What does “the Midas touch” mean?

The wish

Ovid tells the story in Book 11 of the Metamorphoses, written in Rome around AD 8. It begins with a lost old man. Phrygian farmers find Silenus, the aged tutor of the wine god Dionysus (Ovid calls the god Bacchus), staggering with years and wine. They crown him with garlands and lead him to their king. Midas knows him from the god’s rites, feasts with him for ten days and nights, then brings him home to his foster son.

The grateful god lets the king name any reward he likes. Midas answers without a pause: “Grant that whatsoever I may touch with my body may be turned to yellow gold.” Ovid says the god agreed, sorry that Midas had chosen something that would hurt him.

On the way home the king tests his new power. A twig pulled from an oak turns to gold, then a stone, a clod of earth, a handful of wheat, an apple fit for the garden of the Hesperides. Even the water he washes in falls from his hands like a shower of gold.

The dinner

Then his servants set the table. Bread stiffens into metal in his hand, meat turns to flakes of gold between his teeth, wine slides down his throat as liquid gold. Ovid sums up the king at that moment:

Amazed by this strange mishap, rich and yet wretched, he seeks to flee his wealth and hates what he but now has prayed for. No store of food can relieve his hunger; his throat is parched with burning thirst, and through his own fault he is tortured by hateful gold.

Lifting his shining arms to the sky, Midas confesses his fault and begs the god to “save me from this curse that looks so fair.”

Washed into the Pactolus

Dionysus relents. Go to the river that flows past Sardis, he says, follow it up to its spring and plunge in, head and body. Midas obeys, and the touch leaves him and passes into the stream. Ovid adds that the fields along its banks are still hard and yellow with that gold. It is an origin story: it explains why the Pactolus, in Lydia, carried gold dust.

That river gold was real, and so was the king, as the page on whether Midas was a real person shows.

From curse to compliment

Today the phrase has lost its dinner. To have the Midas touch is to turn every venture into money: a producer whose shows all hit, an investor who never seems to lose. It is praise. In Ovid it means the opposite: a wish granted too literally, a man who owns everything and can eat nothing.

Ancient readers took the warning seriously. Aristotle, in his Politics (1257b), uses Midas to separate coin from wealth: a man can have heaps of money and still die of hunger, like the king in the fable, so real wealth is what you can live on.

Two details people often get wrong. The golden daughter who turns to metal when her father kisses her is not in Ovid; Nathaniel Hawthorne added her, Marygold, in his retelling for children, “The Golden Touch.” And Midas did not grow much wiser: in Ovid’s very next scene he earns the ears of a donkey.