Why I Threw an Apple

The simplistic answer is because I was, rightly, irritated that they didn't invite me to the wedding. Hence I threw the golden apple to cause trouble. And kindly note my superlative success. The resulting squabble between those three stuck-up bitches, Athena, Aphrodite, and Queen bloody Hera, escalated delightfully into a decade-long war. Ah, Troy--those sweet, sweet years, and Paris, that sweet, sweet youth, a morsel as pretty as Helen.

Anyway, yes, I threw the apple to cause trouble, but why an apple? Why not a fig? Or a pomegranate? Or an emerald greener than spring grass etched with the words, te kalliste, for the fairest, fateful and precious?

My reasons were threefold. First, I had one to hand, having earlier purloined it from Hera's tree. Second, being from Hera's tree, I judged it would doubly provoke her. Third, the Moirai will have their way.

The Moirai? Fate's three ancient handmaidens, they who spin destiny with every twitch of their gnarled fingers.

Mount Olympus is not what it once was, the gods demoted to fairy tale. But, acknowledged or not, the Moirai still rule us. And they have never cared for apples.

You doubt me? Consider the tale of Eve and the unspecified forbidden fruit with which she tempted Adam. With a thread shifted here, a snip there, the three Moirai wove the ambiguous Hebraic fruit into its popular depiction as an apple.

Or Isaac Newton, watching the apple fall, what he made of that. Some say he ushered in the Enlightenment. Enlightenment! As if its fruits were all benign.

Or, more recently, take Snow White. Now there's a tale one could unpick: racism, the symbolism of dwarves, the issue of consent. And what does the villainous queen use to poison Snow White? An apple.

So, like many another before me, I plead that the deterministic tyranny of the Moirai was ultimately to blame.

Had they shifted the threads just a little, had sweet Paris sought me out, had he spared me even one admiring, long-lashed, golden look, then matters might have taken quite a different turn.