The Judgment of Paris

At a Glance

• Central figures: Paris, shepherd prince of Troy; Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, who each claimed the golden apple; and Helen of Sparta, whose beauty was Aphrodite’s price.
• Setting: Mount Ida outside Troy, then Sparta; the story belongs to the Greek mythological cycle surrounding the origins of the Trojan War.
• The turn: Zeus refuses to arbitrate the beauty contest between the three goddesses and appoints Paris to judge instead - each goddess then bribes him with a different prize.
• The outcome: Paris chooses Aphrodite and her promise of Helen; he travels to Sparta, takes Helen away, and Menelaus calls the Greek kings to war; the ten-year siege of Troy begins.
• The legacy: The war that followed destroyed Troy, killed Paris, and drove Hera and Athena’s enmity through the entire Greek epic tradition, shaping the Iliad and everything that came after it.

Eris was not invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Every god on Olympus was there - the feast ran long, the wine was good, and nobody wanted the goddess of discord near any of it. She came anyway. She walked in at the height of the celebration and threw a golden apple onto the table, and on the apple were three words: To the Fairest. Then she left. She had done enough.

Hera reached for it. Athena reached for it. Aphrodite reached for it. None of them let go. Zeus, watching three of the most formidable beings in existence argue over a piece of fruit at his brother’s wedding feast, made the only reasonable decision available to him: he refused to judge. He sent the three of them to Mount Ida, outside the walls of Troy, and told them a mortal would decide.

The Shepherd on the Mountain

Paris did not know he was a prince. His parents, King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, had received a prophecy before he was born: the child Hecuba carried would bring their city to ruin. When the boy arrived they gave him to a shepherd on the slopes of Mount Ida, and the shepherd raised him among flocks and open hillsides, and Paris grew up knowing nothing of palaces or thrones or the particular weight of a crown.

He had a reputation, even there, for settling disputes fairly. A good judge of livestock. A good judge of most things. This was why Zeus chose him - or so Hermes explained, when the messenger god appeared on the mountain with three goddesses at his back and a task that no sensible man would want.

Hermes laid it out plainly. Paris was to look at Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite and choose the most beautiful. The apple would go to the winner. Paris looked at the three of them standing on his mountain and understood, probably, that there was no version of this that ended well for him.

Three Promises

The goddesses were not interested in a fair judgment. Hera spoke first. She offered Paris dominion - all of Asia under his rule, wealth sufficient to make Croesus look modest, a kingdom that would answer to him and no one else. The offer was calibrated for a man who had grown up in obscurity and might hunger for exactly that.

Athena offered something different. Grey-eyed Athena, daughter of Zeus, goddess of warfare and strategy, promised him that he would never lose in battle. Unrivaled martial skill. Unrivaled wisdom. The finest warrior in the world, and the wits to use that strength. For a man who would have to fight eventually - and in that age, every man fought eventually - this was not a small thing.

Aphrodite waited for them both to finish. Then she told Paris about Helen.

Helen, queen of Sparta, wife of Menelaus - the most beautiful woman alive. Aphrodite would arrange it. Paris would have her. The shepherd prince listened, and made his choice.

He handed the apple to Aphrodite.

Hera and Athena turned and walked back toward Olympus. They said very little. They did not need to. The hatred they carried down from that mountain would take ten years and the lives of thousands to exhaust, and it would not be fully spent even then.

Helen in Troy

Paris traveled to Sparta. He came as a guest of Menelaus, which meant xenia - the sacred laws of hospitality - bound both men to each other. Menelaus fed him, sheltered him, treated him as a friend. Then Menelaus was called away to Crete for a funeral.

What happened next depends on which account you believe. Some said Helen was taken by force, carried off before she could resist. Others said Aphrodite had been at work on Helen’s heart from the moment Paris arrived, and that she left willingly, and brought a good portion of the Spartan treasury with her. What is not disputed is that when Menelaus returned from Crete, his wife and his guest were both gone.

He went to his brother Agamemnon of Mycenae. Agamemnon went to the other Greek kings. The oath mattered here - Helen had been the most sought-after bride in Hellas, and when her father Tyndareus chose Menelaus, he had made all her other suitors swear to defend the man she married. They had sworn. Now Menelaus called them to their oath, and the ships began to gather at Aulis.

The War the Apple Made

The force that assembled was extraordinary - Achilles, swift-footed and nearly invulnerable, brought by his mother Thetis and destined not to see home again; Odysseus of Ithaca, who had tried to avoid the whole thing and failed; Ajax, who carried the shield; Diomedes; Nestor; the long catalog of names that Homer would eventually carry across twenty-four books. They crossed the Aegean and made camp on the plain of Ilium and began the siege that would define the age.

Aphrodite fought for Troy. Apollo and Artemis fought for Troy. Hera and Athena fought for the Greeks with a relentlessness that made the other Olympians nervous - not grief exactly, not grief the way mortals feel it, but something cold and permanent that drove them to intervene at every turning point, to pull their favorites back from death and push Trojan heroes toward it.

Paris himself fought from behind walls when he could. Achilles killed his brother Hector. Apollo guided the arrow that killed Achilles. The war ground on across the plain while the gods moved above it like pieces on a board.

Troy fell in the tenth year. The wooden horse, the night assault, the fires visible from the Aegean. Priam died at his own altar. The prophecy that had made him abandon his son on a mountain came true in the worst possible way - though Paris himself did not live to see the final collapse. He was dead by then, killed by an arrow, the city falling around him.

The apple still lay somewhere in Aphrodite’s possession, presumably. The fairest. She had won it, and the world had paid her price.