrygian cap as a near-universal attribute in later depictions. Rubens returned to the composition at multiple points in his career. Among artists of the 18th century, Watteau and Angelica Kauffman both painted the subject, while in the 19th century academic painters took it up frequently. Enrique Simonet painted his version, El Juicio de Paris, in 1904, and Salvador Dali treated it in the 20th century.

• 6. The Story in Music and Opera

  ›

  In London between 1700 and 1701, a libretto by William Congreve on the Judgement of Paris was set to music by four different composers in a competitive exercise. Thomas Arne composed a score to the same Congreve libretto in 1742, and his setting was considered highly successful. Christoph Willibald Gluck's 1754 opera Le Cinesi, meaning The Chinese Women, closes with a ballet on the Judgement of Paris, performed as a vocal quartet. Francesco Cilea's 1902 opera Adriana Lecouvreur includes a Judgement of Paris ballet sequence as well. An earlier operatic treatment, Il pomo d'oro, meaning The Golden Apple, was written by the Italian composer Antonio Cesti with a libretto by Francesco Sbarra, who lived from 1611 to 1668. That work was structured as a prologue followed by five acts, and it stands as one of the most elaborate operatic productions of the seventeenth century.