Eris

Also Known As: Greek Ἔρις, “strife” or “discord”; identified by Latin writers with Discordia, an equation that dates from the Roman reading of Greek myth rather than from any cult of her own
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She grows physically larger as a quarrel spreads, beginning small enough to overlook and ending with her head in the sky.
Role in Mythos: She begins conflicts she does not fight in, most consequentially the dispute among three goddesses that led to the Trojan War.
Relation to Humans: Hesiod says there are two of her, and that one of the two is good for people, driving a man to work because his neighbour is prospering. No temple, festival or priesthood of hers survives in the record, which is unusual for a deity this often named.

On the plain at Troy she starts out small enough to miss. Homer gives her a crest that rears only a little at first, the way water lifts before it means anything, and then her head is fixed in heaven while her feet are still walking on the earth. By that point the shouting has spread down the whole line and the bronze is moving. She has not struck anybody. She is the reason everyone else is striking.

Hesiod puts her among the children Night bore with no father involved, in the same stretch of the Theogony that produces Doom, Death, Sleep and the tribe of Dreams. Her own offspring read like an inventory of everything that can go wrong between two people who have to live near each other. Toil and Forgetting. Starvation and the Pains. The Fightings and the Battles, the Murders and the Manslaughters. Quarrels, Lies, Disputes. Lawlessness and Ruin, and then, last of the list and set slightly apart from it, Oath, who troubles men more than any of his siblings whenever somebody swears falsely on purpose.

It is a bleak family and it would be a dull entry if that were all of it. It is not. Hesiod wrote a second poem and opened it by correcting the first one.

The Works and Days begins by saying, more or less directly, that he had got this wrong. There was never only one Eris. There are two, and they are not two aspects of a thing but two different beings with opposite effects. One of them fosters war and killing, and nobody loves her; men honour her only because the gods make them. The other is the elder daughter of Night, and Zeus put her down in the roots of the earth, and she is far kinder. She is the one who stirs up a man with no appetite for work, because he looks over the fence at a richer neighbour hurrying to plough and plant and get his house in order, and something in him gets up off the step. Potter is angry with potter and craftsman with craftsman. Beggar is jealous of beggar and singer of singer. Hesiod says plainly that this one is better for men.

That is not what anybody expects from a goddess of discord, and it is the most interesting thing about her. The Greeks had a word for the thing that makes you resent your neighbour’s new roof and go and fix your own, and the word they used for it was the same word they used for the thing that burns a city down.

The city it burned down was Troy, and the way it started is worth getting right, because the version everyone knows is later than the version that survives first. The summary of the lost epic Cypria says that Eris, attending the feast of the gods at the wedding of Peleus, provoked a quarrel among Athena, Hera and Aphrodite about which of them was the most beautiful. That is the whole of it. There is no apple in that sentence. The apple arrives centuries afterwards in the mythographers: Apollodorus has her throw one to the goddesses, and Hyginus, who is the reason we picture her outside a shut door, has her barred from the wedding and pitching it in through the doorway from the dark. The detail that made her famous is the one the epic did not need. A quarrel about beauty among three goddesses who had all been drinking was quite sufficient without a prop.

She was at the fighting she caused, and she stayed for it. In the eleventh book of the Iliad the other gods withdraw and sit apart, resenting Zeus for handing the day to the Trojans, and Eris alone is still on the field, taking pleasure in the noise of men being killed. Homer twice pairs her with Ares as his sister and his companion, which is a precise piece of casting: the god does the violence and she does the falling-out that arranges it. Elsewhere she goes among the Achaeans and puts strength into their hearts, and the effect is indistinguishable from courage.

Her powers are all consequences of that shape. She escalates: the growth is not a costume change but the mechanism, since the more people join a quarrel the larger a quarrel becomes, and Homer simply made that visible. She works exclusively through other people’s hands, which means there is no defending against her directly. Her children do the actual damage, and they are inherited rather than summoned, so a household that has taken on Lies and Disputes tends to find that Ruin has moved in behind them without being invited.

Her limits are the same fact seen from the other side. She never finishes anything, because finishing is not in her; Aeschylus has a line about Eris being the last of the gods to close an argument, and closing arguments is precisely what she cannot do. She has no cult worth the name. For a goddess named this often across this many centuries she is almost absent from the practical religion of it, with no temple to visit and no offering that buys her off, because there is no version of the transaction where she is satisfied. And she has that one strange vulnerability that Hesiod found: the same force, aimed at a field instead of a neighbour, turns into work. The Greeks did not think discord could be destroyed. They thought it could be put to use.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Eris in Greek mythology?

Eris is the Greek goddess of strife and discord, born of Night without a father according to Hesiod’s Theogony. She starts conflicts rather than fighting them herself, and Homer describes her growing physically larger as a quarrel spreads, beginning small and ending with her head in the sky. Her children include Quarrels, Lies, Lawlessness and Ruin.

Did Eris really throw a golden apple at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis?

Not in the earliest surviving account. The summary of the lost epic Cypria says only that Eris provoked a dispute among Athena, Hera and Aphrodite about beauty at the wedding feast, with no apple mentioned at all. The apple appears centuries later in the mythographers Apollodorus and Hyginus, and it is Hyginus who adds the detail that Eris had been shut out of the wedding.

Why are there two goddesses called Eris?

Because Hesiod changed his mind. Having listed a single destructive Eris in the Theogony, he opened the Works and Days by saying there are in fact two: one who fosters war and killing, and an elder one whom Zeus set in the roots of the earth, who drives people to work by making them envious of a prospering neighbour. Hesiod states outright that the second is better for people.

Is Eris the same as the Roman Discordia?

Latin writers identified the two, and Hyginus tells the wedding story under the name Discordia. The identification belongs to the Roman habit of matching Greek deities to Latin names rather than to any independent Roman cult, and there is no meaningful body of Roman worship of Discordia to set beside the Greek material.

What is Eris the goddess of, besides war?

Competition. Hesiod’s second Eris governs the rivalry between people doing the same job, which he illustrates with potters resenting potters, craftsmen resenting craftsmen, and beggars and singers envying their own kind. In that form she is the force that gets an idle man out of his doorway and into his field.