![]() ![]() The book follows the popular model of the erotic elegy, as made famous by figures such as Tibullus or. It was first published in 16 BC in five books, but Ovid, by his own account, later edited it down into the three-book edition that survives today. When Apollo was declared the winner, Midas questioned this judgment, and Apollo made a pair of ass’s ears grow from Midas’ head.īut this version has less to teach us about the dangers of greed than the tale of ‘the Midas touch’, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that it’s less famous. (Ovid) Amores is Ovid 's first completed book of poetry, written in elegiac couplets. Midas was present when Marsyas, the inventor of the double-flute (in some versions, Pan, with his Pan pipes, is present instead of Marsyas) competed against Apollo, with his lyre, to see who could produce the most beautiful music. There’s one other curious story involving Midas which is worth mentioning, and it has nothing to do with gold, and everything to do with a pair of ass’s ears. ![]() ![]() This version of the Midas story, of course, loses the moral force of Ovid’s telling, where greed is the central human emotion. Dionysus duly obliged, granting Midas’ wish that the gold be turned to water, in a sort of inversion of the Ovid story (or the first part of it, at least). However, the spring flowed with liquid gold rather than water, so Midas called upon Dionysus to help him. Indeed, there are even alternative versions of the ‘golden touch’ story: Plutarch, for instance, who styled himself as a historian and chronicler but was in many ways as powerful a mythmaker as Ovid, told of how Midas became lost in the desert, and although there was no water to be found, a spring welled up out of the earth. ![]()
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