Midas

Midas is a king of Phrygia, and Ovid's Metamorphoses tells his two famous stories back to back. The first, the golden touch, begins with Silenus, the old companion of Dionysus. Phrygian countryfolk find him staggering with age and wine, bind him with garlands and lead him to their king. Midas had learned the Bacchic rites from Orpheus and Eumolpus, so he knows his guest at once.

Midas feasts Silenus for ten days and nights, Ovid says, and on the eleventh brings him back to Dionysus in Lydia. The god, glad to have his foster-father back, lets the king choose any reward. Midas asks that whatever he touches turn to yellow gold. Dionysus grants it, grieving that Midas did not ask for something better.

At first the gift delights him. A twig, a stone, a clod of earth, ears of grain and an apple all turn to gold in his hands. Then his servants set a meal before him. The bread stiffens into gold at his touch, the meat turns to gold under his teeth, and his wine flows into his mouth as liquid gold. Rich and wretched at once, he hates what he had just prayed for.

Midas raises his gleaming arms to heaven and admits he has done wrong. Dionysus takes the gift back. He sends Midas to the river that flows past Sardis, to plunge his head and body into its spring. The gold passes from his body into the water. Ovid says the fields along that river, the Pactolus, are still hard and pale with gold.

Cured of wealth, Midas takes to the woods and follows Pan, but Ovid says his mind stays as dull as before. On Mount Tmolus, Pan boasts that his reed pipe beats the music of Apollo. The mountain god Tmolus judges the contest and gives the prize to Apollo's lyre. Everyone agrees except Midas, who calls the verdict unjust.

Apollo will not let such dull ears keep a human shape. He stretches them, fills them with grey hair and makes them twitch. Midas now has the ears of a slow-moving ass. He hides them under a purple headdress. But the servant who trims his hair sees them. Unable to keep the secret, the man digs a hole, whispers into it and buries his words.

A thick bed of reeds grows on the spot. About a year later, Ovid says, the reeds stir in the south wind and repeat the buried words. So the secret of their master's ears comes out after all.

Hyginus's Fabulae tells both stories in the opposite order, with different details. There Midas is the son of the Mother goddess. He judges a pipe contest between Apollo and either Marsyas or Pan, and says Marsyas should have won. Apollo tells him he will have ears to match the mind he showed in judging, and gives him ass's ears.

In Hyginus, Silenus is not captured at all. He wanders away while Dionysus leads his army to India, and Midas hosts him generously and gives him a guide back. The golden touch follows as a reward. When hunger torments him, Midas asks Dionysus to take the gift away and washes in the Pactolus, which Hyginus says is now called Chrysorrhoas.

Other writers say Midas caught Silenus by a trick. In Xenophon's Anabasis, the army passes a Spring of Midas at Thymbrium in Phrygia. There, the story went, Midas caught the satyr by mixing wine with the water. Pausanias knew a Spring of Midas at Ancyra, a city he says Midas son of Gordius founded. There too, he says, Midas mixed its water with wine to capture Silenus.

Herodotus places the capture in Macedonia instead. His Histories describe a garden of Midas son of Gordias, where roses grow of themselves with sixty blossoms each. In this garden, according to the Macedonian story, Silenus was taken captive. Herodotus does not say how.

The ancient sources disagree on how Midas died. Aristotle's Politics mentions the Midas of legend, who died of hunger because every dish served to him turned to gold. Strabo's Geography reports that Midas died by drinking bull's blood when the Cimmerians overran Phrygia. Plutarch's essay On Superstition also has him drink bull's blood, but as suicide, after dreams left him dispirited and disturbed.

Herodotus also treats Midas son of Gordias as a real king of Phrygia. He says Midas sent an offering to Delphi before the Lydian Gyges did: the royal seat on which he sat to give judgment. It stood beside the bowls of Gyges in Herodotus's own day. Herodotus also names a later Adrastus, son of Gordias son of Midas, who came to Croesus at Sardis as a suppliant.

The daughter turned to gold is a modern addition. Nathaniel Hawthorne gave Midas a little girl in The Golden Touch, part of his Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, whose preface is dated 1851. His narrator admits that nobody but himself ever heard of her, and that he named her Marygold because he loves odd names for little girls. In his version her father's kiss turns her into a golden statue, and river water brings her back.