Midas was a king of Phrygia with whom many myths became associated, as well as two later members of the Phrygian royal house. Son (or adoptee) of Gordias and linked with Cybele, the legendary Midas is remembered for the "golden touch" granted by Dionysus and for the donkey's ears he received after judging against Apollo in a music contest. Historical kings named Midas ruled Phrygia in the eighth and (as a royal ancestor) sixth centuries BCE; they are not identical with the mythic figure of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
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I.Mythological Midas
Legends of the earliest Midas are many and often contradictory. Some make him king of Pessinus, adopted by Gordias and Cybele; others place his youth in Macedonian Bermion, where Herodotus describes a fragrant wild rose garden of "Midas son of Gordias." He is sometimes given a son Lityerses, a demonic reaper. Homer does not name Midas, mentioning instead the Phrygian kings Mygdon and Otreus.
II.Golden touch
In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Dionysus's foster-father Silenus, drunk and lost, was brought to Midas. The king entertained him for ten days and restored him to the god. Dionysus offered Midas any reward; Midas asked that all he touched turn to gold. The gift became a curse when food, drink, and (in some retellings) his daughter turned to metal. He begged release; Dionysus told him to wash in the river Pactolus, which thereafter carried gold in its sands. The phrase "Midas touch" survives for the power to make everything profitable—or dangerously excessive.
III.Ears of a donkey
Having learned to hate wealth, Midas became a follower of Pan. When Pan challenged Apollo to a musical contest judged by Tmolus, Midas alone preferred Pan's pipes; Apollo gave him the ears of a donkey. Midas hid them under a turban; only his barber knew. Unable to keep silent, the barber whispered the secret into a hole in the earth; reeds grew there and, when the wind blew, murmured that Midas had donkey's ears.
IV.Historical namesakes
A historical King Midas of Phrygia in the late eighth century BCE—likely the Mita of Assyrian texts, king of the Mushki—fought Assyria and is said to have died when the Cimmerians sacked Gordium. The Great Tumulus at Gordion (timbers cut c. 740 BCE) is often discussed as a possible royal tomb of his generation, though attribution remains debated. Herodotus also knows a later Phrygian royal Midas as grandfather of Adrastus in Croesus's time. The atlas character midas is the mythic king of the golden touch and the judgment of Pan and Apollo, not these historical rulers.