The Apple of Discord

[Phantasm]

In my amateur mythologist's opinion, the MacGuffin of a story doesn't need stats. It's an apple, or possibly a gold-plated bronze casting of an apple, etched with a phrase. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. :)

If you wanted to give it stats, I'd give it the HT, HP, and DR of a solid item of its size, IT: Homogenous, and most importantly a Reputation. The Reputation of the item is most important; think about the Reputation of other MacGuffins: the Golden Fleece, the Maltese Falcon, the Holy Grail, etc.


If I had to consider the goddesses involved, I'd look at things as such:

Hera, Queen of the Gods, goddess of women and childbirth. Basically, a third-generation fertility goddess (after grandmother Gaia and mother Rhea), but in a human rather than nature sense like her sister Demeter. Hera receiving the apple would in her mind solidify an image of general prosperity, the ability to "be fruitful and multiply." (Interesting to note that Hera is perhaps the one major goddess other than Aphrodite who gave birth to several deific offspring: Ares, Eris, Hephaestus, Hebe, Eileithyia, Enyo (who may or may not be the same as Eris; the myths conflict on that point), and possibly Tython (again, conflicting myths give Tython different mothers). Most other major goddesses only ever gave birth to one deific child, and three goddesses (Hestia, Artemis, and Athene) were affirmed perpetual virgins.

Athena, goddess of wisdom, tactical warfare, and women's crafts. As mentioned above, she is a perpetual virgin. She represented the Achaeans' efforts in the Aegean and the upcoming Trojan War, and her own participation in the contest could be seen as both an admittance that a woman can be beautiful when not in the marital bed, and an attempt to halt the Trojan War before it started. She is often jealous (see the Arachne myth), and may enjoy war a bit too much in The Iliad, but can normally be counted on to keep a level head.

Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, love, passion, and let's face it sex. An import to the Olympian pantheon by way of Cyprus and married to the lame Hephaestus (she literally married into the pantheon from outside it), she may or may not be the Semitic Astarte/Ishtar or Sumerian Inanna, who was just as vain and self-centered, and also a goddess of war; particularly, the goddess of starting wars, a trait Aphrodite seems to have shared with Enyo. (A more mythological origin for Aphrodite is as the child of Ouranos's castrated testicles and the sea, hence her usual Renaissance depiction of an emergence from a seashell among the shore foam. This may have come across by some mythographers not wanting to admit she was an import from their enemy's territory, as Mesopotamia and Phoenicia had come under Persian rule in classical times.) She was held to be the most beautiful, but she was bigger in the Ionian colonies on the western shore of Asia Minor (Turkey), which included the city of Troy, than she was on the Achaean mainland.

And to trigger the Trojan War, which Zeus and the other gods used to thin the heroic bloodlines since the monsters they were meant to fight were mostly no longer around (Scylla and Charybdis notwithstanding), who better than a foreign goddess whispering words of temptation in the ear of an Ionian to take Zeus's own beautiful mortal daughter, Helen, as a prize?