Fantastic Metropolis

When the mortal Peleus married the sea-goddess Thetis, all the other gods attended the wedding and brought gifts, except, that is, for the unpopular Eris (Strife.) She was not invited, but appeared nevertheless and out of spite threw into the gathering a golden apple (the ‘Apple of Discord’) inscribed with the words ‘for the fairest.’ The three goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite all claimed it, and to settle the dispute Zeus told Hermes to take them to Paris, the son of King Priam of Troy, who was tending flocks on Mount Ida, and to let him decide between them. They all offered bribes: Hera offered him imperial power, Athena victory in battle, and Aphrodite the love of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. Paris awarded the apple to Aphrodite, and as his reward, during a visit to Sparta, he won the love of Helen and carried her off to Troy. Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon led a vast Greek force to Troy to regain Helen, and this was the beginning of the ten year long Trojan War during which the three goddesses took sides: Aphrodite naturally supported Paris and the Trojans, while the rejected Hera and Athena never forgave Paris and were staunch upholders of the Greek cause.

—Jenny March, Cassell’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology

Let us bend our minds to disentangle the complicated webbing that forms the myth Schliemann claimed to believe was literally a true story to some degree. First, of course we have the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the Argonaut and the goddess who he had won by wrestling with her while she shifted shapes (much like Proteus, Thetis the sea-goddess could control her form) and who would sire Achilles, the doomed and wrathful hero of the Iliad who would wreak so much havoc at Troy. Then we have the appearance of Eris and the Apple of Discord, which would of course lead to the Judgment of Paris itself, wherein Paris awards Aphrodite (and one should point out both that Aphrodite is the mother of Aeneas, one of the greatest of Troy’s heroes and the one who would survive the war and go on to found Alba Longa, the roots of Rome, according to Virgil’s Aeneid, so it’s possible that Paris would have naturally favored Aphrodite anyway, being that she was the mother of his cousin) and thus earned the enmity of Hera the wife of Zeus and Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war. In fact, one must wonder why Zeus chose Paris to make the judgment in the first place: it’s almost as though he knew that whoever made that decision would end up the poorer for it, and so chose someone he didn’t mind seeing get screwed over. Troy had already been sacked once by Heracles, Zeus’ son, so it’s quite possible that Zeus just plain didn’t like the place: in addition, the gods Apollo and Poseidon built Troy’s walls as punishment for daring to rebel against Zeus… but they did so alongside the mortal Aeacus, so as to ensure that the city would still fall rather than being impregnable. Why would Zeus deliberately send gods to build the walls of Troy yet not want them to be walls built by gods? Was it merely because he wanted his son Heracles to gain the horses once granted in exchange for the love of Ganymede? Laomedon’s treachery towards Apollo, Poseidon and Heracles would not only lead to his death, but to Priam’s ascension to the throne of Troy… and thus the reign of the last king of that great Asian city. (Asia here being Asia Minor, which to the ancient Greeks was Asia itself.) Was Eris’ Apple an unexpected attempt at divine division that Zeus merely decided to take advantage of or rather a deliberate part of his plan to mold the ancient Danaans (shades of the people of the goddess Danu, the Tuatha de Dannan), Argives and Achaeans into a civilization?

It’s interesting to note that the ancient Hattusan empire known today as Hittite was more or less the direct master of much of Asia Minor at this time, and the culture of the Hattusans was influenced by her neighbors to the east in Phoenicia and Akkadia. The resemblance between Aphrodite and Ishtar/Innana makes me wonder if perhaps a cult center sacred to Innana thrived in Troy itself. Since we know that Pelops (son of Tantalus) came from the region now known as Lydia, it’s possible that his descendants in Mycenae and the rest of the Peloponnese held a grudge against their rivals in Troy itself. (Since both the Hattusans and the proto-Greek Dananns, Acheaeans and Argives were Indo-European in language and religion, such cultural contact was less difficult than it otherwise would be… as would be illustrated later, when the Dorians, another Indo-European tribe, would sweep downward into Greece during the chaos that was soon to sweep the Mediterranean.) Was this war a battle of Mycenaean vs. Hattusan imperial interests as much as it was a massive woman-stealing raid gone wrong? If you prefer your mythology as a metaphor, then the Apple of Discord sowed at the wedding could well be explained as a battle between the cults of Pallas Athenae and Hera in their older form and that of Innana, a battle between Greek and Asian interests. Even if you are comfortable imagining a war in which the gods felt no difficulty choosing sides and taking part, Eris’ Apple was more than a mere prop to vanity: in short order would come the theft of Helen, the war at Troy, the destabilization of both Greece and Asia which would lead to the death of Agamemnon and the collapse of Mycenae, the fall of the Hattusan Empire, and wave after wave of barbarian invasions. Clearly, Eris knew how to instigate some strife, and if we consider that Aphrodite’s influence over Paris may well have led to the loss of her cult center and a need for her to become more dependent on the protection of Zeus as an alien element in the Olympian pantheon (as well as a loss of her warlike aspects… Innana being a goddess of love and war… to Pallas Athenae).