In Greek mythology, the satyr Marsyas (; ) is a central figure in two stories involving music: in one, he picked up the double oboe (aulos) that had been abandoned by Athena and played it;The folk of Celaenae held "that the Song of the Mother, an air for the flute, was composed by Marsyas", according to Pausanias (x.30.9). in the other, he challenged Apollo to a contest of music and lost his hide and life. Literary sources from antiquity often emphasize the hubris of Marsyas and the justice of his punishment.
One strand of modern comparative mythography regards the domination of Marsyas by Apollo as an example of myth that recapitulates a supposed supplanting by the Olympian pantheon of an earlier "Pelasgian" religion of chthonic heroic ancestors and nature spirits.According to this theory, the antagonists in the Labours of Heracles are, like Marsyas, representatives of the older religion; see Ruck and Staples 1994 passim. Marsyas was a devoté of the ancient Mother Goddess Rhea/Cybele, and the mythographers situate his episodes in Celaenae (or Kelainai), in Phrygia, at the main source of the Meander (the river Menderes in Turkey).The river is linked to the figure of Marsyas by Herodotus (Histories, 7.26) and Xenophon (Anabasis, 1.2.8).
Family When a genealogy was applied to him, Marsyas was the son of the "divine" Hyagnis.see Anthi Dipla:2001Nonnus, Dionysiaca 10.233 His father was called OeagrusHyginus, Fabulae 165 or Olympus.Apollodorus, 1.4.2 Alternatively, the latter was said to be Marsyas' son and/or pupil and eromenos.Hyginus, Fabulae 273; Pausanias, Graeciae Descriptio 10.30.9Pseudo-Plutarch, On Music, 7.Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists, 2.5.5.
Mythology
The finding of the aulos
Marsyas was an expert player on the double-piped double reed instrument known as the aulos.García Martín, F. J. (2026), “Marsyas and the aulos: an autoptic reading of facial alteration in the sculptural record”, Greek and Roman Musical Studies, 14 (1), pp. 70–99. The dithyrambic poet Melanippides of Melos ( 480 – 430 BC) embellished the story in his dithyramb Marsyas,quoted in Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae, 14.616e claiming that the goddess Athena, who was already said to have invented the aulos, once looked in the mirror while she was playing it and saw how blowing into it puffed up her cheeks and made her look silly, so she threw the aulos away and cursed it so that whoever picked it up would meet an awful death. Marsyas picked up the aulos and was later killed by Apollo for his hubris. The fifth-century BC poet Telestes doubted that virginal Athena could have been motivated by such vanity.Telestes, Fr. 805, quoted in Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae 616f
Later, however, Melanippides's story became accepted as canonical and the Athenian sculptor Myron created a group of bronze sculptures based on it, which was installed before the western front of the Parthenon around 440 BC. In the second century AD, the travel writer Pausanias saw this set of sculptures and described it as "a statue of Athena striking Marsyas the Silenos for taking up the flutes [aulos] that the goddess wished to be cast away for good".Pausanias, i.24.1.
Marsyas and Apollo
In the contest between Apollo and Marsyas, which was judged by the Muses or the Nysean nymphs,Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 5. 75. 3Tmolus was judge in another musical contest, that of Apollo and Pan. the terms stated that the winner could treat the defeated party any way he wanted. Marsyas played his flute, putting everyone there into a frenzy, and they started dancing wildly. When it was Apollo's turn, he played his lyre so beautifully that everyone was still and had tears in their eyes.
There are several versions of the contest; according to Hyginus, Marsyas was departing as victor after the first round, when Apollo, turning his lyre upside down, played the same tune. This was something that Marsyas could not do with his flute. According to Diodorus Siculus, Marsyas was defeated when Apollo added his voice to the sound of the lyre. Marsyas protested, arguing that the skill with the instrument was to be compared, not the voice. However, Apollo replied that when Marsyas blew into the pipes, he was doing almost the same thing. The Nysean nymphs supported Apollo's claim, leading to his victory.The most elaborated accounts are given by Diodorus Siculus Library of History, Hyginus (Fabulae, 165) and Pseudo-Apollodorus' Bibliotheke (i.4.2); see also Pliny's Natural History 16.89.
Yet another version states that Marsyas played the flute out of tune, and hence accepted his defeat. Out of shame, he chose the penalty of being skinned to be used as a winesack.Philostratus the Younger, Imagines 2 (trans. Fairbanks)
He was flayed alive in a cave near Celaenae for his hubris to challenge a deity. Apollo then nailed Marsyas' skin to a pine tree,-Apollodorus, Bibliothekei.4.2 near Lake Aulocrene (Karakuyu Gölü in modern Turkey), which Strabo noted was full of the reeds from which the pipes were fashioned.Strabo, Geography xii.8.15; Diodorus Siculus felt that Apollo must have repented this "excessive" deed, and said that he had laid aside his lyre for a while,Diodorus, Library of History v.75.3. but Karl Kerenyi observes of the flaying of Marsyas' "shaggy hide: a penalty which will not seem especially cruel if one assumes that Marsyas' animal guise was merely a masquerade".Karl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks 1951:179. Classical Greeks were unaware of such shamanistic overtones, and the flaying of Marsyas became a theme for painting and sculpture. His brothers, nymphs, gods, and goddesses mourned his death, and their tears, according to Ovid's Metamorphoses, were the source of the river Marsyas in Phrygia (called Çine Creek today), which joins the Meander near Celaenae, where Herodotus reported that the flayed skin of Marsyas was still to be seen,Herodotus, Histories vii.26.3. and Ptolemy Hephaestion recorded a "festival of Apollo, where the skins of all those victims one has flayed are offered to the god".Ptolemy Hephaestion, New History iii, summarised by Photius, Myriobiblon 190.
Plato was of the opinion that the skin of Marsyas had been made into a wineskin.Plato, ''Euthydemus, 285c.
Ovid touches upon the theme of Marsyas twice, very briefly telling the tale in Metamorphoses vi.383–400, where he concentrates on the tears shed into the river Marsyas, and making an allusion in Fasti, vi.649–710, where Ovid's primary focus is on the aulos and the roles of flute-players rather than Marsyas, whose name is not mentioned.
In Phrygia, there was a river called Marsyas, which the Phrygians believed originated from the blood of Marsyas.Palaephatus, On Unbelievable Things, 47, Narrative about Marsyas
The wise Marsyas The hubristic Marsyas in surviving literary sources eclipses the figure of the wise Marsyas that is suggested in a few words by the Hellenistic historian Diodorus Siculus,Diodorus Siculus, iii.59-59. who refers to Marsyas as admired for his intelligence (sunesis) and self-control (sophrosune), not qualities found by Greeks in ordinary satyrs. In Plato's Symposium,Symposium 215.b-c. when Alcibiades likens Socrates to Marsyas, it is this aspect of the wise satyr that is intended. Jocelyn Small identifies in Marsyas an artist great enough to challenge a deity, who can only be defeated through a ruse.Jocelyn Penny Small, Cacus and Marsyas in Etrusco-Roman Legend (Princeton University Press) 1962:68. A prominent statue of Marsyas as a wise old silenus stood near the Roman Forum.Pliny, 34.11; Horace, Satires 1.6.119-21; noted by Niżyńska 2001:157.
This is the Marsyas of the journal, Marsyas: Studies in the History of Art, published since 1941 by students of the Institute of Art, New York University.
Prophecy and free speech at Rome Among the Romans, Marsyas was cast as the inventor of auguryN.M. Horsfall, reviewing Cacus and Marsyas in Etrusco-Roman Legend by Jocelyn Penny Small (Princeton University Press, 1982), in Classical Review 34 (1984) 226–229, vehemently rejects Marsyas's connection with augury, but this is a minority view. and a proponent of free speech (the philosophical concept παρρησία, "parrhesia") and "speaking truth to power". The earliest known representation of Marsyas at Rome stood for at least 300 years in the Roman Forum near or in the comitium, the space for political activity.Elaine Fantham, "Liberty and the Roman People," Transactions of the American Philological Association 135 (2005), p. 221; on assemblies of the people, see Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Bill Thayer's edition at LacusCurtius, "Comitia." He also was depicted as a silen,The distinction between a satyr and a silen was sometimes blurred in the later tradition. carrying a wineskin on his left shoulder and raising his right arm. The statue was regarded as an indicium libertatis, a symbol of liberty, and was associated with demonstrations of the plebs, or common people. It often served as a sort of kiosk upon which invective verse was posted.Servius, ad Aeneidos 3.20; T.P. Wiseman, "Satyrs in Rome? The Background to Horace's Ars Poetica," Journal of Roman Studies 78 (1988), p. 4; Elaine Fantham, "Liberty and the Roman People," Transactions of the American Philological Association 135 (2005), p. 227; Ann L. Kuttner, "Culture and History at Pompey's Museum," Transactions of the American Philological Association 129 (1999), pp. 357–358.
Marsyas served as a minister for Dionysus or Bacchus, who was identified by the Romans with their Father Liber, one of three deities in the Aventine Triad, along with Ceres and Libera (identified with Persephone). These deities were regarded as concerning themselves specially with the welfare of the plebs. The freedom that the ecstasies of Dionysian worship represented took on a political meaning in Rome as the libertas that distinguished the free from the enslaved. The Liberalia, celebrated March 17 in honor of Liber, was a time of speaking freely, as the poet and playwright Gnaeus Naevius declared: "At the Liberalia games we enjoy free speech."Rather alliteratively: libera lingua loquimur ludis Liberalibus. Nonetheless, Naevius was arrested for his invectives against the powerful.T. P. Wiseman, Roman Drama and Roman History (University of Exeter Press, 1998), passim, explores the connections among Marsyas, the Aventine trinity, the plebs, the Liberalia, and free speech. For a detailed discussion of the case of Naevius, see Harold B. Mattingly, "Naevius and the Metelli", Historia 9 (1960) 414–439. Marsyas was also the title of a work by the Roman playwright Lucius Pomponius, possibly a satyr play, in the second century BC.