Notes

The story begins with the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, none of which are ever really mentioned in Greek mythology because the only thing they did was give birth to Achilles, the Trojan War hero from the Iliad. Peleus was the son of a son of a god, but that God was Zeus, and his father was Heracles, now survived as the Roman god Hercules. Unfortunately, Peleus didn't do anything cool or important or appropriate, so next up is Thetis, one of the fifty daughters of the sea. She didn't do anything either. Sorry. In fact, she was so boring and unworshipped that only one record of worship to her has ever been found in the history of archaeology. So Miss 49-Other-Sisters-And-Judgemental along with Mr.-My-Family-Actually-Did-Something-With-Their-Lives get married, and they have a celebration (or Zeus holds one, it's never really clear if he has a hand, or forces the nymph to marry Peleus,or if he's just judgemental of their relatively happy marriage against his relatively not, which I guess is a problem but it's not mine because I have three minutes). So, continuing down the aisle of bottled-up rage, we have a marriage with invitations for all the Olympian gods but Eris, the goddess of discord. They wanted the ceremony to be happy, and discord is not, sooooo.... yeah. As the name suggests, she gets really angry and decides to stir the pot through throwing in a golden apple that she stole and writing for the fairest on it. Hera (queen of the gods), Athena (goddess of wisdom), and Aphrodite (goddess of love) all go for the apple and begin to verbally slap each other around for the apple, ignoring the fact that you know there's a wedding going on and everything. They get frustrated, crash the wedding, and get Zeus to judge which one of them should have the apple, despite all of them probably having better things to do then fight over an apple cuz they're gods, but Zeus, valuing his friendship and relatively not marriage with Hera decides it would be best to just slowly fade out of the wedding. Side note: even though Hera is the queen of the gods and mothership and all that jazz, don't let that fool you; she's not Mother Mary, think Mellie Grant. Ok, Zeus does not want to be a part of this burning bridges thing and is basically like, "Hey, that goat herder farmer dude looks trusworthy, ask him!" and runs the heck out of there. So the lion tiger and bear go down to troy and sees Paris tending sheep on his farm. They immediately realize that neither of them have any chance of winning and decide to begin with bribes. yay. Hera offers to make Paris king of the world, Athena offers him skill in battle, and Aphrodite offers the hand of the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris accepts Aphrodite's gift, being a goat farmer and all, and is given instructions on how to kidnap Helen of Sparta, the wife of menelaus. The other two goddesses hate him now, and start yelling about how they're gonna kill him. And thus begins the Trojan War.