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Marsyas receiving Apollo's punishment, İstanbul Archaeology Museum

In Greek mythology, the satyr Marsyas (/ˈmɑːrsiəs/; Greek: Μαρσύας) is a central figure in two stories involving music: in one, he picked up the lyre and played it;^[1][2] in the other, he challenged Apollo and lost his life. In antiquity, literary sources often emphasise the hubris of Marsyas and the justice of his punishment.

In one strand of modern comparative mythography, the domination of Marsyas by Apollo is regarded 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.^[3] Marsyas was a devoté of the ancient Mother Goddess Rhea/Cybele, and his episodes are situated by the mythographers in Celaenae (or Kelainai), in Phrygia, at the main source of the Meander (the river Menderes in Turkey).^[4]

Family

When a genealogy was applied to him, Marsyas was the son of Olympus (son of Heracles and Euboea, daughter of Thespius), or of Oeagrus, or of Hyagnis.^[5] Olympus was, alternatively, said to be Marsyas' son or pupil.

Mythology

The finding of the aulos

Marsyas Ill-Treated by the Muses by Jacob Jordaens, Mauritshuis in The Hague

Marsyas was killed for picking up the double-piped double reed instrument known as the aulos.^[6] The comic playwright Melanippides of Melos (c. 480-430 BC) embellished the story in his comedy Marsyas,^[7] 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.^[7] Marsyas picked up the aulos and was later killed by Apollo for his hubris.^[7] The fifth-century BC poet Telestes doubted that virginal Athena could have been motivated by such vanity.^[8] Some account informs about the curse placed on the bearer of the flute, i.e; Athena placed a curse that the one picking up the flute would be severely punished.^[9]

Later, however, Melanippides's story became accepted as canonical^[7] and the Athenian sculptor Myron created a group of bronze sculptures based on it, which was installed before the western front of the Parthenon in around 440 BC.^[7] 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."^[10]

Marsyas and Apollo

In the contest between Apollo and Marsyas, which was judged by the Muses,^[11] 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. The match ended in a draw.

Some accounts state that, to decide the winner, Apollo played his lyre upside down, and because Marsyas couldn't do that with his flute, he lost.

Other account states that Apollo lent his beautiful voice, against which Marsyas couldn't compete, and hence lost the match.^[12]

Yet another version states that Marsyas played the flute out of tune, and hence accepted his defeat. Out of shame, he assigned to himself the penalty of being skinned for a winesack.^[13]

He was flayed alive in a cave near Celaenae for his hubris to challenge a god. Apollo then nailed Marsyas' skin to a pine tree,^[14] near Lake Aulocrene (the Turkish Karakuyu Gölü), which Strabo noted was full of the reeds from which the pipes were fashioned.^[15]Diodorus Siculus felt that Apollo must have repented this "excessive" deed, and said that he had laid aside his lyre for a while,^[16] 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."^[17] 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, which joins the Meander near Celaenae, where Herodotus reported that the flayed skin of Marsyas was still to be seen,^[18] and Ptolemy Hephaestion recorded a "festival of Apollo, where the skins of all those victims one has flayed are offered to the god."^[19]Plato was of the opinion that it had been made into a wineskin.^[20]

Apollo flaying Marsyas by Antonio Corradini (1658–1752), Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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 another version 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 himself. The Muses^[21] supported Apollo's claim, leading to his victory.^[22]

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 actually mentioned.

The wise Marsyas

The hubristic Marsyas in surviving literary sources eclipses the figure of the wise Marsyas suggested in a few words by the Hellenistic historian Diodorus Siculus,^[23] 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,^[24] when Alcibiades likens Socrates to Marsyas, it is this aspect of the wise satyr that is intended. Jocelyn Small^[25] identifies in Marsyas an artist great enough to challenge a god, who can only be defeated through a ruse. A prominent statue of Marsyas as a wise old silenus stood near the Roman Forum.^[26]

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 augury^[27] 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.^[28] He was depicted as a silen,^[29] 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.^[30]

Denarius minted at Rome in 82 BC by L. Censorinus, with the head of Apollo and the figure of Marsyas holding a wineskin, based on the statue in the forum

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 gods 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."^[31] Naevius, however, was arrested for his invectives against the powerful.^[32]

Marsyas was sometimes considered a king and contemporary of Faunus, portrayed by Vergil as a native Italian ruler at the time of Aeneas. Servius, in his commentary on the Aeneid, says that Marsyas sent Faunus envoys who showed techniques of augury to the Italians.^[33] The plebeian gens of the Marcii claimed that they were descended from Marsyas. Gaius Marcius Rutilus, who rose to power from the plebs, is credited with having dedicated the statue that stood in the Roman forum, most likely in 294 BC, when he became the first plebeian censor and added the cognomen Censorinus to the family name.^[34] Marcius Rutilus was also among the first plebeian augurs, co-opted into their college in 300, and so the mythical teacher of augury was an apt figure to represent him.^[35]

The Torment of Marsyas, Louvre Museum, Paris.

In 213 BC, two years after suffering one of the worst military defeats in its history at the Battle of Cannae, Rome was in the grip of a reactionary fear that led to excessive religiosity. The senate, alarmed that its authority was being undermined by "prophets and sacrificers" in the forum, began a program of suppression. Among the literature confiscated was an "authentic" prophecy calling for the institution of games in the Greek manner for Apollo, which the senate and elected officials would control. The prophecy was attributed to Gnaeus Marcius, reputed to be a descendant of Marsyas. The games were duly carried out, but the Romans failed to bring the continuing wars with the Carthaginians to a victorious conclusion until they heeded a second prophecy and imported the worship of the Phrygian Great Mother, whose song Marsyas was said to have composed; the song had further relevance in that it was also credited by the Phrygians with protecting them from invaders.^[36] The power relations between Marsyas and Apollo reflected the continuing Struggle of the Orders between the elite and the common people, expressed in political terms by optimates and populares. The arrest of Naevius for exercising free speech also took place during this period.^[37]

Another descendant of Marcius Rutilus, L. Marcius Censorinus, issued coins depicting the statue of Marsyas, at a time when the augural college was the subject of political controversy during the Sullan civil wars of the 80s BC^[38] On the coin, Marsyas wears a Phrygian cap or pilleus, an emblem of liberty.^[39] This Marcius Censorinus was killed by Sulla and his head displayed outside Praeneste. Sulla's legislative program attempted to curtail power invested in the people, particularly restricting the powers of the plebeian tribunes, and to restore the dominance of the senate and the privileges of patricians.^[40]

Marsyas was also claimed as the eponym of the Marsi, one of the ancient peoples of Italy.^[41] The Social War of 91–88 BC, in which the Italian peoples fought to advance their status as citizens under Roman rule, is sometimes called the Marsic War from the leadership of the Marsi. The Roman coloniae Paestum and Alba Fucens, along with other Italian cities, set up their own statues of Marsyas as assertions of their political status.^[42]

During the Principate, Marsyas became a subversive symbol in opposition to Augustus, whose propaganda systematically associated him with the silens’ torturer Apollo. Augustus's daughter Julia held nocturnal assemblies at the statue, and crowned it to defy her father.^[43] The poet Ovid, who was ultimately exiled by Augustus, twice tells the story of Marsyas's flaying by Apollo, in his epic Metamorphoses and in the Fasti, the calendrical poem left unfinished at his death.^[44] Although the immediate cause of Ovid's exile remains one of literary history's great mysteries, Ovid himself says that a "poem and transgression" were contributing factors; his poetry tests the boundaries of permissible free speech during Rome's transition from republic to imperial monarchy.^[45]

Pliny indicates that in the 1st century AD, the painting Marsyas religatus ("Marsyas Bound"), by Zeuxis of Heraclea, could be viewed at the Temple of Concordia in Rome.^[46] The goddess Concordia, like the Greek Harmonia, was a personification of both musical harmony as it was understood in antiquity, and of social order, as expressed by Cicero's phrase concordia ordinum. The apparent incongruity of exhibiting the tortured silen in a temple devoted to harmony has been interpreted in modern scholarship as a warning against criticizing authority.^[47]

In later art

Athena and Marsyas: the discovery of the aulos in an imaginative recreation of a lost bronze by Myron (Botanic Garden, Copenhagen)

In the art of later periods, allegory is applied to gloss the somewhat ambivalent morality of the flaying of Marsyas. Marsyas is often seen with a flute, pan pipes or even bagpipes. Apollo is shown with his lyre, or sometimes a harp, viol or other stringed instrument. The contest of Apollo and Marsyas is seen as symbolizing the eternal struggle between the Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of human nature.

Paintings taking Marsyas as a subject include "Apollo and Marsyas" by Michelangelo Anselmi (c. 1492 – c.1554), "The Flaying of Marsyas" by Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652), the Flaying of Marsyas by Titian (c. 1570–1576) and "Apollo and Marsyas" by Bartolomeo Manfredi (St. Louis Art Museum).

James Merrill based a poem, "Marsyas", on this myth; it appears in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (1959). Zbigniew Herbert and Nadine Sabra Meyer each titled poems "Apollo and Marsyas". Following Ovid's retelling of the Apollo and Marsyas tale, the poem "The Flaying Of Marsyas" features in Robin Robertson's 1997 collection "a painted field".

Hugo Claus based his poem, Marsua (included in the Oostakkerse Gedichten), on the myth of Marsyas, describing the process of flaying from the perspective of Marsyas.

In 2002, British artist Anish Kapoor created and installed an enormous sculpture in London's Tate Modern called "Marsyas". The work, consisting of three huge steel rings and a single red PVC membrane, was impossible to view as a whole because of its size, but had obvious anatomical connotations.^[48]

There is a bridge built towards the end of the Roman period on the river Marsyas that is still called by the satyr's name, Marsiyas.^[49]

See also

• 
  Arachne, a mortal woman who engaged in a weaving contest with Athena

Notes

References

• Ruck, Carl A.P. and Danny Staples, The World of Classical Myth (Carolina Academic Press) 1994.

External links

• 
  Media related to Marsyas at Wikimedia Commons


• 
  The Ancient Library.


• 
  Theoi Project: Marsyas. English translations of Classical texts.


• The Warburg Institute Iconographic Database: ca 200 images of Marsyas