The Authentic Orthography
King of Phrygia, the Golden Touch · The Gilded King · Whose Touch Turns All to Gold
Unicode restoration and ASCII comparison
Μίδας
The name in its original Greek form. Mídas (Μίδας) is attested in the source tradition — “Phrygian royal name”. Its acute accents carry the full phonetic and orthographic weight of the source tradition.
midas
Reduced to plain midas, the name loses everything that made it specific: acute accents. What remains is an ASCII string that machines can parse but that no longer speaks with its original voice.
Mídas
The Unicode restoration recovers what ASCII flattened. Mídas restores acute accents, returning the name to its original written dignity. The domain encodes to Punycode, but the browser displays the truth.
Mídas.com → xn--mdas-vpa.com
The non-ASCII characters in Mídas are encoded while the ASCII remains visible. To the DNS, it is Punycode. To humanity, it is Mídas.
How Mídas is preserved in writing
A bespoke provenance study for Mídas is being prepared by the PUNICODEX scholarly team.
Contribute scholarly provenance →How Mídas was spoken
Kingship, Gold, and the Price of Wishes
Mídas is the double figure of Greek imagination: a real king of Phrygia, known to Assyrian scribes as Mitâ of Muški and to Herodotus as the first foreigner to send gifts to Delphi — and the mythic fool whose wish made the world gold and his stomach empty. In him, legend and chronicle meet like the two halves of a coin.
Granted by Dionysos in thanks for the return of Silenos; everything his hands touched — bread, wine, roses — hardened into gold.
When he preferred Pan's pipes to Apollo's lyre, Apollo gave him the ears of an ass — the byword for deaf judgment ever since.
Behind the fable stands a historical ruler of Gordion, contemporary of Sargon II of Assyria, lord of the Phrygian migrations.
Where he washed away the gift at the god's command; its sands ran gold afterward, the aition of Lydia's wealth.
Stories of Mídas
The Greeks attached two great fables to Mídas — the touch and the ears — and one genuine history: the wealthy Phrygian king whose gifts reached Delphi and whose wars reached Assyria. Ovid gives the fables their classic form; Herodotus keeps the history.
Silenos, the drunken companion of Dionysos, strayed and was brought to Mídas — in some tellings caught in the king's own rose gardens. Mídas entertained him ten days and returned him to the god, who offered any gift in thanks. The king, thinking of his treasury, wished that everything he touched might become gold. The wish was granted on the spot.
The gift revealed itself at table: the bread stiffened in his hands, the wine ran molten and would not wet his lips. Hungry and thirsty in a house of gold, Mídas begged release. Dionysos sent him to wash in the spring of the Pactolus at Sardis; the power passed from his body into the river, whose sands bore gold ever after. Later ages added a gilded daughter to the tale — antiquity was content with the bread and the wine.
Old Tmolos judged the music-contest of Pan and Apollo for the lyre; Mídas alone declared for the pipes. Apollo would not suffer such ears to keep their human shape: they lengthened, furred, and moved. The king hid them under a Phrygian cap, but his barber knew, and whispered the secret into a hole in the ground — and the reeds that grew there have murmured 'King Mídas has ass's ears' on every wind since.
The Assyrian annals of Sargon II name Mitâ, king of Muški, pressing on the empire's eastern marches and then seeking its friendship — the Greek Mídas, ruler of Phrygia from Gordion in the late eighth century BCE. Herodotus preserves his splendor: the first foreign king to dedicate at Delphi, where his throne of judgment could still be seen, and the roses of his Macedonian gardens, which the Phrygians were said to have tended before they crossed into Asia.
The touch and the ears are one story told twice. Both are parables of misjudged value: the king who thinks gold is the best thing in the world, and the listener who thinks pipes are better than the lyre. Each wish-come-true is a famine; each judgment is a deformity. The Greeks were exact about this — wealth and taste are the two places where a man chooses what he is, and Mídas chose wrong both times, and knew it, and wept, and was not destroyed.
Enter Extended Lore