Midas
Greed, Gold, Comedy, and History
Hello and Welcome to another Dropout Classicist Newsletter! Today, I am covering Midas and the surprising history of his golden touch. If you enjoyed this, and want to read more on Ancient History and Mythology, please consider subscribing!
King Midas is a figure known to children the world over. His tale is a staple of books of Greek mythology. Whats more, the moral of his story is simple and easy, and a lesson all children should learn: do not be too greedy, and always think of the consequences. This tale though holds some shocking depth, history and hilarity, that we often miss in the modern retellings.
The most well known and best surviving example of the story of Midas comes from Ovid, the infamous witty poet in the era of Augustus. In his Metamorphoses, he lays out the bones of the tale we know, in his elegant way.
We begin on in medias res on Dionysus, who has just punished some of his followers for the brutal murder of Orpheus. Annoyed, the god of Wine wants nothing more than to drink and party away his frustrations. He rejoins his party of revelling followers, and finds one missing. Silenus, Dionysus’ tutor and adopted father, has wandered off somewhere. We discover that he has found his way to Phrygia, into the rose gardens of King Midas. Midas is initiated in Dionysus’ party cult too, so he recognises Silenus and throws him a 10 day non-stop feast, clearly a very rich man.
Midas then delivers him back to Dionysus. Though sometimes cruel, Dionysus can be equally as kind and so offers Midas anything he wants. Midas choses to turn anything he touches to gold, and Dionysus is disappointed. He grants him his wish nonetheless. Midas is ecstatic, turning branches and mud to gold on his walk home. But he quickly discovers he cannot eat his bread, nor drink his wine. Contrary to popular belief, Ovid does not make Midas turn his daughter to gold. The tone of this poem is not tragic, and often closer to silly. In desperation, he calls out to Dionysus. The god takes pity on him, and tells him he can wash out the gold in the nearest river. Midas rushes to do this, and the gold seeps into the ground.
‘But his wits remained as obtuse as ever. Moreover, his utter stupidity, once again, was destined to be his downfall’ - Ovid, describing Midas
Ovid does not leave Midas there though, he has further antics planned for him. After the whole gold incident, Midas is understandably traumatised by wealth. We rejoin him in a form of semi-exile, as he traipses through wild woodlands, worshiping the god Pan. Suddenly, he hears distant, divine music. Pan and Apollo are having a music contest by the nearby Mount Tmolus. Apollo plays his lyre, Pan plays his eponymous pipes and the mountain itself judges. Midas stumbles into this scene, entranced. The mountain eventually declares Apollo the winner, unsurprisingly. After all, Apollo’s other famous music contest in myth involved a satyr being flayed alive, so it is best to keep the god of music happy. Midas clearly wasn’t aware of this though, and declares that Pan should have won. Apollo must have been in a good mood though. He only curses Midas with having the ears of a donkey, as opposed to murdering him in a horrible way.
Midas returns home, hiding his new ears in a turban. He bides away the months, keeping them disguised from all. Eventually though, he needs a haircut, and visits his barber. The barber finds this hilarious, but is sworn to secrecy under his king. Eventually, the secret weighs on him too much. He has to let it out, so he whispers it to reeds on the riverbank. It is picked up by the wind, and soon everyone knows.
Midas is undoubtedly funny. He works in Ovid’s poem as a palette cleanser, a pleasant interlude between brutal punishments and tragic deaths. However, the character of Midas is much more interesting than that. Besides being a goldmine for comedy, he also owned literal goldmines.
Greek mythology is fascinating because it is often rooted in reality, serving to explain nature, dynasties and the world itself. Midas is one of the rare examples where we know the actual historical figure that the character is based on.
In the 8th century BCE, Phrygia was under the rule of a people known as the Mushki. According to written records, we know they had a king in this time named Mita, hellenised as Midas. Surviving tablets from the Hittites, a people whose empire covered a lot of the land to the south of Phrygia, contain references and even letters to this king. He is widely acknowledged by early Greek historians, with Herodotus even claiming to have visited the tomb of a Midas. There may even have been two or more Midases, with one being cited to be from around 1200BCE.
So, how did this real king find his way into the myths of the Greeks? Our knowledge of the actual history of the real Midas is a little shaky, but we know that the land of Phrygia was a major exporter of gold. Whats more, Gordion, the capital city of Phrygia, has clear evidence of very wealthy burials around the time of the later Midas. The final fact we have is that the historical Midas was said to drink poison upon his lands being conquered at the end of the 8th Century.
At first, it seems we can piece together very little connection between the mythological and historical, until we start to look at other sources of the myth. We see references to Midas crop up across literature, from Plato to Aristophanes, as being synonymous with a rich man. Aristophanes jokes that ‘if we could capture the god of wealth, everyone would be a Midas’.
The first written source we have for the myth itself comes from Aristotle. In his Politics, he makes uses the tale we have laid out above as an anecdote for his claim that no matter how rich a man is, he still needs to eat. Aristotle’s Midas has one key difference though: instead of Dionysus saving the day, he dies from starvation.
This crucial difference in the myth has provided the missing link for some scholars in connecting these two figures. It is hypothesised by Lynne Roller that, somewhere in the 400 years since the historical figure, the death by poison has been replaced by death by starvation caused by his gold. After all, this ties together very neatly in a moral and many Greek writers loved preserving historical narratives purely for their morals. The involvement of Dionysus can easily be explained too, as Anatolia and Phrygia have always had very strong links with his cult.
The tale, neither the mythological nor historical one, does not stop there. Another common myth associated with Midas is that he questioned Silenus for the meaning of life. This is a very common image on pottery, especially on drinking cups. This myth predates any written account we have, going back as early as 560BCE. How did this one come about? In Herodotus’ references to Midas, he claims that he was ‘the first barbarian known to us’.
The Greeks had a very ‘them versus us’ view to the outside world, and thus any non-Greek speakers were termed βαρβαροι - literally ‘those that go blah blah’. Ignoring the mildly comic onomatopoeia of the word, it led to a lot of hostility for non-Greeks in the ancient world. Midas is viewed as a slight exception to this by Herodotus, or so it seems. He claims that the vastly wealthy king made a visit to the Oracle at Delphi, and left massive gifts. Thus, he earned some respect from Herodotus, and presumably the rest of the Greek world.
But what does this have to do with the myth of Silenus and the meaning of life? Well, despite being a drunk old man, Silenus is often considered a symbol of wisdom. After all, who better to pose the question of the meaning of life to than your drunk friends? Socrates is often compared to Silenus in Plato’s Symposium, in both looks and wisdom. So, Midas asks this wise but drunk Greek for advice. This is theorised to be representative of Midas’ attempts to ‘learn’ from the Greeks, by asking their wise man the wrong questions. Though a mildly xenophobic depiction of a foreigner getting it a bit wrong, it is possible to see how a visiting royal with no knowledge of customs could be mythologised like this.
Thus, we have a lot of the factors coming together. Midas’ golden touch is the explanation for the wealth of himself and his kingdom. His comedic personality may come from his lack of customary understanding. His ties to Dionysus come from his land. As for the donkey’s ears, these are hard to explain. The best reasoning most scholars can find is the link between donkeys and Dionysus.
Ovid’s version of Midas takes all these elements and spins them together into one, cohesive myth. In his genius way, he takes this complicated and varied story and streamlines it to the one we have laid out. In doing so, he unknowingly sets it in stone for all poets following him. And equally unknowingly, he preserves the name and wealth of a Phrygian king from 700 years before his time as a silly king with too much money.
In a way, the story of Midas makes me smile. Of course, this is likely what Ovid intended. He was not a poet who could be serious for too long. Thus, Midas serves as a little comic interlude, a wink and a nudge to keep it from all getting too dark. But Midas is lucky, in a way. He incurs the wrath of two gods, to walk away only with a fear of gold and a pair of donkey ears. Most kings get torn to pieces by their own mother, their own hunting dogs, a thunderbolt or something similar. But also, unbeknownst to Ovid, his silly king was a real man. A real man who will stand the test of time, preserved for generations and generations of others. Money cannot buy happiness, but it accidentally bought this man eternal glory, at the cost of forever being seen as a bumbling idiot.
Sources and Further Reading
Metamorphoses, Ovid tr. David Raeburn
The Greek Myths, Robert Graves
Roller, Lynn E. “The Legend of Midas.” Classical Antiquity, vol. 2, no. 2, 1983, pp. 299–313.
Berndt-Ersöz, Susanne. “The Chronology and Historical Context of Midas.” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte, vol. 57, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–37.
Sayce, A. H. “Midas of Phrygia.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 1, 1931, pp. 135–38.
Fun read! Interesting that Ovid's Midas gets away by cleansing away 'wealth' -- in light of Ovid being exiled by the policing piety of Augustus.