Judgement of Paris

For the famous wine-tasting event known as "The Judgment of Paris", see Paris Wine Tasting of 1976

The Judgment of Paris is a story from Greek mythology, in which the legendary roots of the Trojan War can be found. As with many mythological tales, details vary depending on the source. The story is casually referred to by Homer (Iliad, XXIV, 25–30) as a mythic element with which his hearers were well familiar, and it was elaborated in Kypria, a lost work of the Trojan War cycle, of which only fragments remain. It is told in more detail by Ovid (Heroides xvi.71ff, 149–152 and v.35f), Lucian (Dialogues of the Gods 20), and Hyginus (Fabulae 92), all of whom are late and have skeptical, ironic or popularizing agendas. But it appeared wordlessly on the ivory and gold votive chest of the 7th-century tyrant Kypselos at Olympia, which was described by Pausanias as showing

"Hermes bringing to Alexandros the son of Priamos the goddesses of whose beauty he is to judge, the inscription on them being: 'Here is Hermes, who is showing to Alexandros, that he may arbitrate concerning their beauty, Hera, Athena and Aphrodite." (Description of Greece, LXV.9.5).

The subject was favoured by painters of Red-figure pottery as early as the 6th century (e.g. Kerenyi, fig. 68).

The story

It is recounted that Zeus held a banquet in celebration of the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. However, Eris, goddess of discord, was uninvited. Angered by this snub, Eris arrived at the celebration, where she threw a golden apple (the Apple of Discord) into the proceedings, upon which was the inscription καλλίστῃ ("for the fairest one").

Three goddesses claimed the apple: Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. They asked Zeus to judge which of them was fairest, and eventually Zeus, reluctant to favor any claim himself, declared that Paris, a Phrygian mortal, would judge their cases, for he had recently shown his exemplary fairness in a contest in which Ares in bull form had bested Paris's own prize bull and the shepherd-prince had unhesitatingly awarded the prize to the god (see Paris).

Thus it happened that with Hermes as their guide all three of the candidates appeared to Paris on Mount Ida, in the climactic moment that is the crux of the tale. After bathing in the spring of Ida, each attempted with her powers to bribe Paris; Hera offered to make him king of Europe and Asia, Athena offered wisdom and skill in war, and Aphrodite, who had the Charites and the Horai to enhance her charms with flowers and song (according to a fragment of Kypria quoted by Athenagoras), offered the love of the world's most beautiful woman (Euripides, Andromache, l.284, Helena l. 676). This was Helen of Sparta, wife of the Greek king Menelaus. Paris accepted Aphrodite's gift and awarded the apple to her, receiving Helen as well as the enmity of the Greeks and especially of Hera. The Greeks' expedition to retrieve Helen from Paris in Troy is the mythological basis of the Trojan War. (For a more complete history of Paris, see Paris.)

Seen purely as a story, such as is recounted in Bulfinch's Mythology, the Judgment of Paris is simply an amoral episode in which Paris' skill for sound judgment (for which the gods approved him) is overcome by appeals to his lust; thus a lengthy and blood-soaked war revolves upon a series of apparently trivial episodes, each adding to the inertia that drives events to their inevitable and tragic conclusions.

Alternatively, the narrative can be seen as a rationalized series of episodic causes and consequences that has been developed to embed within a human timeframe, and to explain, a moment of epiphany that occurs in a suspended moment out of time that artists endeavor to recapture in an icon (ilustration): a blissfully fortunate mortal is confronted by a trinity of goddesses and a transcendent gift, the "apple", is exchanged. The story appears to be the result of an interpretation of an archaic iconic image representing such an ecstatic moment, which logically must have preceded the narrative invented to explicate it.

In the archaic prototypical stories antedating the Judgment of Paris, the gift is imparted by the deity, like the pomegranate that the Goddess offers on Minoan seal-impressions, with the mortal the recipient. As such, the classic telling of the Judgment of Paris is an example of mythic inversion, in which the apple becomes his to award.

The mytheme of the Judgment of Paris naturally offered artists the opportunity to portray three ideally lovely women in undress, as a sort of beauty contest, but the myth, at least since Euripides, rather concerns a choice among the gifts that each goddess embodies: a subtext of the bribery involved is ironic, and a late ingredient.

In each allusion to the Judgment of Paris or narrative account, an aspect of Paris' sojourn as a shepherd-exile that is never linked to the explication of the central moment is his connection with the nurturing nymph of Mount Ida, Oenone.

Kallisti

Kallisti is the word from the Greek language inscribed on the Golden Apple of Discord by Eris. In Greek, the word is καλλίστῃ (the dative singular of the feminine superlative of καλος, beautiful). Its meaning comes out to be "to the fairest one" or "to the prettiest".

Use in Discordianism

The word Kallisti written on a golden apple, has become a principal symbol of Discordianism, a modern religion. In non-philological texts (such as Discordian ones) the word is usually spelled as καλλιστι. Most versions of Principia Discordia actually spell it as καλλιχτι, but this is definitely incorrect; in the afterword of the 1979 Loompanics edition of Principia, Gregory Hill says that was because on the IBM typewriter he used, not all Greek letters coincided with Latin ones, and he didn't know enough of the letters to spot the mistake.

Other uses

Kallisti (Καλλίστη) is also an ancient name of Santorini.

Dramatizations

The Judgment of Paris was burlesqued to great effect in the 1954 musical The Golden Apple. In it, the three goddesses have been reduced to three town biddies in smalltown Washington state. They ask Paris, a travelling salesman, to judge the cakes they have made for the church social. Each woman (the mayor's wife, the schoolmarm, and the matchmaker) makes appeals to Paris who chooses the matchmaker. The matchmaker, in turn, sets him up with Helen, the town floozy. And she runs off with him.

External links

Reference

Kerenyi, Karl, 1959. The Heroes of the Greeks, vii: "The Prelude to the Trojan War"

Discordianism | Greek mythology | Trojan War

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