According to Greek myths, the Goddess Aphrodite was the first winner of a beauty contest. She also bribed the lone judge, making her the cause of the first pageant scandal, according to the The Pageant News Bureau ....
As the Greek goddess of love, beauty, and sexuality... her birth was itself something of a scandal, as according to reports it was following her fathers castration ... According to the Greek poet Hesiod, she was born when Cronus cut off Uranus' genitals and threw them into the sea, and from the aphros (
sea foam) arose Aphrodite.
Anyway, later a golden apple (
'the Apple of Discord') upon which was the inscription καλλίστῃ ("
for the fairest one") was claimed by three goddesses: Hera, Athena and Aphrodite, and they asked Zeus to judge which of them was fairest, and eventually Zeus, reluctant to favour any claim himself, declared that Paris, a mortal, would judge their cases.
All three of the candidates appeared to Paris on Mount Ida, and after bathing in the spring of Ida, each attempted with her powers to bribe Paris;
- Hera offered to make him king of Europe and Asia,
- Athena offered wisdom and skill in war, and
- Aphrodite, who had the Charites and the Horai to enhance her charms with flowers and song (according to a fragment of the Cypria quoted by Athenagoras), offered the love of the world's most beautiful woman. This was Helen of Sparta, wife of the Greek king Menelaus.
Paris accepted Aphrodite's gift and awarded the apple to her, receiving Helen as well as the enmity of the Greeks and especially of Hera. The Greeks' expedition to retrieve Helen from Paris in Troy is the mythological basis of the 'Trojan War'.
But as this was the worlds first beauty contest, they have been corrupted ever since... As
Danielle Lloyd's disqualification from the Miss Great Britain 2006 title, after her alleged affair with one of the pageant's judges, her then-boyfriend, footballer Teddy Sheringham, would seem to confirm.
Miss Lloyd (who
has her own thread).
Aphrodite (who doesn't).
