The remarkable thing about Ovid’s version of the Midas story is that it is more than a story about gold and greed, it’s a story about mankind’s inability to learn. True, Midas learns not to ask for the power to turn everything he touches into gold, but he no sooner learns this lessons than he commits a new error and receives the ears of an ass. That will teach him another useless lesson, for the world presents us with infinite possibilities for making new mistakes, and life is too short to learn about them all. Trial and error prove useless. King Midas does not learn how to avoid the temptations of stupidity, or, to speak more to Ovid’s point, he does not learn how to enjoy a life of modest poverty. Even as a lover of Pan (i.e. as an Earth lover), King Midas does not know how to at-tend to the Earth, as a gardener would; in fact, he loves Pan so disproportionately that he never understands the equation of life, the equality among all things (Sun and Earth included), and still sees only competition (not that it doesn’t exist between children and asses).
