The Phrygians are said to have been a very ancient nation.[713] According to the accounts of the Greeks, the legends of the Phrygians began the history of their country with Gordius and Midas. Gordius, it was said, was a poor farmer, who possessed only two yoke of oxen. At that time the Phrygians were divided by factions, and in order to restore peace, the deity commanded that they should elect as king the man whom they first met on a waggon on the way to the shrine of Zeus. Then they met Gordius on his waggon and greeted him as king. Gordius built the city of Gordium at the confluence of the Scopas and Sangarius, and dedicated in the temple of Zeus on the citadel of Gordium the chariot which carried him to the throne. After Gordius's death the throne descended to his son Midas, to whose lips, when a boy, ants had carried grains of corn. Midas is said to have founded the city of Gordiutichus in the south of the land, on the borders of Phrygia, and Ancyra in the north: at Pessinus on the slope of Mount Agdus he built a temple to the goddess of Phrygia and established the sacrifices.[714] He was the richest king who ever lived. Everything that he touched turned to gold. Once he bathed in the Pactolus, and ever since the sands washed down by the river became sands of gold. When Pan blew his shepherd's pipe, and Apollo touched his lyre, Midas preferred the music of Pan. In revenge, Apollo caused asses' ears to grow upon Midas, and he covered them with a tall cap. But the barber of Midas knew the secret, and told it into a pit; and some rushes grew in the pit, and whispered "Midas has asses' ears."[715]
The gold of Midas and his power of changing everything into that metal comes from the Greeks, whose legends desired to celebrate and explain the ancient wealth of the kings of Phrygia. From the same source are the asses' ears and the whispering rushes. The use of the pan's pipe, though not of the shepherd's pipe, was learnt by the Greeks through their colonists in Asia Minor from the Phrygians. The reed (or flute) was called "eleg" among the Armenians: its notes first accompanied the Elegies of Callinus of Ephesus, and Archilochus of Paros, to which it gave the name. Among the Greeks many judges, and those by no means of the least reputation, gave the most decided preference to the music of the cithara, the lyre of Apollo, over the flute. In the same feeling which prompted this judgment, the want of taste in finding the tones of the flute more beautiful than those of the cithara is visited by a punishment which at the same time is intended to explain the origin of the tall Phrygian cap. The reeds belong to a brook in the vicinity of Celænæ in Phrygia, which the Greeks called "the flute-spring" (Aulokrenê) because the reeds growing on the shores were used as wind-instruments. There is another story in which the Greeks have expressed the contrast between the quiet and composed tones of the cithara, and the wild music of the Phrygian flutes—the Phrygian harmonies to which they ascribed the power of rousing the feelings into a passionate excitement of pain or delight.[716] The music of the flute was introduced into choric poetry in the first half of the sixth century by Polymnestus of Colophon, and Sakadas of Argos. Among the Phrygians, Marsyas, a faithful and chaste companion of their national goddess, was the genius of flute-music.[717] A brook which flowed into the Mæander through the city Apamæa Cibotus, in the neighbourhood of Celænæ, was named after Marsyas. The Greeks had a story that their god Apollo had overcome with his cithara the flute-player of the Phrygians, and had flayed him in punishment for his presumption in entering on the contest. At Celænæ a bottle of Marsyas was exhibited, on which the story of the flaying of Marsyas may have been founded.[718]
After removing the fictions and additions of the Greeks, the characteristic trait of the Phrygian story still remains, that their monarchs arose out of the agricultural class, that grains of corn were carried into the lips of the son of the first ruler, and that the king of Phrygia loved the pan's pipe of the shepherds. Elsewhere also the respect of the Phrygians for the agricultural life is brought into prominence. Nicolaus of Damascus tells us of a law of the Phrygians by which the slaughter of the ploughing ox, or the theft of agricultural implements, was punished with death.[719] In the fourth century B.C. the waggon of Gordius was still standing on the citadel of Gordium. The yoke was bound so fast to the pole with the bark of dog-wood—the knot is reported to been tied by Gordius himself—that it was said in Phrygia that the man who should untie this knot would rule over all Asia. The name Gordius should apparently be traced back to the Armenian "gords," i.e. labour, or "day labour."[720] That side by side with these traits the national tradition ascribed the erection of the ancient cities and temples, the building of Gordium, Gordiuteichus, and Ancyra to the earliest princes, is only natural. The names of the cities Manegordum (near Ancyra) and Midaëum also point to these.
The Phrygians obeyed a dynasty which saw its ancestors in the kings Gordius and Midas, and called themselves alternately by these names. The first king of whom we have any more definite information was Midas, the son of Gordius, who ascended the throne of Phrygia in the year 738 B.C. according to the date of Eusebius. His wife was Damodice, the daughter of Agamemnon, the king of the Greek city of Cyme, who is said to have been a woman distinguished by beauty and wisdom.[721] The seat on which he used to dispense justice, a work well worth seeing, as Herodotus says, he consecrated at Delphi. When Phrygia was attacked by the first great invasion of the Cimmerians, he took away his own life by drinking bull's blood (693 B.C.).[722] Of a third Midas, who reigned apparently about a century later, we learn that his tomb was adorned with the image of a maiden in brass, and that a Greek poet composed as an inscription for this monument the following verses:—
"I am a maiden of brass,
I lie on the tomb of Midas;
While waters flow, and tall trees grow,
On Midas' tearful tomb I lie.
I say to every passer by,
'Here Midas sleeps in earth below.'"[723]
With the descendants of this Midas, Gordius and his son Adrastus, this dynasty came to an end in the sixth century B.C.[724]
Between Prymnessus and Midaëum (Jazili Kaja and Sidi Ghazi), in the valley of Doganlu, lie the tombs of these kings, sepulchral chambers, which are hewn in the perpendicular walls of red sandstone. On the face of the rock there is no trace of any entrance; and the corpses must have been lowered down behind the exterior front. The walls of rock are changed into sculptures, in imitation of the outlines and rudiments of a light wooden building. In low relief a framework of beams is sketched, and over this a low-pitched gable rises. Such are the simplest of these façades, which apparently we must also consider the oldest. Others display a frieze of palm leaves in the upper field of the framework. Others again put the figures of animals in the gable, e.g. two horses, between which is an obelisk, and exhibit traces of Hellenic influence, while another presents a perfect imitation of the Doric arrangement of pillars. Among these sepulchres may once have been the tomb with the maiden of brass. The inscriptions found on some, or in the neighbourhood, are Phrygian, but written in Greek characters. The most important tomb is that of a more ancient Midas at Kümbet. The façade of this monument, which is in framework of the Phrygian style, covers about sixty square feet of the hundred feet of the rock. The space in the field of the framework is entirely filled