Why did King Midas have donkey ears?

Done with gold, not with folly

After he washes off the golden touch, Ovid’s Midas wants nothing more to do with riches. He leaves the palace for the woods and fields and follows Pan, the goatish shepherd god who lives in mountain caves. But his mind, Ovid says, stays as thick as it was, and it is about to cost him again.

Pipes against lyre

On Mount Tmolus, the steep ridge between Sardis and the small town of Hypaepa, Pan is showing off to the nymphs. He plays light tunes on his pipes of reeds joined with wax and boasts that Apollo’s music is nothing beside his. A contest is arranged, and the judge is the mountain itself: Tmolus, an old god, sits down on his own slopes, clears the trees away from his ears and wears a crown of oak leaves.

Pan goes first, with rustic tunes that delight Midas, who happens to be listening. Then Apollo steps up, laurel in his golden hair, a robe of Tyrian purple sweeping the ground, a lyre set with gems and ivory in his left hand. His playing settles the matter. Tmolus orders Pan to lower his pipes before the lyre, and everyone present approves, except Midas, who calls the award unjust.

Ears to match

Apollo decides that ears so dull do not deserve a human shape. He draws them out long, fills them with gray hair and makes them twitch at the base, leaving the rest of Midas human. As Brookes More translates the line, “Midas had ears of a slow-moving ass.”

The punishment follows Ovid’s logic of fitting changes. The donkey was the ancient picture of a dull creature, so a man deaf to beauty gets a dull beast’s ears. Midas hides them under a purple turban, a tiara in Ovid’s Latin, the tall headdress of eastern kings.

The barber and the reeds

One man has to see them: the servant who cuts the king’s hair when it grows long. He dares not tell anyone, and he cannot bear to keep quiet. So he digs a shallow hole, murmurs into it what kind of ears his master has, and fills it with earth. A thick bed of reeds springs up on the spot. About a year later, stirred by a gentle south wind, the reeds repeat the buried words and give the secret away.

Reeds are a pointed choice. They are what Pan’s pipes are made of, and Ovid has already told, in Book 1, how the nymph Syrinx became the marsh reeds that Pan bound into his first pipes. The instrument Midas preferred ends by exposing him. A voice that can only repeat what it heard is also the fate of the nymph Echo, in Ovid’s Book 3.

The same secret elsewhere

The servant who cannot keep a royal secret turns up far from Phrygia. Irish legend gives King Labraid Loingsech the ears of a horse; his barber tells a tree, and a harp made from its wood sings the secret aloud. A Korean tale in the Samguk yusa says King Gyeongmun of Silla had ears like a donkey’s, and the one man who knew shouted it into a bamboo grove, which went on repeating it in the wind.

The Midas behind the myth was a real king of Phrygia, but no ancient record says a word about his ears.