| |
|
I'd be interested in hearing where your Classics prof got that one, Bard... it may well be true, but it's not a version I can nail down. Possibly it's in a scholiast to the Cypria, but it doesn't make a lot of narrative sense - why would Eris punish Peleus and Thetis, when it was Hera's fault. Hera gets what she wants out of the war - the death of Paris and the destruction of Troy.
Tom Tit Tom: Generally, I am a helpful bundle of nice. However, one thing that does irritate me is lazy scholarship, especially *irresponsible* lazy scholarship passed off as knowledge.
although some Greek Myth considers her "Mother of strife" (ie a personification of strife) and others "Mother of Strife" (a separate deity.)
And you're still trying. Which Greek Myth? Where are your sources? And why the capitals? I am going to try to explain this again very slowly to demonstrate why I doubt your contention. "Eris" *means* strife. It is the Ancient Greek word for strife, as "phthonos" is the word for envy, or "deimos" is the word for terror. The Greek myths are not written in fucking English. So, "Eris, mother of strife" would be written as something like "Eris, Eridos mater" - Eris, mother of Eris. Do you understand? So, I see this as you trying to save face. If you can actually come up with a citation, then do so. Otherwise, stop trying to muddy the issue. Accept you were wrong - not "largely" wrong, just wrong - and get over it. Otherwise someone like Rob Frost is just going to believe whatever he has been told last, and is going to end up getting into terrible trouble.
Again, the Hesiod. You're misreading Hesiod in an attempt to make it seem that the person you are correcting is somehow unreliable. It's an ego-saving manoeuvre, and not a useful one. Two Strifes - Erides - one the battle-strife, one the daughter of Nyx that might be translated as "competitive instinct". Since the story of the apple is part of the cyclic epics (the Cypria, in fact), the Strife involved, we can assume, is the sister of Ares. Thus I think apple-Eris-bad we can assume is the *unwanted* Strife on account of the not being wanted at the wedding.
Ancient Greek as a language is highly focused on antithesis. What you have in the Works and Days is:
ouk ara mounon eên Eridôn genos, all' epi gaian
eisi duô: tên men ken epainesseie noêsas+,
hê d' epimômêtê: dia d' andicha thumon echousin.
hê men gar polemon te kakon kai dêrin ophellei,
schetliê: outis tên ge philei brotos, all' hup' anankês
athanatôn boulêisin Erin timôsi bareian.
tên d' heterên proterên men egeinato Nux erebennê...
The "ouk ara mounon" in the first line means "*But* not only" . "All'epi gaian" means "*but* (also) upon the Earth". That is the first balance. The second and third use "men" and "de", which are untranslatable emphasis marks expressing thesis-antithesis, sometimes indicated by "on the one hand... on the other hand"... "ten men"-"he de" (this one/that one) "he men gar" "ten d'heteren" (for this one/but this other one).
Two Erides - and I should point out that this distinction crops up in one piece, and seems forgotten by the Theogony, where Eris is back to being an absolute pain, and a unity, represented as the daughter of Nyx. One might, if one were trying to look at things in a slightly more complex way, see Hesiod in the Works and Days as speaking of divine Eris (war-strife) and human eris (the compulsion to do well in contest with one's peers), which, since it is bordered by the time one has to work and the end of work brought on by the arrival of night, is the child of Chronos and Nyx.
However, that is unnecessarily complex for now, I suspect. So, where's the problem? The problem is that you don't know what you are talking about, and are not ready to accept that, or indeed to use the source texts once you are driven to them as anything other than a figleaf for your previously-displayed complacency. And Eris is a dangerous deity. If you lot don't know the language, the history or the culture of a goddess whose major exploit involved not antlers or rotating bow ties but genocide, how on Earth are you going to worship the nicer, newer Eris safely? |
|
|
