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. To name such a power was already to acknowledge it: the Greeks did not invent strife by giving it a face, but they gave the experience of it a place in the order of things, set it among the children of the dark, and so made it answerable to story. Eris is what conflict looks like when conflict is granted a will.

Eris shown as a running winged figure on an Attic black-figure plate, ca. 575–525 BCE, Antikensammlung Berlin (F1775) — Berlin Antikensammlung, via Wikimedia Commons (PD-Art / PD-old-100)

She has almost no biography. The deities of Olympus accumulate wives, feuds, seductions, and shrines; Eris accumulates effects. Where Aphrodite is desire that walks, and Eros is the pull between bodies and worlds, Eris is the wedge — the moment a single thing becomes two opposed things. Her nearest kin in the divine economy are not the great Olympians but the abstractions that move beneath them, the powers a later vocabulary would call daimones: forces named for what they do. She is closer to a verb than to a person.

Daughter of Night, mother of ruin

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 — born, like her grim siblings, without a father, out of the generative dark that the cosmogonists set near the beginning of things, the same primordial gloom that the figure of Erebos names on its nether side. Around line 226 Hesiod makes her in turn a mother, and her children are a catalog of everything that goes wrong between mortals: Toil and Forgetfulness, Famine and the Pains, the Fightings and Battles, the Murders and Manslaughters, the Quarrels and Lies and Disputes, Lawlessness and Ruin (Ate), and last of all Oath — Horkos — who, Hesiod says, brings the most grief to men on earth when a man knowingly swears falsely. This is genealogy as moral physics. Strife does not merely cause these things; she generates them as a parent generates offspring, so that famine and perjury and slaughter are kin, one family with one nature. The grim Eris of the Theogony is wholly destructive, and her line is the anatomy of a society coming apart.

But in the Works and Days Hesiod corrects himself, and the correction is one of the most quietly radical sentences in early Greek thought. He opens the poem by announcing that there was never one Strife after all; there are two. The first is the elder daughter of black Night, the cruel one who fosters war and the evil fight, whom no one loves but is forced to honor. The second Zeus set in the roots of the earth, and she is far the better for men. This is the strife that, seeing a neighbor grow rich, sets the idle man himself to plowing and planting and putting his house in order — the rivalry of potter against potter, craftsman against craftsman, beggar envious of beggar. Hesiod calls this second Eris 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 contest that wrecks a community and the contest that goads it to thrive. The Greeks would build whole institutions on the second Eris. The games, the tragic and comic competitions, the rivalry of cities that drove their arts and their wars alike, the agon at the center of public life — all of it runs on a strife that Hesiod was willing to bless. He had drawn, in a few lines of a farmer’s almanac, the distinction between envy that destroys and emulation that builds, and he had given each a goddess.

The thin god of the Iliad

The story that fixed Eris in later memory is not in Homer’s Iliad. There she keeps the older, leaner shape, and Homer’s two images of her are among the sharpest in the poem. She is the sister and companion of Ares, the one divinity who never leaves the field once the killing starts while the other gods withdraw; and she is small at first and then immense. In the fourth book Homer describes how Strife, little when she first rears up, grows until she strides over the earth with her head striking the sky. The picture is a definition. A quarrel begins as nothing — a slight, a word, an uninvited guest — and swells until it fills the world and there is no longer any sky above it that is not strife. This is the same insight the Works and Days made ethical and the Theogony made genealogical, here made visual: conflict has a scale, and the scale is the horror. Homer needs no apple and no wedding. He needs only to show the thing getting larger.

The apple and the war

The episode that made her famous belongs to the lost epic Cypria and the mythographers who came after it. The Cypria, an early poem of the Epic Cycle ascribed in antiquity to Stasinus of Cyprus and composed perhaps in the seventh or sixth century BCE, survives only in fragments and in a prose summary set down by the late-antique scholar Proclus, itself preserved through the Byzantine patriarch Photius. In Proclus’s outline, Zeus plans with Themis to bring about the Trojan war, and at the wedding feast of Peleus and Thetis — the marriage that produced Achilles — Eris arrives and starts a quarrel among Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite over which of the three is most beautiful. At Zeus’s command Hermes leads the goddesses to the Trojan prince Paris on Mount Ida; Paris, promised the most beautiful woman in the world, awards the prize to Aphrodite; and the prize is Helen, whose carrying-off lights the ten-year war.

The Golden Apple of Discord at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, showing Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite disputing the apple — Jacob Jordaens, 1633, Museo del Prado, via Wikimedia Commons (PD-Art / PD-old)

The detail that everyone remembers — Eris uninvited to the wedding, flinging into the company a golden apple inscribed to the fairest — is later than the Cypria itself. The bare summary of Proclus speaks of the dispute, not of the apple; the apple and its provoking inscription are filled in by Roman-era mythographers, among them Hyginus in the Latin Fabulae and Lucian in the second century, who stages the whole quarrel as a comic dialogue. The distinction matters, because the apple is the part the tradition could not do without. A goddess of strife who is merely present at a feast is a footnote; a goddess who, shut out of the one celebration where all the powers are gathered, repays the slight with a single bright object engineered to set the three vainest goddesses at one another’s throats — that is a portrait of strife at the height of its art. The smallest possible cause, the largest possible effect: Homer’s swelling figure told as an anecdote. From this episode descend both the phrase apple of discord and the enduring trope of the petty slight that breeds catastrophe, the wedding that is not so much crashed as weaponized.

It is worth holding the figures of that quarrel apart from their outcomes. The golden apple is the hinge of the whole Trojan cycle, but Eris’s part in it ends the moment the fruit leaves her hand. She does not judge, does not bargain, does not appear before Paris. Her power is exhausted in the act of division; everything after — the bribes the three goddesses offer, the verdict, the abduction of Helen, the thousand ships — is the work of others quarreling over what she set in motion. This is the precise theology of strife. It does not need to win. It needs only to begin.

A goddess without an altar

Eris held no significant cult in the ancient world. There were no great temples to Discord, no festival in her honor, no priesthood; she was a figure of poetry and explanation more than of worship, named where strife had to be accounted for rather than petitioned where it might be courted. This near-absence is itself revealing. The Greeks raised altars to powers they hoped to attract or appease — to Hebe, the bloom of youth, at her sanctuary in Phlius; to Health, to Persuasion, to Harmonia, the joining-together that is strife’s exact opposite and, in the Theban genealogy, the daughter born of Ares and Aphrodite, war reconciled with love. Strife was a power one did not invite. To build her a house would be to ask her in, and the whole of the apple story is what happens when she is left off the guest list. That she is the goddess most defined by exclusion, and the goddess least given a home, is not a coincidence the tradition failed to notice. It is the same fact seen twice.

Order’s equal: the Discordian afterlife

Her most active afterlife is modern and entirely unexpected. In a bowling alley in Whittier, California, around 1958 or 1959 — the founders never could agree on the year, and made the disagreement part of the legend — two young Americans, Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley, conceived a religion with Eris at its center. Hill took the name Malaclypse the Younger and Thornley the name Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, and the tradition they made, Discordianism, holds disorder to be sacred. Its scripture, the Principia Discordia — circulated in a first edition in 1963 and in its best-known form by 1970 — treats chaos not as the enemy of order but as its equal and origin: the undifferentiated ground out of which every imposed pattern is cut, and to which Eris is the standing witness. In its cosmology the human mind divides the seamless flow of reality into the Aneristic illusion of pure order and the Eristic illusion of pure disorder, and both are illusions, screens laid over a chaos that is neither. Eris is reverenced as the power that keeps the screens from hardening, the goddess who throws the apple so that no settlement may be mistaken for the final one.

The Sacred Chao, the central symbol of Discordianism, opposing a pentagon (order) and a golden apple inscribed “kallisti” (chaos) — drawn from material released into the public domain in 1970, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

What makes the movement genuinely strange, and genuinely interesting, is that it declines to choose between being a religion and being a joke. Its adherents describe their own tradition as both a faith and a deliberate refusal to take any faith, including their own, at its solemn estimate — a religion, in the self-mocking formula, disguised as a joke disguised as a religion. Scholars of new religious movements have taken it seriously precisely as a serious parody: not a hoax wearing the mask of devotion, but a real devotion that uses parody as its sacrament, treating laughter as the proper human response to a cosmos whose deepest principle is the one that undoes every arrangement. There are living Discordians. For them Eris is not a relic of the Theogony but a present power, and the contest Hesiod split in two — the strife that wrecks and the strife that makes — is folded back into a single goddess who is honored for both at once, because the wrecking and the making are, on their account, the same motion seen from two sides.

The sources and their afterlives

Eris is a figure assembled from thin, scattered, and unusually precise evidence, and reading her well means keeping the strata apart. The two foundational treatments are Hesiod’s, and they belong to the public domain in the old Loeb translation by Hugh Evelyn-White, who rendered the Theogony, the Works and Days, and the surviving fragments of the Epic Cycle together; the same volume preserves the prose summary of the Cypria by Proclus, where the wedding-quarrel is set down without the apple, and where the gap between the early dispute and the later golden fruit becomes plain to anyone reading the Cypria fragments beside the mythographers. For the source-by-source reconstruction of who says what — the Theogony’s catalog of Night’s children, the doubling of Eris in the Works and Days, the Homeric battlefield figure, and the cycle behind the apple — the standard modern handbook is Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), which lays the variants side by side rather than harmonizing them; M.L. West’s commentary on the Works and Days (Oxford, 1978) remains the close reading of the two-Erides passage, and Walter Burkert’s Greek Religion (1985) situates her among the named powers and daimones who shaped the Greek sense of the world without commanding its temples.

The modern reception is a separate field with its own scholarship. Discordianism has been studied as a genuine new religious movement rather than a mere prank: the profile maintained by the World Religions and Spirituality Project sets out the founding, the editions of the Principia Discordia, and the doctrine of sacred chaos, while Carole Cusack’s article on Discordianism as “liquid religion” makes the case for taking its serious parody seriously — that a faith built on laughter is still a faith, and that Eris is its working theology. David Chidester’s Authentic Fakes (University of California Press, 2005) reads the same material as a chapter in the religious life of American popular culture. Read together, the ancient and the modern literatures describe one continuous problem — how a people gives an honest name to the force that divides it — handled once by a Boeotian farmer-poet and again by two pranksters in a bowling alley.

The dwarf planet Eris (center) and its moon Dysnomia (lower left), imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2006 — NASA, ESA, and M. Brown (Caltech), via Wikimedia Commons (PD-NASA)

Given a world

The line from the daughter of Night to the patron of a twentieth-century disorganized religion is long, and it runs through every age that needed a name for the thing that splits the whole. It reached, at last, beyond the earth. A faint point of light was found beyond the orbit of Neptune in 2005, a body of the far outer system rivaling Pluto in size; the discovery made the old, comfortable count of the planets impossible to defend, and the astronomers were forced to decide in formal session what a planet is. Their answer demoted Pluto and drew a new boundary across the sky, and the world whose finding had compelled the quarrel was named, the following year, for the goddess who throws the thing that no assembly can agree how to share. The figure who began as a force without a temple, who entered the great story only by being shut out of it, was given a world of her own at the edge of the sun’s reach — and the gift arrived in exactly her manner, as a single cold object that obliged a gathering of the learned to fall to arguing over names.

→ Related: Pan · Hebe · Triton · Adonis · Erebos · Hera · Thetis · Helen Of Troy · Zeus · Pluto · Harmonia · Eros