Tmolus

Also Known As: Greek Tmolos, Τμῶλος; Latin Tmolus or Timolus; the name belongs to the mountain and to its god alike, the modern Bozdag in western Turkey
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He is the mountain itself given a face and a voice, and his one recorded act is a judgement nobody afterwards dares to overturn.
Role in Mythos: He umpires the music contest between Apollo and Pan on his own summit and awards it to Apollo.
Relation to Humans: Mortals live on him rather than with him, planting vines on his slopes and washing gold out of the river that rises in his flank. The one man who argues with his verdict, a king who happened to be standing on the mountain at the time, leaves the hearing with the ears of a donkey.

Above Sardis the ground goes up and keeps going, steep and broad and high, until the last crags look out over the sea. On the far side the slope runs down to a small town called Hypaepa. Between the two there is a summit, and on the summit, in the only story that really matters, something enormous is sitting still enough to be mistaken for the ground.

Then it moves. The forest at the sides of the summit is pushed back, the way a man pushes hair away from his ears, and an old face comes clear of the trees. There is oak on the green hair, a wreath of it, and acorns swinging at the hollows of the temples. The voice, when it comes, is short and unimpressed and entirely certain of its own authority. The judge attends.

That sentence is close to everything Tmolus ever says. He is the god of the Lydian mountain that carries his name, the long ridge south of Sardis that divides the water running north to the Hermus from the water running south to the Cayster, and he holds his office in the plainest possible sense: he is where the thing happened, and being where it happened is his entire claim on the story. Homer knows him only as a landmark, a place men are born under. Later poets went looking and found a face in him.

The contest that made him famous begins as a boast. Pan, playing on his reeds among the nymphs of the lower slopes, lets it be known that he considers Apollo’s music the lesser art. The challenge is accepted and an umpire is needed, and there is really only one candidate on the mountain, because the mountain is the candidate. So the judge is seated, the trees come away from the ears, and Pan plays first.

He plays well, on his own terms. The pipes are rustic and the song is rough, and the noise of them delights the piper enormously. A Phrygian king named Midas happens to be standing there and is entranced. Then the old head turns toward Apollo, and every tree along that fringe turns with it, a whole hillside of leaves swinging round at once to face the other player.

What Apollo does next is less a performance than a display of everything he owns. Laurel from Parnassus in the golden hair. A mantle so heavy with Tyrian purple that it drags along the ground as he walks. The lyre held in the left hand, gems and ivory worked into the frame, the plectrum in the right, the pose itself announcing the profession before a note is struck. Then he touches the strings, and the mountain, who has heard every wind that ever crossed Lydia and every stream that ever cut down his own flank, tells the reed to bow to the lyre.

Nobody disagrees except one man. Midas calls the ruling unjust, and Apollo turns on him and says he shall have ears to suit the mind he judges with, and draws them out long and grey and furred. It is the most famous punishment in the whole episode, and it lands on the only person present who is neither a god nor a mountain.

The sources cannot even agree on who lost. Ovid says Pan. Hyginus, writing later and far more briefly, has Apollo contesting with Marsyas, or Pan, and leaves the choice open. The judge is the same either way. That is a strange kind of fame, to be remembered with total precision for an act whose other participant is uncertain.

There is a second Tmolus in the record, and the ancient writers are not tidy about keeping the two apart. This one is a king of Lydia rather than a mountain, husband of Omphale, the queen who later bought Heracles as a slave and worked him for three years. Apollodorus mentions the husband once and only in order to remove him: at his death the government of Lydia passed to his widow. Older reference works simply merge the two figures, making the mountain-god the husband of Omphale and the father of Tantalus. It is fair to say that nobody in antiquity was much troubled by the difference between a Lydian king and the Lydian rock he ruled from.

The king’s own story is nastier, and it survives in a late compilation of river and mountain lore whose cited authorities nobody has ever been able to find. In it Tmolus is a son of Ares, out hunting, when he sees a girl named Arrhippe who serves Artemis. He wants her, she refuses, and he takes her by force inside Artemis’s own temple. She hangs herself. Artemis sends a maddened bull, and the bull throws the king into the air, and he comes down on stakes and stones and dies slowly. The mountain, in that telling, is named after the body that landed on it.

His powers are the powers of standing in one place for a very long time. He is the watershed, and rain falling on one shoulder of him ends in a different sea from rain falling on the other. The Pactolus rises inside him and for a while ran gold, which is why Sardis grew rich at his foot and why Lydia is remembered for inventing coined money. His slopes make good wine. Within the story itself, his authority amounts to the simple fact that nobody is well placed to argue with the ground they are standing on. Apollo does not thank him. Pan does not appeal.

The limits are just as plain. He judges, and then he is finished. He cannot enforce the verdict, cannot protect the one mortal foolish enough to dissent from it, and cannot follow anyone down off his own slopes. He is the least mobile deity in Greek myth. Whatever happens on Tmolus, Tmolus is obliged to sit through.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tmolus in Greek mythology?

Tmolus is the god of Mount Tmolus in Lydia, the ridge in western Anatolia standing above the city of Sardis. He is best known as the judge who awarded the music contest between Apollo and Pan to Apollo. Ovid describes him as an old figure whose hair is forest and whose ears are trees, which he pushes aside in order to listen.

Why did Midas get donkey ears?

Midas was present at the music contest on Mount Tmolus and objected when Tmolus gave the victory to Apollo. Apollo told him he would have ears to match the mind he judged with, and turned them into a donkey’s. In Hyginus’s version Midas argues that the prize should have gone to Marsyas rather than to Pan.

Was Tmolus a mountain or a king?

Both, depending on which source is read, and the ancient writers did not always separate them. One strand makes Tmolus the mountain-god who judges the contest. Another makes him a king of Lydia, the husband of Queen Omphale, who left her the kingdom when he died. A late account calls that king a son of Ares and has him killed by a bull sent by Artemis.

Where is Mount Tmolus today?

It is the range known in Turkish as Bozdag, in western Turkey, rising to just over 2,100 metres. The ancient Lydian capital of Sardis sat at its foot, and the gold-bearing river Pactolus rose on its slopes. Its ridge divides the drainage of the Hermus to the north from that of the Cayster to the south.