The golden apple: fruit of rivalry, seduction and desire

In Greek mythology the apple appears at moments when love becomes entangled with rivalry, deception and fate. It is the prize for beauty that sparks the Trojan War, the bait that lets a young man win his bride, the gift with which a feeling was declared. Later, in the Western Christian tradition, it came to be identified with the forbidden fruit of Eden, adding the theme of temptation to the symbol.

The apple of discord

According to the myth, all the gods were invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis except Eris, Discord. Offended, the goddess threw among the guests a golden apple inscribed “to the fairest”. Hera, Athena and Aphrodite competed for it, and Zeus entrusted the choice to the young Paris, a Trojan prince. Each promised him a gift: Aphrodite offered him the love of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, and won the apple.

The Judgement of Paris had immense consequences. Helen was already the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, and her abduction provoked the Trojan War. The scene of the judgement became one of the favourite subjects of European art, from Greek vases to paintings by Rubens and Lucas Cranach, who returned to it several times, emphasising the apple in the hands of the young shepherd.

Atalanta and Hippomenes

Another famous story is told by Ovid in the tenth book of the Metamorphoses. Atalanta, extremely swift at running, agreed to marry only a man who could beat her in a race, while the losers were put to death. The young Hippomenes asked Venus for help, and she gave him three golden apples picked in her garden at Tamasus, on Cyprus. During the race Hippomenes dropped them one after another, and Atalanta stopped to pick them up, losing the race.

The two married, but Hippomenes forgot to thank Venus. According to Ovid's account, the couple then profaned a sanctuary and were turned into a pair of lions destined to draw the chariot of the goddess Cybele. The myth shows the double face of the apple: an instrument of seduction and union, but also a promise that demands gratitude.

Throwing an apple

In ancient Greece throwing an apple at someone could be a declaration of love, and catching it meant accepting. Traces of this survive in Aristophanes and in bucolic poets such as Theocritus. An epigram in the Palatine Anthology, traditionally attributed to Plato, opens with this very gesture: “I throw the apple at you”, says the poet, asking the beloved to take it if she returns his feeling.

Eve and the Latin pun

Genesis does not say what the fruit of the tree of knowledge was. Its identification with the apple took hold in the Latin West, perhaps helped by the similarity between malum, apple, and malum, evil. In Albrecht Dürer's engraving of Adam and Eve, of 1504, Eve holds the fruit quite naturally, and from then on the apple also became the fruit of temptation and forbidden desire.

From Eris's golden apple to those dropped by Hippomenes, from the Greek epigram to the fruit of Eden, the apple has united love, beauty and unforeseen consequences over time. It is an ambivalent symbol, reminding us that seduction can lead as easily to happy marriages as to ruinous quarrels. It is no accident that the golden fruit has remained, to this day, the image of a coveted and dangerous prize.