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-17- | |
"You will find that the State is the kind of | |
organization which, though it does big things | |
badly, does small things badly, too." [Illustration: the | |
-- John Kenneth Galbraith Golden Apple] | |
THE MYTH OF THE APPLE OF DISCORD | |
It seems that Zeus was preparing a wedding banquet for Peleus and | |
Thetis and did not want to invite Eris because of Her reputation as a | |
trouble-maker.* | |
This made Eris angry, and so She fashioned a apple of pure gold** | |
and inscribed upon it KALLISTI, "to the prettiest one," and on the day | |
of the fete She rolled it into the banquet hall and then left to be | |
alone and joyously partake of a hot dog. | |
Now, three of the invited goddesses,*** Athena, Hera, and | |
Aphrodite, each immediately claimed it to belong to herself because of | |
the inscription. And they started fighting, and they started throwing | |
punch all over the place and everything. | |
Finally Zeus calmed things down and declared that an arbitrator | |
must be selected, which was a reasonable suggestion, and all agreed. | |
He sent them to a shepherd of Troy, whose name was Paris because his | |
mother had had a lot of gaul and had married a Frenchman; but each of | |
the sneaky goddesses tried to outwit the others by going early and | |
offering a bribe to Paris. | |
Athena offered him Heroic War Victories, Hera offered him Great | |
Wealth, and Aphrodite offered him The Most Beautiful Woman on Earth. | |
Being a healthy young Trojan lad, Paris promptly accepted Aphrodite's | |
bribe and she got the apple and he got screwed. | |
As she had promised, she maneuvered earthly happenings so that | |
Paris could have Helen (_the_ Helen) then living with her husband | |
Menelaus, King of Sparta. Anyway, everyone knows that the Trojan War | |
followed |