King Midas

The teaching

Taught from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book Eleven, with Aristotle, Xenophon, Arrian, Chaucer and Hawthorne.

The ants and the wagon

Midas is a king of Phrygia, the son of Gordias. When he was a child, Cicero records, ants carried grains of wheat into his mouth as he slept, and the seers read it as a sign of great wealth. His father was a poor farmer on whose plough an eagle once settled. When the Phrygians, torn by strife, were told by an oracle that a wagon would bring them a king, Midas came riding into their assembly in a wagon with his father and mother, and they made him king, as Arrian tells it. Midas set the wagon up for Zeus in the citadel of Gordium, its yoke tied with a knot of cornel bark that whoever loosed was to rule Asia, until Alexander cut it.

Silenus caught

The tale of the golden touch begins with a satyr. Silenus, the old companion of Dionysus, wise and always drunk, was said to haunt the Phrygian countryside, and Xenophon was shown a spring by the road where Midas caught him by mixing wine into the water. What the king wanted of him was wisdom. Aristotle told, in a dialogue now lost, that when Midas asked his captive what is best for man, Silenus kept silent, until at last, compelled, he said that best of all is never to be born, and next best to die as soon as may be. Nietzsche set the scene near the opening of The Birth of Tragedy as the wisdom of the forest god that the Greeks knew, and over which they raised the bright dream of their gods.

The golden touch

In Ovid the old satyr is found staggering in the fields by Phrygian peasants, who bind him with flowers and bring him to the king. Midas, whom Orpheus himself taught the rites of Dionysus, knows his fellow initiate and keeps a feast for him ten days and nights, and on the eleventh brings him back to the young god in Lydia. Dionysus, glad to have his old foster father again, offers the king whatever gift he chooses, and Midas asks that whatever he touches be turned to gold. The god grants it, grieving that he did not ask better.

Midas goes home trying it: a twig of oak turns gold, then a stone, a clod, ears of wheat, an apple he plucks, the posts of his doors; even the water he washes in runs gold over his hands. Then his servants set the table. The bread grows hard in his fingers, the meat turns to gold between his teeth, and the wine mixed with water runs into his mouth as molten metal. Rich and wretched, he longs to escape his wealth and hates what he prayed for.

The river Pactolus

He lifts his shining hands to heaven: forgive me, father Dionysus, he prays, I have sinned; have pity on me and save me from this splendid ruin. The god, being kind, takes back the gift. Go to the river that runs by great Sardis, he tells him, follow it up through the hills to its source, and where the spring foams out plunge your head and body under it and wash away your fault. The king does so; the power to make gold passes from his body into the stream, and the fields along its banks are still hard and yellow with gold where its waters spread. That river is the Pactolus, whose golden sands made the kings of Lydia rich.

The ears of an ass

Hating riches now, Midas lives in the woods and fields and worships Pan, but his wits stay as thick as before. On Mount Tmolus, Pan boasts of his reed pipes before the nymphs and dares to compete with Apollo, and the mountain god Tmolus sits as judge, clearing the trees from his ears. Pan plays his rustic tune, to the delight of Midas, who happens to be there; then Apollo, crowned with laurel, his purple robe sweeping the ground, his lyre set with jewels and ivory, touches the strings, and Tmolus gives him the prize. All agree but Midas, who calls the verdict unjust, and Apollo will not let ears so dull keep human shape: he draws them out long, fills them with grey hair and makes them move at the root, the ears of a slow ass.

Midas hides them under a purple turban, but his barber sees them, and unable either to keep the secret or to tell it, he digs a hole in the ground, whispers into it what ears his master has, and fills it in. A clump of reeds grows on the spot, and when they ripen, stirred by the soft south wind, they whisper the buried words and give the king away.

The wife's version

Chaucer's Wife of Bath tells the second tale to her own ends. Her knight must learn within a year what women most desire, and among the answers he hears is that women wish to be thought able to keep a secret. That, says the Wife, is not worth a rake handle, and she proves it with Midas, changing the story so that it is his own wife who knows of the ears. Sworn to silence, she feels she shall die if she keeps it, and runs to a marsh, lays her mouth to the water, and, like a bittern booming in the mire, tells it that her husband has two long ass's ears; and now her heart is whole again.

The daughter of gold

Nathaniel Hawthorne, telling it to children, gave the king a little daughter, Marygold, whom he loves even more than gold, and a smiling stranger who grants him the golden touch at sunrise. The roses of the garden turn gold and lose their scent, and Marygold weeps for them; at breakfast the coffee and the trout turn gold; and when she runs to comfort her father and he kisses her, she becomes a golden statue. The stranger asks him then which is worth more, the golden touch or a cup of cold water, a crust of bread, his child; and Midas, cured, washes in the river and sprinkles its water on his daughter, who wakes again.

What the tellers read in it

Aristotle took the fable for a lesson in what wealth is. Money is a thing of custom, not of nature, and the art of piling it up knows no limit; but true wealth is what serves life, and a man may have coin in plenty and still perish of hunger, like Midas, whose greedy prayer turned everything set before him into gold. In Ovid the god grieves at the choice even as he grants it and takes the gift back the moment it is regretted, but the dullness that chose it stays with the king and brings him to his second shame. And the reeds teach what the barber learned, that a secret too heavy to keep will find its way into the wind.