Pactolus

Also Known As: Greek Paktolos; earlier called Chrysorrhoas, the gold-flowing; a river of Lydia rising on Mount Tmolus and running past Sardis into the Hermus, today the Sart Çayı in western Turkey
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: It carries gold in its sand, and every story about it is an explanation of how the gold got there.
Role in Mythos: It is the river in which Midas washes off the golden touch, and the water that made Lydia rich enough to invent coined money.
Relation to Humans: Two men in the myths drown themselves in it, both of them to escape something they had done. Everyone else who went near it went to get rich, and for about two centuries they did.

Nothing about it looks like much. It is a modest stream running off a mountain, past a city wall, out across a plain to join a bigger river, and a person could walk into it up to the knees without noticing anything unusual. What was unusual was in the sand, and it was fine, and it was gold.

The Greeks had two ways of accounting for that and the more famous one involves a king with a hospitality problem. Midas of Phrygia entertained a lost old satyr well, and was rewarded by Dionysus with any wish he cared to name, and named the wrong one. Everything he touched turned to gold, and food is a thing you touch, and so is a daughter in some tellings. He went back and begged to have it taken off him, and was told to go to Lydia and find the river that rises high up under Mount Tmolus and follow it to its source and put his head and his body under the water. He did. The power went out of him into the stream, and the fields along that river have been pale with gold ever since.

The other explanations are older and stranger and come from a late collection of river lore whose sources nobody has been able to trace. The stream, it says, was called Chrysorrhoas first, the gold-flowing, after a craftsman of that name, a son of Apollo who lived hand to mouth and who broke into the treasury of Croesus one night, took as much gold as he could carry, distributed it to his family, and threw himself into the water when the king’s men closed on him. Then the name changed again. A man called Pactolus, at a festival of Aphrodite, forced himself on a woman without knowing that she was his own sister Demodice, and when he understood what he had done he walked into the same river and did not come out. The stream took his name and has kept it.

The same source records two other things about it that read like a merchant’s notes rather than a poet’s. Gold sand carried down to the gulf. And a stone in the riverbed the colour of silver, hard to find because it is mixed in with the gold, which the wealthier Lydians bought and set at the doors of their treasuries, because when a thief came near it made a noise like a trumpet.

The gold was entirely real. Herodotus mentions it twice and treats it as an ordinary fact of Lydian geography, and Strabo says the same. What the river was carrying down off the mountain was electrum, gold and silver naturally alloyed, and the presence of it at Sardis is the reason Lydia is a name anybody still knows.

What happened next is the part that is not myth at all, and it was dug up in the twentieth century. On the bank of the Pactolus just outside the old city, in a sector the excavators simply called Pactolus North, the Harvard and Cornell expedition found furnaces and cupels from the first half of the sixth century BC, and worked out what they were for. Thin sheets of electrum were packed in a pot with salt and brick dust and heated, which pulls the silver out and leaves the gold behind. Then the silver was recovered separately by cupellation. It is the oldest gold refinery anyone has found anywhere in the world, and it sat on the bank of a river the Greeks were writing poems about.

The consequence was money. Lydia struck the first precious-metal coinage in the world in the late seventh century BC, in electrum straight out of the river. Croesus, whose wealth became proverbial and whose treasury is the one the mythical thief robs, then did the thing that mattered more: he stopped using electrum, issued separate coins of refined gold and refined silver on a matched weight standard, and thereby guaranteed a fixed rate between them. Every bimetallic currency since descends from a workshop on the Pactolus.

Its power, in the stories, is one thing done once. It takes a curse off a man by rinsing it out of him and keeps it, which makes it the only river in Greek myth to be permanently altered by a favour. That transfer is the model for everything the river then does: it is rich because somebody else’s disaster went into it.

Its limits are the ones any river has. It runs out. By the Roman period the gold was gone, worked to nothing, and writers were already noting that the famous Pactolus no longer produced anything worth stooping for. What is left today is a shallow seasonal stream below Bozdağ, the mountain that used to be called Tmolus, running past a ruined city with a hole in the bank where the workshop was.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the river Pactolus?

The Pactolus is a small river in Lydia, in western Turkey, that rises on Mount Tmolus and runs past the ancient city of Sardis into the Hermus. In antiquity it carried gold dust in its sand, and it is best known as the river in which King Midas washed away the golden touch.

How did Midas get rid of the golden touch?

Dionysus told him to go to the river that rises under Mount Tmolus in Lydia, follow it up to its source, and put his head and body under the water. The power passed out of him into the stream, and from then on the Pactolus carried gold in its sand and the fields along its banks were pale with it.

Was there really gold in the Pactolus?

Yes. Herodotus and Strabo both record it as a plain fact of Lydian geography, and what the river carried was electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver. The deposits were worked out by the Roman period, and ancient writers were already commenting that the river no longer produced anything.

What was found at Pactolus North?

Excavations on the riverbank outside Sardis uncovered Lydian furnaces and cupels from the first half of the sixth century BC, used to separate electrum into pure gold and pure silver by cementation and cupellation. It is the oldest gold refinery known anywhere in the world.

Why is the Pactolus important to the history of money?

Lydia struck the world’s first precious-metal coinage in the late seventh century BC, using electrum taken from the river. Croesus later abandoned electrum in favour of separate refined gold and silver coins on a common weight standard, producing the first bimetallic currency, and the refinery that made it possible stood on the Pactolus bank.