The Apple of Discord

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by whswhs

In any case, I don't think we need to look to regional ethnic attachments to explain why Aphrodite won. Here we have Paris going on a mission to Greece and bringing home the most beautiful woman in the world, who happens to be another man's wife. Which of the goddesses would have giving him that as a bribe? Probably not Hera, who's the goddess of marriage, and probably not Athena, who's one of the three virgin goddesses and also is the goddess of prudence; it's not in their idiom. But Aphrodite is the goddess of love and beauty and has had more affairs than any other Olympian except Zeus. And she's also the goddess most likely to inspire Helen to forget her home, children, and husband, as Sappho says in one of her surviving poems. Purely in literary terms it's the obvious choice.

It might be more general too. We know enslaving girls from elsewhere was a relatively normal part of the economy of Mycenean palaces (from IIRC palace inventories that list them with the other textile production stuff), and Aphrodite is a war goddess too - this is more obvious in the Near Eastern goddesses, but isn't absent from the Greek side if you don't buy that link - both in her relationship to Ares and in some of her cults - Aphrodite Areia as Sparta for example. It's possible Aphrodite was just generally considered responsible for girl stealing raids, and her patronage of this particular one flowed from that.