I love cautionary tales. And as everyone knows, the best cautionary tales are the ones with
lessons that are completely inapplicable to real life. Ill-advised magical wishes,
powerful sorceresses with extremely specific instructions, highly judgmental magical beings
doling out punishments to the unworthy - I may be shaky at best on filing taxes
and annual car maintenance, but you better believe I know what I’m not gonna wish for
in the event of a surprise genie or divine boon. Now when it comes to ill-advised wish stories,
King Midas of Phrygia is probably the most well-known mythological case,
and is mostly known in the mythos for being broadly very dumb. If Midas is in a myth,
you better believe he’s not gonna have a good time, and you better believe it will be 100%
his own fault. King Midas is most well known for two particularly embarrassing
vignettes in his career recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, so let’s talk about ‘em today.
Now our story begins when our sweet bacchanal boy Dionysus notices his crew of revelers and
followers is apparently short one member - the elderly satyr Silenus, a drunken prophet and
also Dionysus’s foster father, is nowhere to be found. This is because he got super drunk and
passed out in a region that happened to belong to King Midas, and was captured and brought to his
court. Now fortunately for Silenus, King Midas is up-to-date on his Orphic Dionysian lore and
recognizes him as a follower of Dionysus, and honors his presence in the court with a full
ten days of feasting and revelry. When Dionysus rolls into town to pick him up, he’s so happy
with Midas’s treatment of Silenus that he offers Midas a boon, any boon. Midas has prepared his
whole life for this moment and asks Dionysus to make everything he touches turn to pure gold.
Now Dionysus may be the god of wine and drunken madness, but he knows a bad idea when he hears
one. But he did promise Midas any boon, so he reluctantly agrees, and Midas is absolutely
delighted by his newfound golden touch - until dinnertime, when he learns that food and drink
count as part of “everything” and turn to gold as soon as he tries to eat. Gold is, regrettably,
not very nutritious, and this boon situation threatens to become a very bad time very quickly.
Now, fun fact, there’s a popular version of this story - that I actually referenced
in an earlier video, whoops - where Midas accidentally turns his daughter to gold,
but as far as I can tell that version was invented in 1851 by American author Nathaniel
Hawthorne and isn’t referenced any earlier than that, which is a shame cuz it’s a pretty
gnarly twist. In Ovid’s version, at least, Midas doesn’t need any more motivation than
hunger to realize that this particular wish was ill-advised and beg Dionysus to help him.
Dionysus directs him to the river Pactolus and tells him to jump in, which washes Midas clean
of the gift-turned-curse and as a fun bonus loads the river full of rich gold deposits,
which was actually true - the Pactolus was loaded with electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver
that the Lydian iron age culture used to make the first coins in history. Thanks, Midas!
Now Midas, free of his curse and the consequences of his actions, has had enough of gold and riches
for a while, and decides to relax and unwind by living alone in the woods, which coincidentally
is where the wilderness god Pan likes to hang out with his Pan posse. Pan is in fact
playing on his pan pipes having a grand old time when he gets super into the moment and
boasts that his music is so good, it’s even better than Apollo’s. Now Apollo is never
one to pass up an opportunity for some petty conflict, so he zorps down to the mountain to
challenge this bold claim and he and Pan declare an official competition, with Tmolus, god of the
mountain, serving as an impartial judge. Pan cuts loose on the panpipes and plays
a beautiful rustic melody, which is very nice and charming, but Apollo’s classically trained
and also the literal god of music and his lyre playing is straight-up breathtaking, so Tmolus
declares Apollo the better musician. Everyone’s pretty happy with this outcome except for Midas,
who’s been listening in, fails to read the room and decides to play satyr’s advocate by declaring
that he thinks Pan is actually the better player! Apollo’s like “if this chump really believes that,
he must be rocking some donkey ears or something” and the raw power of that sick nasty burn
physically transforms Midas’s normal human ears into donkey ears. Midas hides those bad boys
with a big turban so nobody finds out the truth or questions him for anything beyond dubious fashion
choices, but he can’t hide from his barber, who stalwartly keeps it a secret from everyone,
but eventually gets so pent up that he goes out, digs a hole, whispers the truth into the hole and
then buries it, which sounds like something you’d get recommended in therapy and would
probably have been totally harmless if it hadn’t caused reeds to grow from the spot that whispered
the secret whenever the wind blew through them. Truly hilarious, we need more plants like this.
[Glitter And Gold]