In the hills of Phrygia there once ruled a king named Midas, a man who wanted for nothing and still wanted more. His treasury overflowed with coin and jewel, his vineyards stretched farther than a rider could cross in a day, and his palace shone so brightly with gold leaf and polished marble that travelers said it looked like a second sun had fallen among the olive trees. And yet, whenever Midas walked among his riches, a small and restless hunger followed him, whispering that somewhere there was always more to have.
He had one thing, though, that no treasury could buy and no hunger could touch: his young daughter, who filled the echoing halls of his palace with laughter whenever she ran through them, a handful of garden roses always clutched in her fist.
A Kindness Repaid
One warm afternoon, Midas’s gardeners found a stranger sleeping among the rose hedges, an old, round, wine-flushed satyr named Silenus, companion to the god Dionysus, who had wandered off during a festival and lost his way. Rather than have the old satyr driven out, Midas welcomed him as an honored guest, feasting him for days until Dionysus himself came looking for his missing friend.
The god found Silenus well fed and smiling, and in his gratitude, he offered Midas a single wish, anything at all that the king’s heart desired.
Midas should have asked for wisdom, or for peace in his kingdom, or simply for the happiness he already had and so rarely noticed. Instead, the old hunger spoke before he could stop it. He asked that everything he touched would turn to gold.
Dionysus studied him for a long moment, the way one looks at a man about to make a mistake he cannot yet see, and granted the wish anyway.
The Golden Touch
Midas could hardly believe it. He ran his fingers along a stone archway and watched it bloom into gleaming gold. He touched the petals of a rose and they stiffened into delicate golden filigree. He laid his palm against the trunk of an olive tree and it stood forever after as a monument of precious metal. By the time he reached his own feast table, laughing with the simple joy of a boy given a marvelous new toy, he believed he had been given the greatest gift any mortal had ever received.
Then he sat down to eat.
The moment his fingers closed around a ripe fig, it hardened into a cold golden lump. Bread turned to metal between his hands before it ever reached his mouth. Wine became a solid golden stream the instant it touched his lips. Midas sat before a table heaped with more riches than any king had ever owned, and realized, with a chill creeping beneath his golden rings, that he could not eat a single bite of it.
Still, even starving, he told himself it was a small price. He had wished for wonder, and wonder he had received.
What Gold Could Not Replace
It was his daughter who undid him. Seeing her father pale and distressed at a table he could not touch, she hurried to his side to comfort him, reaching out the way she always had, without a moment’s thought for the glow that had begun creeping across his hands.
Midas saw her coming. He tried to pull away, to shout a warning, but his voice caught and his body moved a heartbeat too slowly. Her small hand found his wrist, and the gold that had delighted him all day raced up her arm and over her laughing face, and in an instant, where his daughter had stood, there was only a statue, beautiful and gleaming and perfectly still.
For the first time since his wish was granted, Midas understood exactly what he had asked for.
He knelt before her gilded shape for a long time, the richest man in the world and, in that moment, the poorest. When he finally found his voice, it was to beg, not for more, but for all of it to be undone.
Dionysus, who had expected something like this all along, took pity on him. He told Midas of a river nearby, the Pactolus, whose waters could wash away a god-given curse as easily as river water washes away the dust of the road.
Midas ran as he had never run in his life. He fell to his knees at the riverbank and plunged his glowing hands into the current, and watched, weeping with relief, as the gold unraveled from his skin and sank into the riverbed in a thousand glimmering motes.
He raced back to the feast hall and wrapped his ordinary hands around his daughter’s golden shoulders, and warmth and color and breath returned to her all at once, as though she were waking from a long and peaceful sleep.
That same day, Midas took off his crown and set it in the dust, and gave away so much of his golden hoard that his courtiers whispered he had lost his senses. He had not. He had simply learned, in the hardest way a king can learn anything, which of his possessions had ever truly mattered.
To this day, travelers who visit the river Pactolus say its waters still run with flecks of gold, a king’s fortune scattered across the stones, forever less valuable to him than the daughter he nearly lost for wanting too much.
