c. Dionysus, who had been anxious on Silenus’s account, sent to ask how Midas wished to be rewarded. He replied without hesitation: ‘Pray grant that all I touch be turned into gold.’ However, not only stones, flowers, and the furnishings of his house turned to gold but, when he sat down to table, so did the food he ate and the water drank. Midas soon begged to be released from his wish, because he was fast dying of hunger and thirst; whereupon Dionysus, highly entertained, told him to visit the source of the river Pactolus, near Mount Tmolus, and there wash himself. He obeyed, and was at once freed from the golden touch, but the sands of the river Pactolus are bright with gold to this day.
d. Midas, having thus entered Asia with his train of Brigians, was adopted by the childless Phrygian King Gordius. While only a poor peasant, Gordius had been surprised one day to see a royal eagle perch on the pole of his ox-cart. Since it seemed prepared to settle there all day, he drove the team towards Phrygian Telmissus, now a part of Galatia, where there was a reliable oracle; but at the gate of the city he met a young prophetess who, when she saw the eagle still perched on the pole, insisted on his offering immediate sacrifices to Zeus the King. ‘Let me come with you, peasant,’ she said, ‘to make sure that you choose the correct victims.’ ‘By all means,’ replied Gordius. ‘You appear to be a wise and considerate young woman. Are you prepared to marry me?’ ‘As soon as the sacrifices have been offered,’ she answered.
f. After Gordius’s death, Midas succeeded to the throne, promoted the worship of Dionysus, and founded the city of Ancyra. The Brigians who had come with him became known as Phrygians, and the kings of Phrygia are alternately named Midas and Gordius to this day; so that the first Midas is now mistakenly described as a son of Gordius.
g. Midas attended the famous musical contest between Apollo and Marsyas, umpired by the River-god Tmolus. Tmolus awarded the prize to Apollo who, when Midas dissented from the verdict, punished him with a pair of ass’s ears. For a long time, Midas managed to conceal these under a Phrygian cap; but his barber, made aware of the deformity, found it impossible to keep the shameful secret close, as Midas had enjoined him to do on pain of death. He therefore dug a hole in the river-bank and, first making sure that nobody was about, whispered into it: ‘King Midas has ass’s ears!’ Then he filled up the hole, and went away, at peace with himself until a reed sprouted from the bank and whispered the secret to all who passed. When Midas learned that his disgrace had become public knowledge, he condemned the barber to death, drank bull’s blood, and perished miserably.
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1. Midas has been plausibly identified with Mita, King of the Moschians (‘calf-men’), or Mushki, a people of Pontic origin who, in the middle of the second millennium BC, occupied the western part of Thrace, afterwards known as Macedonia; they crossed the Hellespont about the year 1200 BC, broke the power of the Hittites in Asia Minor, and captured Pteria, their capital. ‘Moschians’ refers perhaps to a cult of the bull-calf as the spirit of the sacred year. Midas’s rose gardens and the account of his birth suggest an orgiastic cult of Aphrodite, to whom the rose was sacred. The story of the golden touch has been invented to account for the riches of the Mita dynasty, and for the presence of gold in the Pactolus river; and it is often said that the ass’s ears were suggested by Midas’s representation as a satyr, with hideously lengthened ears, in Athenian comic drama.2. But since asses were sacred to his benefactor Dionysus, who set a pair of them among the stars (Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy), it is likely that the original Midas gloried in his ass disguise. A pair of ass’s ears at the tip of a reed sceptre was the token of royalty carried by all Egyptian dynastic gods, in memory of the time when ass-eared Set ruled their pantheon. Set had greatly declined in power until his temporary revival by the Hyksos kings of the early second millennium BC; but because the Hittites formed part of the great horde of northern conquerors led by the Hyksos, ass-eared Midas may well have claimed sovereignty over the Hittite Empire in Set’s name. In pre-dynastic times, Set has ruled the second half of the year, and annually murdered his brother Osiris, the spirit of the first half, whose emblem was a bull: they were, fact, the familiar rival twins perpetually contending for the favours their sister, the Moon-goddess Isis.
3. It is likely that the icon from which the story of Midas’s barber derives showed the death of the ass-king. His sun-ray hair, the seat royal power, is shorn off, like Samson’s; his decapitated body is buried in a hole to guard the city of Ancyra from invasion. The reed an ambivalent symbol: as the ‘tree’ of the twelfth month, gives him oracular warning of imminent death; it also enroyals his successor. Because of the great magical potency of bull’s blood, only priestesses of the Earth-mother could drink it without harm, and being the blood of Osiris, it would be peculiarly poisonous an ass-king.
4. The secret of the Gordian knot seems to have been a religious one, probably the ineffable name of Dionysus, a knot-cypher tied in the hide thong. Gordium was the key to Asia (Asia Minor) because its citadel commanded the only practicable trade route from Troy to Antioch; an the local priestess or priest will have communicated the secret to the Kin of Phrygia alone, as the High-priest alone was entrusted with the ineffable name of Jehovah at Jerusalem. Alexander’s brutal cutting of the knot when he marshalled his army at Gordium for the invasion of Greater Asia, ended an ancient dispensation by placing the power of the sword above that of religious mystery. Gordius (from gruzein, ‘to grunt’ or ‘grumble’) was perhaps so named from the muttering at his oracular shrine.
5. Why the story of the Atlantic Continent should have been attributed to the drunken Silenus may be divined from three incidents reported by Plutarch (Life of Solon). The first is that Solon travelled extensively in Asia Minor and Egypt; the second, that he believed the story of Atlantis and turned it into an epic poem; the third that he quarrelled with Thespis the dramatist who, in his plays about Dionysus, put ludicrous speeches, apparently full of topical allusion into the mouths of satyrs. Solon asked: ‘Are you not alarmed, Thespis, to tell so many lies to so large an audience?’ When Thespis answered ‘What does it matter when the whole play is a joke.’, Solon struck ground violently with his staff: ‘Encourage such jokes in our theatre, an they will soon creep into our contracts and treaties!’ Aelian, who quoted Theopompus as his authority, seems to have had access at second or third hand to a comedy by Thespis, or his pupil Pratinas, ridiculing Solon for utopian lies told in the epic poem, and presenting him as Silenus, footloose about Egypt and Asia Minor. Silenus and Solon are not dissimilar names and as Silenus was tutor to Dionysus, so was tutor to Peisistratus who- perhaps on his advice-founded rites at Athens
6. It is possible that Solon during his travels had picked up scraps of which he incorporated in his epic, and which lent them parody: such as the Gaelic legend of a Land of Youth Ocean-where Niamh of the Golden Hair took Oisin, and whence he returned centuries later on a visit to Ireland. Oisin, it is said, was disgusted of his own people compared to Niamh’s, and bitterly regretted having come back. The unnavigable whirlpool is the famous one, assumed by ancient physicists, where the ocean returns and marks the end of the world into nothingness. Solon seems to have heard geographers discussing the possible existence of an Continent of Atlantis: Eratosthenes, Mela, Cicero, and Strabo speculated and Seneca foretold its discovery in the second act of his Medea-a which is said to have made a deep impression on the young Solon.
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