Midas and the Golden Touch

Ovid begins the episode with Dionysus (Bacchus in Ovid's Latin) leaving one land for the vineyards of Mount Tmolus and the river Pactolus. His usual crowd of satyrs and bacchants surrounds him, but not Silenus. Phrygian countryfolk have caught the old man as he staggered, faint with age and wine. They bind him in garlands and lead him to their king, Midas, whom Eumolpus and Thracian Orpheus had taught all the Bacchic rites. Midas knows his old friend at once and keeps a joyful feast for ten days and nights.

On the eleventh day the king takes Silenus to the Lydian lands and hands him back to his foster-child, young Dionysus. The god is delighted and offers Midas any reward he likes. Ovid calls the offer welcome but harmful.

Other ancient writers place the capture elsewhere and say how it was done. Xenophon's Anabasis has the Persian army pass a spring of Midas, king of the Phrygians, at Thymbrium, where Midas, according to the story, caught the satyr by mixing wine with the water. Herodotus puts the same capture in Macedonia: in a garden of Midas son of Gordias, where roses grow of themselves with sixty blossoms each, Silenus was taken captive "according to the Macedonian story." Neither writer mentions a wish. The full story of the wish, and the washing, is Ovid's.

Midas answers at once, and Ovid calls the reply ill-advised: let whatever he touches change to yellow gold. Dionysus agrees, grieving that the king chose harm and not good. Midas walks off delighted and starts testing the promise.

He pulls down a twig from a holm-oak, and it turns to gold. A dark stone he lifts from the ground goes pale with gold. A clod of earth becomes a shining lump, ripe ears of grain turn golden, and an apple in his hand looks like a gift from the Hesperides. Each door-post glistens when he touches it. Water from his hands runs like the golden shower that astonished Danae. He can hardly hold in his mind how much he has gained.

Then his servants lay a table with dainties and bread. When Midas touches the gift of Ceres, it stiffens into gold. If he bites into a tender piece of meat with hungry teeth, the meat shines with yellow flakes of gold. Wine, the gift of Bacchus, mixed with pure water, shows in his astonished mouth as liquid gold.

Ovid calls him rich and wretched. Plenty could not lessen his hunger, and nothing eased his parched throat. The hated gold tormented him no more than he deserved. He lifts his hands and shining arms to heaven and pleads: pardon me, father Lenaeus, I have done wrong, but pity me and save me from this curse that looked so fair. Aristotle's Politics uses the same legend as an argument about money. It says a man can be well supplied with wealth and die of hunger, "like the famous Midas in the legend," whose prayer was so covetous that all the food served to him turned to gold. Ovid does not let Midas die.

Ovid's Dionysus is patient, and because Midas confessed his fault, he cancels the favour. He tells the king to go to the stream that flows past great Sardis, trace it upward to its source, and plunge head and body into the foam where the spring leaps from the mountain rock. Midas obeys. The gold-making power leaves his body and tints the river. Ovid adds that the fields beside the river are still hard and coloured with the gold Midas left, and his opening lines stress that the Pactolus had not been golden before. The tale explains the river's gold.

Ovid does not stop there. Cured of wealth, Midas hates riches and lives in the woods, following Pan, but his mind stays as dull as before. On Mount Tmolus he sits among the listeners when Pan plays against Apollo, and when the mountain god Tmolus gives the prize to Apollo's lyre, Midas alone calls the award unjust. Apollo will not let such ears keep a human shape, and gives Midas the ears of a slow-moving ass. He hides them under a purple turban, but the servant who cuts his hair sees them, digs a hole, whispers the secret into it and fills it in. Reeds grow there, and about twelve months later they repeat the words in the south wind. That second story, and the sources that tell it differently, belong to the Midas page.