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The
legends and the truth about King Midas
Midas,
or King Midas is the most important king of Phrygia. Two aspects can be
distinguished in his personality : the mythical and the historical
one.
Midas
appears in some legends written by Greek and Roman authors. The first
one shows that he is not very wise : he rescued Silenus, the favorite
companion of Dionysos as he was completely drunk and treated him well.
Therefore Dionysos wanted to thank him and granted him one wish. King
Midas chose, despite the advises of Dionysos, the capacity of changing
everything in gold by a simple touch. He went around his palace and
changed everything into gold, including his palace gates. After a while,
he started to be hungry and thirsty but alas, three times alas, everything
also changed into gold. His servants tried to feed him but it didn’t work.
Understanding that his wish wasn’t very wise, he begged Dionysos to relieve
him from it. The god gave him the cure : to bathe in the spring of the
Pactolus, a river from Lydia. So did Midas, and this is the reason why
the Pactolus has always gold dust in it.
The
second legend related to king Midas presents him as a judge between
Apollo, the god of music, and a satyr, Marsyas. Unwisely, he gives
his preference to the satyr. Apollo, offended, transforms Midas’s ears
in ass’s ears. The poor king manages to hide this deformity from this
people but his barber, having to know the secret, is threatened of horrible
death if he reveals it. The secret being too heavy, he digs a hole in
the meadow and whispers in it. This is why, since then, the wind in the
reeds rustles that “Midas has ass’s ears”.
These two pleasant mythological stories tend to
make forget that Midas was a real and important Anatolian king (there
might be several Phrygian kings named Midas but one is particularly famous).
According to Greek and Roman sources, he is supposed
to have lived between the 740’s ( 736 ? ) and 696 (or 676 but less likely).
He was an well-known king, even for the Continental Greeks, as Herodotus
tells us : he gave his throne to Delphis and “it is worth seeing it” (
I, 14) and he possessed wonderful gardens in Macedonia (VIII, 138). He
married a Greek princess, Hermodike, daughter of the king of Kyme
(Pollux IX, 83) and he had relations with other Greek cities of the Ionian
coast, like Milet.
All these elements show that Midas was a powerful king according to his
Greek neighbors and that he was the one that gave to them. But he had
also relations with his Oriental partners : it is mostly accepted that
the king Mita of the Mushkis mentioned by the Assyrian sources
can be identified with Midas (the remaining problem lies mostly in the
equation Mushkis = Phrygians?).
However, Mita-Midas was a feared enemy of the Assyrians and he was apparently
able to fight as an opponent of equal strength until 709 BC where a Assyrian
text mentions the signature of a peace treaty between them, to the great
relief of Sargon II. The reason why the Phrygian accepted this
treaty may be found in the domestic policy : the NE borders were threatened
by the Cimmerians, nomads and fierce horse-riders who destroyed the Phrygian
state and are said to be responsible of Midas’s suicide in 696.
King Midas
external link
King
Midas and his Golden Touch - A Cartoon by Gareth Pitchford : Cartoon
story about the King Midas myth
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