Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/233

 MIDAS. 217 first under Croesus 1 and then under Cyrus, and with the sentiment of comparative pride which grew up afterwards in the minds of European Greeks. The native Phrygian tribes along the Propontis, with whom the Greek colonists came in contact, Bebrykians, Doliones, Mygdonians, etc, seem to have been agricultural, cattle-breeding and horse-breeding, yet more vehe- ment and warlike than the Phrygians of the interior, as far at least as can be made out by their legends. The brutal but gigantic Amykus son of Poseidon, chief of the Bebrykians, with whom Pollux contends in boxing, and his brother Mygdon to whom Herakles is opposed, are samples of a people whom the Greek poets considered ferocious, and not submissive ; 2 while the celebrity of the horses of Erichthonius, Laomedon, and Asius of Arisbe. in the Iliad, shows that horse-breeding was a distinguishing attribute of the region of Ida, not less in the mind of Homer than in that of Virgil. 3 According to the legend of the Phrygian town of Gordium on the river Sangarius, the primitive Phrygian king Gordius was originally a poor husbandman, upon the yoke of whose team, as he one day tilled his field, an eagle perched and posted him- self. Astonished at this portent, he consulted the Telmissean augurs to know what it meant, and a maiden of the prophetic breed acquainted him that the kingdom was destined to his family. He espoused her, and the offspring of the marriage was Midas. .Seditions afterwards breaking out among the Phrygians, they were directed by an oracle, as the only means of tranquillity, to choose for themselves as king the man whom they should first 1 Phrygian slaves seem to have been numerous at Miletus in the time of Ilipponax, Frag. 36, ed. Bergk : Kal roi'f Goto'iKavf, f/v ?Mf3uri, Trepviiaiv, Valcr. Flacc. iv, 100 ; Apollodor. ii, 5, 9. 3 Iliad, ii, 138 ; xii, 97 ; xx, 219 : Virgil, Georgia, iii, 270: "Bias dncit amor (equas) trans Gargara, transque sonantm Ascaninm," etc. Klausen (JEncas und die Penaten, vol. i, pp. 52-56, 102-107) has pat together with great erudition all the legendary indications respecting then regions. VX>L. III. 10
 * Theocrit. Idyll, xxii, 47-133; Apollon. Ehod. i, 937-954; ii, 5-140;