Eris

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Eris is the Greek personification of strife and discord — the goddess who stands for the rift itself: quarrel, rivalry, the breach that opens between people. The Romans called her Discordia. She belongs to the oldest stratum of Greek divine figures, the kind that is less a character with a temple than a named force loosed upon the world.

Hesiod gives her two distinct treatments, and the difference is the heart of how the Greeks thought about conflict. In the Theogony she is the daughter of Night, sister to a brood of grim abstractions — toil, famine, battle, murder, ruin — and she is wholly destructive. But in the Works and Days Hesiod corrects himself: there are two Erides, not one. The first drives war and hatred; the second is the strife that sets a man to plowing when he sees his neighbor prosper, the rivalry that builds rather than wrecks. Hesiod calls that second one good for mortals. The poet’s revision is one of the earliest surviving attempts in Greek to split a single idea — competition — into its ruinous and its fruitful halves.

The story that fixed her in later memory is not in Homer’s Iliad, where she appears only as a small, swelling figure who walks the battlefield rousing the armies. It comes from the lost epic Cypria and the mythographers who followed: Eris, alone among the gods uninvited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, threw among the guests a golden apple inscribed to the fairest. Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite each claimed it; the quarrel was referred to the Trojan prince Paris; his award to Aphrodite set in motion the abduction of Helen and the Trojan War. The phrase “apple of discord” descends from this episode, as does the trope of the slight that breeds catastrophe.

Eris held no significant cult in the ancient world — she was a figure of poetry and explanation more than of worship. Her most active afterlife is modern and unexpected. In the late 1950s and early 1960s a pair of Americans, Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley, founded Discordianism, taking Eris as the goddess of a religion that holds disorder to be sacred. Its scripture, the Principia Discordia, treats chaos not as the enemy of order but as its equal and origin, and reveres Eris as the power that keeps the world in motion. Discordians describe their own tradition as both a religion and a deliberate refusal to take religion at its own estimate. A dwarf planet found beyond Neptune in 2005 received her name the following year, after its discovery forced the demotion of Pluto and the redrawing of what counts as a planet. The goddess who began as a named force, holding no temple of her own, was given a world.

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