On the occasion of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, all gods of Olympus were invited – all were invited, except Eris, goddess of discord. And although one can argue that discord should really have no place at a wedding, one may at the same time ask oneself whether it is necessarily wise to make her an enemy by not inviting her. You can see that the initial condition for this wedding celebration was already a dilemmatic one.
Eris, understandably enraged, sought to avenge herself by doing what she did best, and so, with a practiced hand, she threw a golden apple between the divine wedding guests, bearing the inscription „to the fairest one“.
What is divine is vain, and so, a fierce dispute immediately broke out about who was rightfully entitled to the apple. It is not known why Artemis, Persephone or Eos, for example, did not make the final cut. Perhaps it is in the nature of every dispute that at some point it simply becomes too stupid for some people, or, to put it more benevolently, they didn’t want to or wouldn’t fit in the negotiated categories.
In any case, in the end, Hera, Zeus’ wife, Athena, head-birth of the father of the gods, and the lovely Aphrodite presented themselves as candidates vying for the favor and distinction of the dubious apple.
Zeus, to whom, as caput tabuli, the decision about the difference of opinion was incumbent, saw himself overtaxed by the fact that the three divine beauties were the wife, the daughter and the adopted daughter and that he did not want to make an enemy of any of the three, went, as is convenient for the chief of the gods, into his role as divine shirker and left the choice to a representative of our kind, a human being.
The one who was to choose between the three goddesses was Paris, son of Priam and Hecabe and prince of Troy, who was not particularly skilled in the art of war (which Menelaus would later teach him – the fact, not the war), but all the more in that of beauty.
Paris chose, at his own discretion, Aphrodite, who had promised him the beautiful Helen as a thank you for the nomination, rejecting – according to his priorities – Hera, who had promised him world domination, and Athena, who had promised him wisdom.
And as a choice, especially an aesthetic one (apart from the fact that it never remains exclusively aesthetic – one can see it in the attempts at bribery) is always one man’s blessing and another man’s ruin (to put it less drastically: to one it seems self-evident, to another inexplicable), Paris, with his decision, threw himself into Helena’s arms and at the same time Troy into its doom. Admittedly, he could not overlook all the consequences of his choice – at least I presume that the sacking of his city and the murder of his family would have made him think again – but that is just the humane thing about the conditio humana, and without that it would be a bit boring on this earth.
The dilemma of the initial situation is given in every decision-making, that of the decision itself is the inevitable result, the dilemma provides the breeding ground for every aesthetic creation, the occasion for the formation of an opinion.
Could Paris have chosen more wisely? Not if Paris had his way, and that is precisely what it was all about. For that is the beauty of a judgment: it does away with the subjunctive, with all ifs and buts, and instead lets an opinion take effect, however well-founded it may be.
Every art work is a judgment about the world.