Eris: Strife. From an Attic Kylix. Antikenzammlung Berlin. Public Domain.

Prologue

Writing about climate change / chaos in 2025 is like writing fiction or describing Eris / strife. Not that climate chaos is unreal or that weather has changed its anthropogenic acceleration of more violence from physical phenomena, more unpredictable and more punishing. No. Nature is a vast global and cosmic power that does not take orders. From an insect to a human being, any impropriety brings swift punishment. That humans fail to understand nature, is a fact of millennial duration. They think and sometimes act as if they dominate nature. Such behavior is not a mark of wisdom but of hubris and Eris. The Greeks defined hubris as insult, ugly talk and extreme arrogance laced with stupidity. Arrogance triggers war. And Eris / strife is even worse than hubris. Hesiod says Eris was the daughter of Night. Eris gave birth to Ponos / pains, famine, oblivion, sorrows, clashes, battles, quarrels and lies as well as arguments and counter arguments (Theogony 225-230).

Eris / discord even influenced the gods. She convinced Athena, Aphrodite and Hera to claim primacy in beauty. The goddesses did with the Trojan prince Paris choosing Aphrodite for the prize of supreme beauty. Aphrodite won because she promised the most beautiful woman for wife. That spectacular and gorgeous woman was no other than Helen, daughter of Zeus and wife of Menelaos, King of Sparta. Paris visited Sparta and departed with Helen, thus sparking the Trojan War.

Judgement of Paris by Anton Raphael Mengs, c. 1757. Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. Aphrodite, Eros, Hera, Athena and Paris giving the golden apple to Aphrodite. Public Domain

The triumph of Eris / strife

The Greeks knew something about Eris / strife – and the Trojan War. They developed institutions like the Olympics to remind them they were all the same civilized people, speaking Greek and worshipping the same gods. However, Eris, also known as Strife, caused endless strife, including civil wars. Poets like Aeschylos, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes had read Homer and Herodotos and understood the causes of strife. Just like Homer, they wrote anti-war plays. These plays were shown at the theater of Dionysos in Athens and other open-air theaters throughout Greece. Athens in fact paid poor people to attend the theater, which had become a school of free speech and democracy. Plays had a cathartic healing effect.

However, 2,500 years later, we have no theaters of Dionysos nor playwrights like those of fifth-century BCE Athens. Eris / strife reigns supreme at........

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