There were at least three King Midases, and one was real
The Midas of the golden touch belongs to myth, but a flesh-and-blood Phrygian monarch of that name reigned in the late 8th century BCE, most likely the Mita whom Assyrian scribes called king of the Mushki. Legend blended them, handing one man gold fingers, donkey's ears and a river full of electrum.
Myths cast the legendary Midas as son or adopted son of Gordias, credited with founding the Phrygian capital Gordium and tying the Gordian Knot, and place them in the 2nd millennium BCE, before the Trojan War. Homer, oddly, never mentions either. Arrian tells a different origin: an oracle promised the quarrelling Phrygians that a wagon would bring them a king, and Midas duly rolled up with his parents. Herodotus added a third Midas of the royal house in the 6th century BCE, and wrote that a Midas son of Gordias gave Delphi a splendid judgement throne, the first foreign gift there before Gyges of Lydia.
The golden touch comes chiefly from Ovid. When Dionysus's drunken foster father, the satyr Silenus, wandered into Phrygia, Midas hosted him for ten days and returned him, and the grateful god granted a wish. Midas asked that everything he touched turn to gold, and was thrilled until his food and wine hardened too. Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1852 retelling added a daughter, Marygold, turned to gold by his embrace. Dionysus told him to wash in the river Pactolus, which explained its gold-rich sands, a handy origin tale for the Lydian dynasty that claimed Midas as ancestor. Aristotle, grimmer, recorded a version where the curse was never lifted and he starved.
Soured on wealth, Midas followed the rustic god Pan. When Pan's pipes lost a contest to Apollo's lyre, Midas alone objected, and Apollo gave him donkey's ears for his poor judgement. The archaeologist Sarah Morris showed in 2004 that donkey ears were a Bronze Age royal emblem, worn by King Tarkasnawa of Mira on a bilingual seal, so the Greek story may explain away a foreign regal symbol.
The hidden-ears tale travels widely. An Irish king, Labraid Loingsech, killed each year's barber until one confided the secret to a willow; in Central Asian legend a whispered secret flooded a kingdom and formed Lake Issyk-Kul.
Source: Midas
