Midas donkey ears. King Midas (myth, illustrations, film adaptations)

Midas - in ancient Greek mythology, the son of Gordius, king of Phrygia. Two popular myths in antiquity are associated with the name of Midas: about the golden touch and about the Midas judgment of the musical duel between Apollo and Marsyas (or Pan).

Midas already in childhood received a sign of future wealth. One day, ants began to crawl into his mouth and carry wheat grains there.
When the god Dionysus led his army to India, Dionysus' teacher Silenus got lost on the way. According to one version of the myth, Midas mixed wine into the water of the source from which Silenus drank and he, being dead drunk, could not continue his journey and found himself in the power of Midas, who received him in his palace, had conversations with him, and ten days later returned Silenus to Dionysus. As a reward for the return of his teacher, Dionysus promised Midas to fulfill any of his wishes. Midas wanted everything he touched to turn into gold.

Having received the gift of the golden touch, Midas, to celebrate, decided to throw a feast, but discovered that his gift had a downside: the food he touched also turned into gold.

Fearing he would die of hunger, Midas asked Dionysus to take away the gift of the golden touch. Dionysus ordered Midas to bathe in the Pactolus River. The river became gold-bearing, and Midas lost his gift.

In A Book of Wonders for Girls and Boys by 19th-century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, King Midas accidentally turned his daughter into gold.

You can make almost anything from Lego, including King Midas. Here Midas is depicted with donkey ears, the origin of which will be discussed below.

Based on the myth of Midas' gift, two cartoons were made: in 1935, The Golden Touch (directed by Walt Disney, USA) and in 1980, The King and the Dwarf (directed by Lubomir Benes, Czechoslavakia) ).

Still from Walt Disney's "The Golden Touch"

According to another ancient Greek myth, Midas was a judge in a musical competition between Apollo and Marsyas.
The goddess Athena invented the flute, but when she saw how ugly her cheeks swelled when playing it, she threw the flute away as an unnecessary thing and it was picked up by the satyr Marsyas, who learned to play it so skillfully that he challenged the god Apollo himself to a musical competition. Marsyas played the flute, and Apollo played the cithara. Midas, who was the judge, gave preference to Marsyas. Angry, Apollo flayed Marsyas and gave Midas donkey ears, which he was forced to hide under his cap. The barber, having learned the secret of Midas, dug a hole in the ground, whispered there, “King Midas has donkey ears,” and filled the hole. At this place a reed grew, which whispered about the secret to the whole world.
According to another version of the myth, Midas received donkey ears for judging a musical duel between Apollo and the god Pan.

Giacomo Palma the Younger. Apollo, Marsyas and Midas

The infamous King Midas became famous throughout the centuries for his greed (he begged Bacchus (Dionysus) to ensure that everything touched by the royal hand would immediately turn into gold) and stupidity. This last quality was eloquently evidenced by the donkey ears with which Midas was crowned for illiterate judging of the competition, which in our days, presumably, would be called a “competition of pop singers.”
The myth of the greed of King Midas.
One day, Silenus, the mentor of Bacchus, after a big drinking session, got lost in the forest and wandered for a long time in search of his comrades, until he finally reached the palace of Midas, the king of Libya. As soon as Midas saw the red nose and the body of the lost wanderer swollen with fat, he immediately recognized him as Silenus, the teacher of Bacchus, and volunteered to take him to the divine student. Seeing Silenus, Bacchus was delighted and promised that he would fulfill any request of Midas. Midas, who was very greedy, fell to his knees and asked God to make everything he touched immediately turn into gold. Bacchus immediately assured that his wish would be fulfilled, and Midas, rejoicing that his enterprise was crowned with success, on the way to the palace touched various objects with his fingers, and they all instantly turned into gold. The sight of these and other miracles caused by a simple touch filled his heart with joy, and he ordered his servants to prepare a sumptuous feast and invited all his courtiers to share in his joy. His orders were carried out without delay, and Midas beamed with happiness, sitting down at the head of the banquet table and looking around at the dishes and wines prepared for the treat. But then an unexpected discovery awaited him - tablecloths, plates and cups also turned into gold, as did food and drink, as soon as he touched them with his lips. And in the midst of abundance, he was tormented by the pangs of hunger, and the precious gift, which did not allow Midas to satisfy this hunger, became a curse for him. Exhausted, Midas walked the road along which he had proudly moved a few hours ago, again threw himself on his knees before Bacchus and asked him to take away the gift that was no longer needed, because of which he could neither eat nor drink. His despair touched Bacchus, and he told Midas to bathe in the Pactolus River if he wanted to get rid of the gift that so quickly became a curse. Midas hurried to the river and plunged into its waters, not noticing that even the sand under his feet had turned golden. And it is since then that the Paktol River flows along the golden sands on the shore.
Donkey ears of King Midas.
Ovid's poem "Metamorphoses" tells about the musical competition between Apollo and Pan. It was on the slopes of Mount Tmola. The judge was the god of this mountain. The simple, ingenuous sounds of Pan's pipe could not compare with the majestic melody of Apollo. The golden strings of the cithara thundered solemnly, and all nature plunged into deep silence. The god of Mount Tmola awarded Apollo victory. Everyone praised the great kifared god. Only Midas, the king of Phrygia, did not admire Apollo’s play, but praised Pan. Apollo became angry, grabbed Midas by the ears and pulled them out. Since then, King Midas became the owner of donkey ears, which he carefully hid under a large turban, trying to keep his deformity a secret. But he did not succeed: the talkative barber, who learned the secret of Midas, unable to remain silent, dug a hole and whispered his secret. A reed grew from the hole, a pipe was cut out of the reed, and the song of the pipe glorified the unlucky king throughout the world. And the saddened Pan, defeated by Apollo, retreated deeper into the thicket of the forests; The tender sounds of his pipe are often heard there, full of sadness, and young nymphs listen to them with love.
However, the newest discoveries of American archaeologists refute the popular opinion about the king and brilliantly confirm the saying that the truth should be sought not just anywhere, but in wine.
Scientists from the Archaeological Museum of the University of Pennsylvania discovered that 2,700 years ago in Asia Minor, at the wake of the deceased Midas, a strange drink flowed like a river (now it would be called a cocktail) - a mixture of beer, wine and honey.
Probably the modern drinker would not be filled with enthusiasm at the thought of this nectar. But meticulous chemical analysis showed that exactly the same grog or punch was consumed by the Greeks on Crete during the time of Minos, and in the Bronze Age it was drunk by the inhabitants of Mycenae, the city whose mythical ruler, Agamemnon, commanded the Greek army in the Trojan War.
According to scientists, the discovery of the remains of a cocktail in the tomb of Midas in the center of modern Turkey, near Ankara, indicates that the myth about this king is at least partially true. His subjects, the Phrygians, turned out not to be from the Middle East at all, but Europeans from what is now called northern Greece.
The fact is that the cocktail mentioned above belongs to the ancient European drinking tradition. Its remains were found in excavations in Scandinavian lands and even in Scotland, where traces of material culture dating back five thousand years were discovered.
When King Midas sat on the Phrygian throne in the 8th century BC, the peoples of the Middle East had been smoking wine for five thousand years. But in Greece it appeared only in ancient times.
Archaeologists at the University of Pennsylvania have been excavating the capital of Phrygia, Gordion, famous, among other things, for the notorious Gordian Knot for half a century. In 1957, they managed to find the wooden sarcophagus of Midas with the well-preserved skeleton of the king, but only recently did it occur to them to do a full chemical analysis of the contents of the clay vessels found in the tomb, and it turned out that the participants in the funeral meal feasted on fried lamb and goat meat, seasoned with Mediterranean herbs and some legumes, most likely lentils. And in a bronze barrel with an image of a lion and a lamb were the dried remains of that same cocktail.
If you believe the myth, Midas was a Macedonian king and lived in a palace surrounded by a garden in which almost only roses grew. It was at this stage of his biography that the god Dionysus endowed the king with the deceptively useful ability to turn everything his hand touched into gold. Very soon, Midas realized that he had been stupid, asking God to give him such an inconvenient gift (both food and drinks he touched turned into gold), and began to beg to take this ability back. Dionysus respected this request, but imposed certain conditions on his agreement, and Midas had to go to Asia, where he was adopted by the childless Phrygian king Gordius.
According to scientists, the Phrygians were an Indo-European people, immigrants from Greece, who crossed the Mediterranean Sea at the very end of the first millennium BC or a little earlier and settled in Asia Minor, conquering the Hittite tribes that dominated there. And Midas, who was not at all a greedy fool, but a brave and skillful warrior, ruled Phrygia at the time of its highest economic and military power. The neighboring Assyrian tribes knew him under the name Mita and called him a warrior king.
It was during the era of Midas that brass was invented - a beautiful yellow alloy of copper and zinc. According to some assumptions, it was this invention that made a great impression on contemporaries and gave rise to the myth of the king who turned everything into gold.
Around 700 BC, Midas died of natural causes at the age of 60-65.
However, there is also a hypothesis, the supporters of which claim that the Phrygians came not from Europe, but from the east. This theory was mentioned by the ancient chronicler Herodotus, who reported that, according to the Egyptians, the Phrygians were the oldest people on Earth.
Archaeologists did not find gold or other treasures in Gordion (but they found a lot of beautiful carved wooden furniture with mosaic inserts, perhaps the oldest on Earth). True, there is also no evidence that Midas led a half-starved existence. He ate meat, drank cocktails and, judging by the state of his skeleton, did not suffer from any serious illnesses during his life. And, of course, he didn’t wear donkey ears.
In the end, Phrygia came under the rule of Lydia, and she, in turn, was captured by the Persians, because the Lydian king Croesus did not find anything better than to heed the thoughtless and irresponsible, to put it mildly, advice of the Delphic oracle and attack Persia. And in the end he destroyed one of the greatest empires of antiquity - his own.

Nicolas Poussin. Midas and Bacchus

Contest between Pan and Apollo, circa 1630

J.B. Tiepolo. King Midas judges the competition between Apollo and Pan

Gillies van Valckenborch. Midas honors Bacchus and Silenus. 1598.

The myth of King Midas (myth of ancient Greece)

One day, when Dionysus and his merry company were wandering through the wooded mountains of Thrace, somewhere along the way they lost their elder Silenus. He got completely drunk, followed them, walked, stumbling at every step, and unbeknownst to himself fell behind. Local peasants saw old Silenus and took him to King Midas. Midas immediately recognized the teacher of the great Dionysus and received him as the most honored guest. For nine days he treated old Silenus and arranged sumptuous feasts for him. And then he took him to Dionysus. Dionysus was delighted to see his beloved teacher and offered Midas any gift he wanted for himself.
“Oh, great Dionysus, make sure that everything turns into gold, no matter what I touch,” Midas asked God.
“How unreasonable these people are,” the great god thought to himself, but did not say anything to King Midas and fulfilled his cherished desire. Satisfied, Midas went home, he felt like the happiest man in the world. Still would! So he bent down and picked up a stone, and immediately the ordinary gray cobblestone turned into a gold ingot. He tore off a green branch and it also became golden. He puts his hand into the stream - and immediately golden water flows in it. Midas rejoices and has fun, his happiness knows no bounds.
He finally came home, he couldn’t wait to immediately touch all the things in the palace so that they would become gold. Midas ran around the rooms for a long time, he even got tired. He washes his hands, and golden water flows from them, sat down on an ordinary wooden chair, and it turns into a golden throne. Midas's joy has no end, there are countless riches around him: everything is gold. King Midas decided to celebrate such an event and give himself a feast for the whole world. He ordered to bring him the best food and wine. The servants carried out the king's order and brought him lunch. But, oh woe! Whatever Midas touched, everything he picked up became golden: bread, meat, and wine. How will he eat now, will he really have to die of hunger? And then the foolish, greedy king only realized what trouble he had brought upon himself. King Midas prayed to Dionysus:
- O generous God, have mercy on me. Forgive me, stupid! Take back your precious gift!
Dionysus took pity on the foolish Midas and said to him:
- Go to the sources of Pactol and there, in its waters, wash this gift and your guilt from your body.
Midas did not linger and immediately went to Lydia, to the sources of Pactolus. He entered the waters of the river and splashed there for a long time until he was completely cleansed. Golden water flowed along the bed of Pactol, and since then gold has always been found there.

Midas was a passionate admirer of the god of wine, more than once sat at the same table with him and knew all his companions. When one day the peasants brought him some drunken old man, Midas recognized him as Dionysus’ teacher, Silenus. Midas warmly received him and, after a ten-day merry feast, personally brought Silenus to Dionysus. The delighted god volunteered to fulfill his every wish. Then Midas wished that everything he touched would turn into gold. Dionysus expressed regret that nothing better came to his mind, but he kept his word.

At first, Midas was beside himself with delight. He broke off a twig from an oak tree and it turned into gold, picked up a stone from the ground and it turned into gold, picked an apple from the tree and it became golden, no worse than the apple from the orchards. But when Midas sat down at the table and took a piece of bread, he could not eat it, as it immediately turned into gold. Gold creaked in Midas’s teeth when he put a piece of meat in his mouth, and wine turned into gold when he wanted to take a sip. In desperation, Midas turned to Dionysus, begging him to free him from this curse. And since the gods are merciful if people admit their guilt and ask for mercy, Dionysus granted his request. He ordered Midas to come to the Pactolus River and bathe in it in order to wash away the guilt for his unreasonable wish. Midas happily obeyed - and all that remained from his misadventures with gold was legend and golden sand in the river, which today is called Gedir.

Having learned the vanity of wealth, Midas lost interest in his duties as a ruler and indulged in wanderings through forests and fields. He fell in love with solitude and simplicity; but here too he went too far. One day, while walking on Mount Tmol, he became an uninvited witness to a musical competition between the god of the shepherds Pan and. Pan's playing on the shepherd's pipe could not be compared with the divine sounds of Apollo's golden lyre, and the god of Mount Tmol, who judged this competition, rightfully awarded primacy to Apollo. But then Midas, whose opinion no one asked, raised a cry, protesting against this decision: they say, a simple shepherd’s song was much better. You can actually argue about tastes, but not with the gods. The angry Apollo attacked Midas and pulled his ears so much that they became long, like a donkey’s.

Midas carefully hid his ears under his long hair, but the servant who cut the king’s hair from time to time discovered this secret of his. It was dangerous to give it away, but it was also unbearable to keep it, so the servant went far outside the city, dug a hole in the ground and whispered into it: “King Midas has donkey ears.” However, even the earth cannot hide a secret once revealed: a reed grew over the filled-in hole, and at the first breeze, the reed rustled the words sown in the ground, and they spread throughout the world.

The legends about Midas sound so fabulous that for many centuries he was seen as just a mythical character. Meanwhile, the “father of history” Herodotus, and after him a number of other historians, mentioned Midas as a real ruler. And in the last century, an inscription of the Assyrian king Sargon I was found, dating back to 717 - 715. BC e., in which King Midas from the Phrygian Gordion (in the Assyrian transcription of Mida) appears as an undeniably historical figure. In Phrygia, there is a rock tomb with a richly decorated facade, which is traditionally called the “Tomb of Midas” (to the east of the current city of Kütahya). Archaeologists also found Gordion, the capital of King Mida. So, Midas from Gordion really existed. Then how can we explain that he became the hero of fairy tales? The story of gold most likely reflects the wealth of this king; The shine of gold has long aroused human imagination. But today an explanation has been found for the story about Midas’s donkey ears. In the ruins of Gordion, coins were found with the name and image of Midas: instead of a crown on his head, he had a donkey’s head along with ears. Thus, he really had donkey ears, though not on his head, but on his hat; Midas ruled at the end of the 8th century. BC e. His mother was clearly not the goddess Cybele (it was just that in ancient times monarchs liked to clean up their genealogy), but his father could well have been Gordius, who, apparently, also really existed.

The legends about Midas are usually told as two separate, independent stories. The first of them is one of the ancient mythological parables about the “curse of gold”, the second is one of the most common fairy tales in the world. The German researcher Lehmann-Nietzsche counted a total of twenty-eight “national versions” of this plot (Greek, Roman, but also Armenian, Serbian, Irish, Moroccan, Persian, Mongolian, Indian, etc.), and he took into account only folklore options. This means that this does not include the author’s adaptations of this plot, such as, for example, Havlíček-Borovský’s poem “King Laurel” (1870), widely known in the Czech Republic, or Vrchlický’s play “Midas’s Ears” (1890).

Ovid used the story of Midas in his "". The oldest images of Midas on vases date back to the end of the 7th century. BC e. Of the European masters, we should first of all mention Schiavone (“The Judgment of Midas,” mid-16th century) and Poussin (“Midas and Bacchus,” c. 1630). The opera “King Midas” was written in 1931 by Kempf.

"Midas and Medusa: the shortest novel"

Expressions with the name of Midas have become common nouns: “Midas’s barber” (who cannot keep secrets), “Midas’s court” (the court of the ignorant), “Midas’s ears” (about stupidity or ignorance that cannot be hidden).

“Intending to write a Midas judgment
I wanted to copy your ears for Midas"
- I. A. Krylov;

S. Zweig: “...like King Midas, he choked on his own gold”(“Discovery of Eldorado”) - here is the image of Midas, dying from the magical gift of turning everything into gold.

Robot boxer Midas from the 2011 film Real Steel.