King Midas and the Golden Touch

At a Glance

• Central figures: King Midas, ruler of Phrygia, whose greed drives the story; Dionysus, god of wine, who grants and later reverses the wish; Silenus, companion of Dionysus; and Midas’s daughter, transformed by the curse.
• Setting: The kingdom of Phrygia and the river Pactolus; the story belongs to the Greek mythological tradition and involves the gods Dionysus and Apollo.
• The turn: Midas asks Dionysus for the power to turn everything he touches into gold - and Dionysus grants it, already knowing how it will end.
• The outcome: Midas cannot eat or drink; he transforms his own daughter into a golden statue; in despair, he begs Dionysus to undo the gift. Dionysus tells him to wash in the Pactolus, and the curse passes into the river.
• The legacy: The sands of the Pactolus ran rich with gold after Midas washed away the curse; in a separate episode, Midas is given donkey ears by Apollo as punishment for judging Pan’s music superior in a divine contest.

Silenus was found drunk in a garden somewhere in Phrygia - tangled in the roses, by most accounts, and unaware that he had wandered away from Dionysus’s retinue. The servants brought him to Midas, who recognized the old satyr at once and kept him as a guest for ten days, feasting him, hearing his stories, sending him back to Dionysus in good health and with proper ceremony. Dionysus was pleased. He offered the king a gift - one wish, whatever Midas desired.

Midas did not hesitate. He asked that everything he touched be turned to gold.

The Wish Granted

Dionysus paused - he knew the shape of what Midas was asking for - but he had made the offer, and so he granted it. Midas went home in high spirits. He ran his fingers along a doorpost, and it blazed yellow behind him. He snapped a branch from an olive tree; it hung from his hand, rigid, gold leaf to gold bark. He picked up a stone and set it down as a nugget. His vaults, already full, were nothing to what a single afternoon of walking through his own palace could produce, and Midas understood this with the particular joy of a man who has always thought the problem was simply that he did not have enough.

He sat down to eat. He lifted bread to his mouth. Between his fingers and his lips the bread hardened, and he set it back on the table as a small loaf of gold. He reached for wine; the cup went solid, and the wine inside it - just before it touched his mouth - went solid too. He tried again with another dish, then another. Everything. Every grape, every fig, every scrap of cheese. All of it gold before it reached his tongue.

His Daughter

Midas was still sitting there, hungry and beginning to understand, when his daughter came in. She saw her father at the table surrounded by gold food, and she came to him - she put her hand on his arm - and he, without thinking, turned and took her face in his hands.

She did not cry out. There was no time for that. She went rigid, and the warmth left her, and the color left her, and she stood there in the posture of a daughter reaching toward her father, gold from her hair to her feet.

Midas looked at what he had made and did not move for a long time. The vaults were full. The palace walls were gold. His food was gold and his daughter was gold and he could not drink and he could not eat and there was nothing left in the world he wanted to touch.

The River Pactolus

He went back to Dionysus. He was not a man much given to pleading, but he pled now - begged the god to take the gift away, to restore his daughter, to let him eat bread that was just bread. Dionysus listened. He told Midas to go to the river Pactolus, which ran out of Mount Tmolus, and to wash his hands in the headwaters. What the touch had given, the river would take.

Midas went. He waded into the Pactolus and put his hands in, and the gold ran out of them - not like dirt rinsing off but like something alive leaving, a warmth going downstream, and the riverbed turned golden under his feet and the sand along the banks caught the color and kept it. The Pactolus ran with gold after that. The curse had passed from the king into the water and stayed there.

He went home. His daughter stood in the hall where he had left her. He touched her shoulder - carefully, afraid - and she breathed, and her color came back, and she was warm, and she was his daughter again. The gold in the palace walls was gold again. The bread on the table was bread.

The Donkey Ears

That was not the last of Midas’s troubles. Some time later, he found himself on the slopes of Tmolus to hear a contest between Pan and Apollo - Pan playing his pipes, Apollo playing the lyre, with the mountain god Tmolus as judge. Tmolus declared for Apollo. So did everyone present. Midas alone said Pan had played better.

Apollo turned and looked at him. He did not shout. He simply changed the ears that had heard such a wrong verdict into the ears of a donkey - long, grey, mobile, unmistakably the ears of an ass - and walked away.

Midas pulled his cap down over them and went home. He kept the ears hidden, summer and winter, and for a long time only his barber knew the truth. The barber could not tell anyone - Midas had made that clear - but the secret sat in him like something that needed to come out. He went to a field, dug a hole, put his face down close to the earth, and whispered into it: King Midas has donkey ears. Then he filled the hole back in and felt better.

Reeds grew up from that spot. When the wind came across the field, the reeds bent and rustled, and anyone who passed close enough could hear what they said. The secret moved from person to person across Phrygia until there was no one left who did not know.

Midas kept the cap on anyway. The ears stayed. There was no river this time to wash into, and no god inclined toward mercy - only the reeds bending in the wind, saying what they knew, for as long as the reeds grew.