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Golden Apple


Apples feature in a lot of stories and folklore. The most famous one is probably the golden apple that started the Trojan war. Eris, goddess of discord, took a golden apple, wrote "τῇ καλλίστῃ" (to the most beautiful) on it, and threw it into a group of goddesses: Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. They all wanted it, claiming the title of "most beautiful" for themselves, so they had this sort of ancient beauty contest, for lack of a better term.

The judge was a man named Paris, a prince of Troy. Each goddess promised him various things in order to be declared the most beautiful. Aphrodite won. She promised him a woman, Helen, the most beautiful woman of the ancient world. Aphrodite took Helen and gave her to Paris. Whether this was a choice on Helen's part or whether she was taken against her will varies by source.

There was a problem, aside from the obvious issues with kidnapping. Before she was "Helen of Troy", she was "Helen of Sparta", married to the Spartan king, Menelaus, a man of tremendous power and influence. This resulted in Sparta and various other Greek city-states declaring war against Troy and laying siege to the city, ultimately ending in the death of a number of heroes (the Iliad) and in a much later story, the founding of Rome (Aeneid) was also claimed as an indirect result of the war. After Troy fell, the survivors founded what eventually became Rome.

All this over an apple.
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