It is widely believed that apples are good for you, and as such they are often consumed in large quantities across the world. From Eve’s biblical temptation to health items in PC games, apples have been prevalent in world culture for a very long time. Perhaps one of the contemporary world’s best known companies is Apple, purveyor of relatively simplistic pieces of touch screen technology (this simplicity often ascribed to Wii games and even those using the brand new Xbox Kinect). But what does an apple symbolise? Were they really that important to history as a whole? Read on to discover more.
The History of Apples
As mentioned previously, apples’ apparent first appearance in history was as the biblical forbidden fruit (otherwise known as the fruit of knowledge). Eve supposedly caused the downfall of mankind by convincing Adam to taste the forbidden fruit following her being tempted by the serpent (an avatar of Satan). This is the reason why human larynxes are known as Adam’s apples. It may come as no surprise, then, that the Latin word for apple is very much like the word for evil, while in ancient Greek all foreign fruits aside from berries were referred to as apples.
As such, the ancient Greeks have a variety of tales involving apples. Examples include Heracles picking the golden apples of the Tree of Life as part of his Twelve Labours and Eris, the goddess of discord, indirectly causing the Trojan War by hurling a golden apple addressed to “the most beautiful one” into the midst of the wedding party of Peleus and Thetis (Hera, Athena and Aphrodite all fought in order to name themselves the rightful owner). Discord-servers As a result of this, in ancient Greece it was considered a declaration of love to throw at an apple at someone, and an acceptance of it if you subsequently caught it.