Marsyas

• 1. Introduction

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  Marsyas was a satyr from Phrygia, now central Turkey, and a devotee of the ancient Mother Goddess Cybele. He picked up a flute and became so accomplished on it that he challenged the god Apollo to a musical contest. He lost. What Apollo did to him as punishment became one of the most depicted episodes in Greek mythology and later art.

  The contest itself was more ambiguous than the standard hubris story suggested. Ancient sources could not agree on how Apollo had won. Philosophers saw in Marsyas a figure of genuine wisdom. And in Rome, for generations, his image served as a symbol of popular liberty at the heart of the city's political life.

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• 2. The Cursed Flute

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  The dithyrambic poet Melanippides of Melos, writing sometime between 480 and 430 BC, gave the aulos story its canonical form. Athena had invented the double-piped instrument herself. One day, playing it before a mirror, she saw how blowing into the pipes puffed out her cheeks. She threw the aulos away and cursed it: whoever picked it up would meet an awful death.

  The fifth-century BC poet Telestes doubted that a virginal goddess could have been motivated by such vanity. But the Melanippides version prevailed in the wider literary tradition.

  By around 440 BC, the Athenian sculptor Myron had translated the story into bronze. His group of statues was installed before the western front of the Parthenon. Writing in the second century AD, the travel writer Pausanias described what he saw there. He saw Athena "striking Marsyas the Silenos for taking up the flutes that the goddess wished to be cast away for good."

  What the tradition preserved was not just a backstory for the aulos. It was the portrait of a musician whose skill seemed to invite comparison with a god.

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• 3. The Contest and Its Cost

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  The Nysean nymphs and the Muses served as judges, and the terms were simple: the winner could treat the loser any way he wished. Marsyas played his aulos and the audience broke into a dancing frenzy. When Apollo played his lyre, that same audience fell still, tears running down their faces.

  Ancient sources differed sharply on how Apollo prevailed. According to Hyginus, Marsyas was departing as the first round's victor. Apollo then made an unexpected move: he turned his lyre upside down and played the same tune. This was beyond what the flute could do. Diodorus Siculus offered a different account. He wrote that Apollo added his voice to the lyre. When Marsyas objected that only instrumental skill should count, Apollo replied that Marsyas used his own mouth to drive the pipes. The Nysean nymphs ruled in Apollo's favor. A third version dispensed with any trickery. In it, Marsyas played out of tune and accepted defeat, even choosing his own punishment: to be skinned as a winesack.

  Apollo flayed Marsyas alive in a cave near Celaenae. He then nailed the skin to a pine tree beside Lake Aulocrene. Strabo later noted that the lake was full of the reeds from which the pipes were fashioned. Diodorus Siculus wrote that Apollo must have repented this excessive act, laying aside his lyre for a time. The scholar Karl Kerenyi observed that the cruelty might seem less absolute if Marsyas's "animal guise was merely a masquerade."

  The Metamorphoses of Ovid, at vi.383-400, places the mourning at the heart of the story. Brothers, nymphs, gods, and goddesses wept over the dead satyr. Ovid wrote that their tears became the source of the river Marsyas in Phrygia, now called Cine Creek, which joins the Meander near Celaenae. Herodotus reported that the flayed skin of Marsyas was still on display in Celaenae in his own time. Plato held the view that the skin had been made into a wineskin.

  Ptolemy Hephaestion recorded a festival of Apollo at which the skins of the god's flayed victims were offered back to him. The Marsyas story, it seemed, was not an isolated episode.

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• 4. The Wise Satyr

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  In Plato's Symposium, Alcibiades compares Socrates to Marsyas. The comparison is not about the flaying. It is about wisdom. Diodorus Siculus described Marsyas as admired for his sunesis, the Greek word for intelligence, and his sophrosune, meaning self-control. These were not qualities that Greeks normally attributed to satyrs.

  The scholar Jocelyn Small identifies in this Marsyas an artist great enough to challenge a deity. Such a figure, Small argues, can only be defeated through a ruse. This reframing shifts the moral weight of the contest: if the judgment required trickery, then the outcome was procedural rather than a fair test of skill.

  The journal Marsyas: Studies in the History of Art has been published since 1941 by students of New York University's Institute of Art. It draws on a tradition of the contemplative satyr, one that found its most politically consequential expression not in Athens but in Rome.

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• 5. Liberty and the Forum

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  The Roman Forum statue of Marsyas showed him carrying a wineskin on his left shoulder and raising his right arm. It stood for at least three hundred years near the comitium, the space reserved for political activity. It was regarded as an indicium libertatis: a symbol of liberty. The statue served informally as a kiosk where invective verse was posted against the powerful.

  Marsyas arrived at this role through his service to Dionysus. The Romans identified Dionysus with Father Liber, one of three deities in the Aventine Triad alongside Ceres and Libera. The freedoms of Dionysian ecstasy had acquired a specific Roman meaning: libertas, the status that distinguished free people from the enslaved. Every year on March 17, the Liberalia festival in Liber's honor created a temporary space for speaking freely. The playwright Gnaeus Naevius declared at the Liberalia: "At the Liberalia games we enjoy free speech." He was later arrested for his invectives against powerful Romans.

  The statue was most likely dedicated in 294 BC by Gaius Marcius Rutilus. That year, Rutilus became the first plebeian censor and added the cognomen Censorinus to his family name. He had also been among the first plebeian augurs, co-opted into the augural college in 300 BC. For Marcius Rutilus, the mythical teacher of augury was an obvious patron.

  In 213 BC, Rome was still reeling from the Battle of Cannae two years earlier. The senate began suppressing unauthorized prophecy and sacrifice in the Forum. Among the confiscated texts was one calling for games in the Greek manner for Apollo. This prophecy was attributed to Gnaeus Marcius, a reputed descendant of Marsyas. The games were carried out. But the war with Carthage continued until Rome acted on a second prophecy and imported the worship of the Phrygian Great Mother, Cybele. Marsyas was said to have composed Cybele's own sacred song, and that song was credited by the Phrygians with protecting them from invaders.

  During the Sullan civil wars of the 80s BC, another Marcius Censorinus issued coins depicting the Forum statue. On the coin, Marsyas wore a Phrygian cap, the pilleus that signified liberty. Sulla then killed Marcius Censorinus and displayed his head outside the town of Praeneste. Sulla's legislative program attempted to strip power from the plebeian tribunes and restore the privileges of patricians.

  The Marsi were an ancient Italian people who claimed Marsyas as their eponym. They led the Social War of 91-88 BC, when Italian peoples fought to advance their status as Roman citizens. The Roman coloniae of Paestum and Alba Fucens raised their own statues of Marsyas as assertions of political standing.

  The freedom that Marsyas represented would face its most acute test when Rome made the transition from republic to empire.

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• 6. Subversion and Empire

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  Augustus's propaganda systematically linked him to Apollo, the god who had tortured a silenus. This made the Forum statue of Marsyas a quietly subversive object. Augustus's daughter Julia held nocturnal assemblies at the statue and crowned it; contemporary Romans understood these acts as direct defiance of her father.

  The poet Ovid retold the flaying of Marsyas twice. One treatment was brief. The longer version appeared in the Fasti, at vi.649-710, a calendrical poem whose primary concern was the aulos and the roles of flute-players. Marsyas is not even named there. The Fasti was left unfinished at Ovid's death. Ovid himself was eventually exiled by Augustus. He identified a "poem and a transgression" as contributing factors. What the transgression was remains one of the great mysteries of literary history.

  In the first century AD, Pliny noted a painting by Zeuxis of Heraclea at Rome's Temple of Concordia. The painting was titled Marsyas Religatus, meaning Marsyas Bound. The goddess Concordia was a personification of both musical harmony and social order; Cicero had expressed that ideal in the phrase concordia ordinum. Scholars have since read the presence of the tortured silenus in a temple to harmony as a deliberate warning against criticizing those in power.

  A marble sarcophagus depicting the contest between Marsyas and Apollo was carved around 300 CE. It was excavated in 1853 on the bank of the Chiarone river in Tuscany, along the route of the former Emilia-Aurelia road. It is now held in the Louvre.

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• 7. Art's Long Memory

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  Titian painted the Flaying of Marsyas around 1570-1576; Jusepe de Ribera, who lived from 1591 to 1652, painted the same subject. Michelangelo Anselmi, Bartolomeo Manfredi, and Luca Giordano, whose version dates to around 1665, each brought the contest to canvas as well. In the later artistic tradition, allegory was applied to what ancient sources had left morally ambiguous. Apollo was typically shown with his lyre, though sometimes a harp, viol, or other stringed instrument. Marsyas appeared with a flute, pan pipes, or even bagpipes.

  Hugo Claus chose the most direct approach in his 1955 poem Marsua, included in the collection Oostakkerse Gedichten. He described the flaying from the point of view of Marsyas himself. James Merrill's poem "Marsyas" appeared in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace in 1959. Robin Robertson included "The Flaying Of Marsyas" in his 1997 collection "a painted field." Zbigniew Herbert and Nadine Sabra Meyer each published poems titled "Apollo and Marsyas."

  In 2002, the British artist Anish Kapoor installed a work called Marsyas at London's Tate Modern. It consisted of three huge steel rings supporting a single red PVC membrane. The structure was too large to take in as a whole, but it carried obvious anatomical connotations.

  A bridge on the river Marsyas in Turkey, built near the end of the Roman period, is still known as Marsiyas. The composer Kyle Rieger wrote a duet for saxophone and piano based on the contest, titled Aulos and Lyre. Both sides of the quarrel are named in the title; no winner is declared.

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