During the sack of Troy, having danced with the others around the wooden Horse and now lying gored in Priam’s palace, Paris had a vision in which he relived his Judgement on the slopes of Ida.
All three goddesses showed up, and he found himself a young man with the apple in his hand again. The three goddesses offered him what they had offered him the last time: Athena, military success; Hera, rulership and majesty; Aphrodite, sexual satisfaction. Paris remembered the mistake he had made last time.
I can’t possibly judge how good a woman looks, he insisted, until I see what she looks like when she’s chewing.
Each goddess in turn bit into the apple as attractively as she could. Hera took a queenly mouthful and chewed with her mouth closed; Athena bared her teeth for the bite and chewed it heartily; Aphrodite ate her portion in slow motion, with hooded eyes, periodically licking her lips. Paris took back the apple and pointed out that he had just successfully given the apple to all three, and they should be generous with him and refrain from cursing him.
The goddesses were delighted with his clever solution. Aphrodite told him she would give him Helen, but Paris told her that would only cause the Argives to sack Troy. Athena said that he needn’t fear—she would favor him throughout the war, keeping him out of battle most of the time and letting people think him a coward; only the luckiest soldiers, she explained, got to stay clear of combat entirely. But when the time came, she would let Paris, and Paris alone, take down the greatest Greek warrior; it would be Paris’s arrow that struck Achilles in the heel. Paris shook his head in anguish and insisted that Achilles’s death would not keep Troy from being sacked. Paris would end up bleeding out in his father’s palace, the same as before. Hera consoled him by promising him posthumous empires. His countryman Aeneas would go on to found Rome, and descendants of Trojans would dominate the entire Mediterranean world and make Greece an effeminate province. Centuries after that, a city named Paris would become the capital of an empire that would stretch to the snows of Russia.
So no matter what I do, or whom I favor, anguished Paris, everything ends up playing out in exactly the same way!
The goddesses nodded—and now, before his eyes, turned into Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, the three Fates. Across their raised hands lay a single length of thread, with which, having recently snacked on the apple, they flossed their teeth. The ugliest Fate, Atropos (who, moments before, had been Aphrodite), took out a pair of shears and cut the thread.
In Priam’s palace, Paris closed his eyes and finished bleeding.