King Midas

Midas was a real title if not a real man — kings of that name ruled Phrygia, and one is attested in Assyrian records. The myth attaches to the name a lesson about wishes so clean that it has never needed retelling to stay current.

The wish was a reward. Midas found Silenus, the old satyr who had tutored Dionysus, drunk and lost in his rose garden, and treated him generously for ten days before returning him. Dionysus, grateful, offered anything. Midas asked that everything he touched turn to gold.

It worked immediately and comprehensively. Ovid lingers on the discovery: a twig turns to metal in his hand, a stone, an apple. Then he sits down to eat, and the bread is gold in his teeth and the wine is gold in his throat. In the version most people know, his daughter runs to him and becomes a statue — an addition by later writers, but the one that gives the story its teeth.

Dionysus took it back. Midas was sent to wash in the river Pactolus, and the power went out of him into the water; the Pactolus really did carry gold, and this is the myth that explains why. The Lydian kings' wealth, Croesus included, came from that river.

He appears once more and comes off no better. Judging a music contest between Apollo and Pan, he voted for Pan, and Apollo gave him donkey's ears for it. He hid them under a cap; his barber, unable to keep it in, whispered it into a hole in the ground, and the reeds that grew there repeated it whenever the wind blew.