Everyone knows the story of King Midas of Phrygia and his golden touch. But what if there was a guy of the same name who ruled in that very area? Let’s dive into the golden truth of the real king Midas.
The Man Behind the Myth
Who was Midas’s family and where was he from? In mythology, Midas said to have brought his metallic touch to Phrygia, part of modern Turkey, as Ovid recounts in his Metamorphoses.
Hyginus even dubs him the “son of the mother goddess from Timolus” - a.k.a. Cybele - the Magna Mater from Phrygia. In his Description of Greece, Pausanias mentions the city of Ancyra, in modern Turkey, “which Midas son of Gordius had founded in former time.” So there’s a long tradition of a guy named Midas, son of a fellow named Gordius, in Phrygia. Where does he begin to appear in history?
For starters, Herodotus records in his Histories that a RL Midas was the first foreigner to send offerings to Delphi, Apollo’s sacred oracle. Herodotus mentions a fellow named Gyges, who “was the first foreigner whom we know who placed offerings at Delphi after the king of Phrygia, Midas son of Gordias.” This Gordias was the same guy that created the Gordian knot, sliced through by Alexander the Great.. What did the guy with all the gold give to Delphi? “For Midas too made an offering: namely, the royal seat on which he sat to give judgment, and a marvelous seat it is,” enthuses Herodotus. Sounds like an appropriate gift.
This Midas was probably the same king as the one who ruled Phrygia at the end of the eighth century B.C. So does he pop up anywhere besides Greek historical and mythological sources?
Midas, Meet Mita
For one, he appears in the records of the Assyrian king Sargon II, who reigned from 721 to 705 B.C., as "Mita." Mita/Midas is roughly contemporaneous with this monarch; the historian Eusebius dates Midas’s reign to contemporary times: 738 B.C. to 696-695 B.C., though Julius Africanus said it ended around 675-674 B.C. In Sargon’s annals, one king named Amris of Tabal rebelled against his Assyrian overlord. Sargon records how he punished the disobedience: “But he did not keep the treaty and sent his ambassador to Urzaha, king of Armenia, and to Mita, King of the Moschians, who had seized my province.”
Later, while Sargon was fighting in the Levant, his deputy in Asia Minor attacked Mita. States Sargon, “My lieutenant, the governor of the country of Kue [Cilicia, in southern Asia Minor], attacked Mita, the Moschian, and 3000 of his towns; he demolished these towns, destroyed them, burnt them with fire, and led away many captives. And … the Moschian, who had never submitted to the kings my predecessors and had never changed his will, sent his envoy to me to the very borders of the sea of the rising sun, bearing professions of allegiance and tributes.”
Who were the Moschians? They were the Mushku from eastern Anatolia. Some scholars hold that Mushku and Phrygia were one and the same, even though Phrygia was in western Anatolia. Even if these two polities were separate originally, by the eighth century, they seemed to have assimilated into one called Phrygia, ruled over by a King Mita/Midas. There is even a citadel in Phrygia, dubbed “Midas City” or “Midas Monument” by modern scholars, that contains fifteen inscriptions in written Phrygian. Archaeologists even discovered one line possibly dedicated to Midas himself! Must be nice to be worshipped after his death at this gorgeous monument.
More From Midas
When he wasn’t involved in Assyrian political shenanigans - rebelling and making peace later, perhaps because of external threats from rival nations - Midas dominated the marriage market. A fragment from Aristotle records the Phrygian king marrying Princess Hermodike of Kyme, daughter of King Agamemnon. Another ancient source called her Demodike, but both men said this Phrygian queen from an Anatolian city struck some of the first coins. But this princess might have married a later Phrygian king also named Midas, since coins only popped up later. Both Gordias and Midas seem to have been dynastic names for the Phrygian kings.
Whether or not Midas was happy with his bride, his triumph didn’t last too long. According to Strabo, Midas’s kingdom was overrun by the Cimmerians, a people formerly under the sway of the Assyrians. When that happened, “Midas drank bull's blood, they say, and thus went to his doom.” The capital of Phrygia, Gordion, was destroyed around this time, agreeing with this account of invasion.
Where was Midas buried? Archaeologists found a tomb in Gordion that they thought might’ve been Midas’s. More probably, it belonged to his dad, Gordias. It definitely belonged to a high-status individual, due to its rich grave goods and size of the mound: an eternal palace fit for a king! Wherever Midas ended his real-life reign, it probably was in as magnificent a manner as his papa.