What is the apple of discord?

What the phrase means

Call something an apple of discord and you mean the one prize or problem that turns allies into rivals: an inheritance, a promotion, the last word on a family recipe. English also says bone of contention. The phrase points back to a quarrel over a title only one could win: three goddesses, one prize, and a judge who could not choose without making two enemies.

Strife at the wedding

The oldest version is a prose summary of the Cypria, a lost epic about how the war began, preserved by the scholar Proclus. The gods are feasting at the marriage of the mortal king Peleus and the sea goddess Thetis when Strife arrives and sets Hera, Athena and Aphrodite arguing over which is the fairest. That is all. There is no fruit, no inscription and no snub. Homer knows the wedding, too: in Iliad 24, Hera reminds the other gods that they all came to it. He alludes to the contest only once, saying that Hera and Athena never forgave Paris for “disdaining the goddesses who came to him when he was in his sheepyards” (Iliad 24.29–30, Butler).

How the apple grew

The famous prop arrived later. Apollodorus, writing a handbook of myths under the Roman Empire, says Strife threw an apple as a prize of beauty (Epitome 3.2). In other retellings it is golden and carries a label, usually given in Greek as tēi kallistēi, “for the fairest.” Other writers explained why she came at all: she had been left off the guest list. Each retelling made the cause more concrete, and the apple is what painters and proverbs kept.

The judgment of Paris

Zeus would not judge the contest himself: one contestant was his wife, and Homer calls the other two his daughters (Hesiod gives Aphrodite another birth, told in how was Aphrodite born?). The Cypria line, in Evelyn-White’s translation:

The three are led by Hermes at the command of Zeus to Alexandrus on Mount Ida for his decision, and Alexandrus, lured by his promised marriage with Helen, decides in favour of Aphrodite.

Alexandrus is Paris, a son of King Priam of Troy. Apollodorus explains why a prince was herding cattle: before he was born, his mother Hecuba dreamed she gave birth to a firebrand that set the city ablaze, so the baby was left on Ida, where a she-bear nursed him for five days until the servant Agelaus took him home and raised him (Library 3.12.5). Each goddess offered a bribe:

• Hera: a kingdom over all men.
• Athena: victory in war.
• Aphrodite: the most beautiful woman alive, Helen of Sparta, already the wife of Menelaus.

What the choice cost

Paris took Aphrodite’s offer. Hera and Athena became Troy’s enemies, and through the whole Iliad they fight for the Greeks. What followed is told in what started the Trojan War? and in who was Helen of Troy? Artists never tired of the scene, from an Athenian vase painter around 465 BC to Rubens, and the apple outlived them all as a phrase.