Midas

A drunk satyr asleep in a rose garden is how it begins. Phrygian peasants find him there, garlanded in flowers because they do not know what else to do with a sacred creature snoring among petals, and they bring him to their king. Midas recognises Silenus at once. The old satyr has been the foster father of Dionysus since the wine god was a child, and his absence will not be ignored long. Midas knows enough about the gods to choose hospitality. He throws a feast that lasts ten days and ten nights, lamplight on stone walls, wine spilling, songs that loosen and rise. By the eleventh morning Silenus is delivered safely back to Dionysus, and Dionysus offers Midas anything he wants.

The story turns on what happens next, and the answer comes quickly. Let everything I touch become gold.

Behind that wish stands a man with a complicated pedigree. Greek tradition makes him the son of Gordias, who founded the city of Gordion and tied the famous knot, and in some versions his mother is Cybele, the great mountain-mother of Anatolia. Ancient depictions show him bearded and royally dressed, often in the Phrygian cap that became, in his case, a hiding place for an embarrassment to come. The gold-touch myth tends to swallow the rest of him. He was a real king before he was a parable.

Dionysus grants the wish. Midas, still smiling, returns to his palace and tests the gift the way a child tests a new toy. An oak twig stiffens in his hand. A stone in his palm doubles in weight and brightness. He pulls a rose from its stem and the petals freeze into something hard and perfect, the scent gone. Door handles, the hilts of knives, the corner of a wooden table: every casual touch leaves behind something colder, heavier, costlier. He laughs. He arranges the small treasures around himself like proof that the world has finally agreed to behave.

The trap closes at dinner. Bread refuses to give. Wine congeals between his lips. Fruit hardens before he can bite. The food sits on the table in obscene splendour, lit by the same lamps that lit the feast for Silenus, and he cannot eat any of it. He tries water. Water turns to a glittering thread of metal as it leaves the cup. The most widely told version, preserved by Ovid, lets him plead his way back. He begs Dionysus to take the gift back, and the god, pitying him, sends him to bathe in the river Pactolus near Sardis. The current strips the curse from his skin, and the sand of the riverbed glows gold ever after. That is how the story explains why the real Pactolus really did carry gold dust in the ancient world.

Some tellings refuse to let him off so easily. Aristotle, the earliest writer to mention the golden touch, lets the wish stand and lets Midas starve. The version many readers know best, in which the king accidentally turns his daughter into a gilded statue when he reaches out to comfort her, is largely the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote it for children in 1852 and gave the daughter a name, Marygold. The image is hard to shake. It is also younger than most people assume.

The golden touch is only half of him. After his rescue from the curse, Midas swore off luxury and went to live in the countryside as a worshipper of Pan. Pan was the wrong god to fall in with, at least where good judgment was concerned. When the rustic god grew bold enough to challenge Apollo to a music contest, the mountain-god Tmolus was chosen as judge, and Midas happened to be present. Pan blew on his reed pipes. Apollo answered on a lyre wreathed in laurel and inlaid with ivory. Tmolus awarded the prize to Apollo without hesitation, and so did everyone else listening, except Midas, who declared in front of the gathered company that Pan’s piping was better. Apollo could not let that pass. With a touch, he stretched the king’s ears into the long, hairy, twitching ears of a donkey.

Midas hid them under a tall purple turban and told no one. The barber who cut his hair was the one mortal who had to know, and he was bound by the king’s threat to silence. Eventually the secret swelled inside him until he could no longer carry it. He went out into a marshy meadow, dug a hole in the wet earth, whispered the truth into it, and covered it back over: King Midas has the ears of an ass. He went home empty and relieved. A patch of reeds grew up on that exact spot, and whenever the south wind passed through them, they whispered the secret again, then to anyone walking past, until the whole country knew.

What finally kills him depends on which storyteller you ask. Aristotle’s Midas dies of starvation, the cursed gift never lifted. Strabo’s drinks bull’s blood when the Cimmerians overrun Gordion, killing himself rather than face the defeat. Other writers quietly let him fade. Underneath the legend stands a real man: a Phrygian king the Assyrians called Mita of Mushki, who ruled in the late eighth century BCE, sent gifts to Delphi, married a Greek princess named Damodice, and was likely buried beneath the great mound at Gordion that still bears his name.

His powers are simple to list and difficult to escape. He could turn anything he touched into pure gold, an absolute and instantaneous transformation, and he held the throne of Phrygia at the height of its wealth. His weaknesses sit on top of those gifts like a second crown. He could not stop the touch when he wanted to, could not separate the things he loved from the things he could ruin, and could not hold his tongue when a god wanted his judgment. Apollo’s punishment is mostly cruel. Dionysus’s, in the end, is mostly a mirror.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was King Midas?

Midas was a legendary Greek king best remembered for two myths: the golden touch and his donkey ears. In Greek mythology, his story functions as a moral warning about desire, wealth, and the humiliations that follow arrogant misjudgment.

How did Midas get the golden touch?

Midas earned the golden touch by offering ten days and nights of hospitality to a wandering satyr who arrived at his court. When the satyr was returned to the god who wanted him, the god offered Midas a reward, and Midas asked that everything he touched become gold.

What happened when Midas tried to eat with the golden touch?

Midas could not eat or drink, because food and wine turned to gold the moment he touched them. Bread hardened in his hands, wine congealed into solid metal, and his entire dinner table became a gleaming display he could not consume. Even brushing a rose in his garden stiffened its petals into flawless, scentless shapes.

How did Midas get rid of the golden touch?

In some versions of the Midas myth, Midas begged the god to take the gift back and was told to wash himself in a river, where the power poured out of him and the river’s sands grew rich with gold. In other tellings, the curse stayed with him until starvation claimed him.

Why did Midas have donkey ears?

Midas was given donkey ears as punishment by Apollo after he sided with Pan during a musical contest between the two gods. When Midas openly refused to agree with the verdict in Apollo’s favor, the god retaliated by sprouting long, furred donkey ears from the king’s head, which Midas then tried to hide beneath a turban.

Related Entries

Dionysus, Silenus, Apollo, Pan, Cybele, Orpheus, Satyr, Maenad, Sisyphus, Niobe, Arachne