The Apple of Discord

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

I'm with Bill on this. I'm also not a fan of saying "everything must have stats"; that way lies AD&D and gods who could be killed by parties nowhere near the peak of their potential. Eris' golden apple was a plot device, not a collection of numbers.

Possibly even a later plot device. The oldest surviving reference to this myth (two lines about a page into Book 24 of the Illiad) doesn't mention the setup story, just Paris humiliating two goddesses by preferring the bribe offered by the third, with no mention of the apple (or Eris for that matter). One assumes this was a story well known to the audience of the Illiad, or it wouldn't be that casual a reference, but with more than half a millennium for the details to have changed before there are any other sources, which conflict anyway, who knows what they thought the story was.