Eris Mythology

When Hesiod lists the children that Night (Nyx) bore without a father, he names Eris among them. He then lists the children of Eris herself: Ponos (toil), Lethe (forgetting), Limos (famine), Algea (pains), battles, quarrels, lies, Dysnomia (lawlessness), Ate (ruin) and Horkos (oath). This lineage presents Eris as the mother of the troubles in human life. Eris in the Greek family tree →

At the opening of Works and Days, Hesiod says that there is not one Eris on earth but two. One fosters war and contention, and nobody loves her. The other is the elder daughter of Night, and Zeus set her in the roots of the earth. This second Eris drives even the idle man to work, because a man who sees his neighbour growing rich sets to work himself.

Hesiod describes the good Eris through examples. The potter envies the potter, the carpenter the carpenter, the beggar the beggar and the singer the singer. This kind of envy does not destroy but produces. The passage on this side of Eris is the oldest Greek text to say that strife is not always bad.

In the fourth book of the Iliad, Homer introduces Eris as the sister and companion of Ares. She starts small, and then her head strikes the sky while her feet still walk on the earth. Homer uses this image to show how a quarrel grows from a small word until it draws everyone in. Ares on the Mars page →

In the eleventh book of the Iliad, Zeus sends Eris to the Achaean ships with the portent of war in her hands. Eris climbs onto the ship of Odysseus, which stands in the middle of the line, and gives a great cry. The cry makes war seem sweeter to the Achaeans than going home.

In the battle scene on the shield that Hephaestus made for Achilles, Eris moves among the fighters together with Kydoimos (tumult) and Ker (death). Here Homer shows Eris as a personified force, as one of the figures inside the battle.

According to the summary of the lost epic Cypria preserved by Proclus, Eris starts a quarrel over beauty among Hera, Athena and Aphrodite at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Zeus then tells Hermes to take the goddesses to Alexandros (Paris) on Mount Ida. This summary does not mention an apple.

In the Epitome of Apollodorus (3.2) the apple appears as an object that Eris throws to the goddesses as a prize for beauty. Hyginus (Fabulae 92) writes that Eris was not invited to the wedding, threw the apple through the door and said that the fairest should take it. Lucian also mentions the inscription on the apple, and Colluthus links the apple to the garden of the Hesperides. The best known details of the story are therefore found not in the oldest source but in later ones. Aphrodite on the Venus page →

The goddesses appear before Paris on Mount Ida. Hera promises him sovereignty, Athena promises victory in war, and Aphrodite promises Helen. Paris chooses Aphrodite and carries Helen off from Sparta. Homer recalls this judgement only once, in the last book of the Iliad, and does not name Eris.

Ate is blindness and ruin. Hesiod makes her a daughter of Eris. Homer, in the nineteenth book of the Iliad, calls Ate the eldest daughter of Zeus and tells how Zeus seized her by the hair and threw her from the sky. The two sources give the same figure different parents, and both versions were in use in antiquity. Ate in the family tree →

Dysnomia is one of the daughters of Eris in Hesiod's list, and her name means bad order or lawlessness. Her opposite is Eunomia, good order. The moon of the dwarf planet, found in 2005, was given this name.

Hesiod ends the list of the children of Eris with Horkos and says that he is the power that does most harm to those who knowingly swear false oaths. Works and Days says that the Erinyes assisted at the birth of Horkos on the fifth day of the month. Some linguists connect the name of Orcus, the Roman god of the underworld, with Horkos, but the connection is disputed. Orcus page →

In Rome the counterpart of Eris is Discordia. In the sixth book of the Aeneid, Virgil places her at the entrance to the underworld with her snake hair bound in bloody ribbons. In the eighth book she moves through the middle of the battle of Actium on the shield of Aeneas, wearing a torn cloak.

Heraclitus of Ephesus writes that war is common to all, that justice is strife (eris), and that all things come into being through strife and necessity. This sentence turns Eris from a goddess into a principle that explains how the cosmos works.

The half-humorous Principia Discordia, written in the 1960s by Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley, started the movement called Discordianism, which makes Eris its chief goddess. The five-fingered 'Hand of Eris' is a symbol drawn in that text. When the dwarf planet was named, this symbol came into use as its sign.

Until an official name was given, the discovery team informally called the object 'Xena'. Once it emerged that Eris might be larger than Pluto, people debated whether it should count as the tenth planet. On 24 August 2006 the International Astronomical Union defined a planet, and Pluto and Eris became dwarf planets. The name alludes to that debate.

In 2007 the astrologer Henry Seltzer proposed a second glyph for Eris, and in 2015 he interpreted Eris in his book 'The Tenth Planet'. This interpretation is a personal modern reading, and no tradition shared and accepted among astrologers has formed. It has no connection with the classical system of dignities.