Greek to Me: Midas Never Turned His Daughter to Gold

King Midas never turned his daughter to gold.

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, completed around AD 8, Midas turns a twig, a stone, grain, an apple, his dinner, water and wine to gold. No daughter appears. He begs Bacchus to remove the gift, washes it into the River Pactolus, and the story moves on to the contest that gives him donkey ears. More than eighteen centuries later, Nathaniel Hawthorne added a daughter named Marygold to “The Golden Touch” in A Wonder-Book, published in 1851. Hawthorne admits the invention in his opening sentence by calling her a daughter “whom nobody but myself ever heard of.” His Midas turns Marygold into a golden statue with a kiss, then restores her with the river water.

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