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Contents
1Legend
2Interpretations
3Use of the phrase
4See also
5References
Legend[edit]
The Phrygians were without a king, but an oracle at Telmissus (the ancient
capital of Lycia) decreed that the next man to enter the city driving an ox-cart
should become their king. A peasant farmer named Gordias drove into town on
an ox-cart and was immediately declared king.[1]Out of gratitude, his
son Midas dedicated the ox-cart[2] to the Phrygian god Sabazios (whom
the Greeks identified with Zeus) and tied it to a post with an intricate knot
of cornel bark (Cornus mas). The knot was later described by Roman
historian Quintus Curtius Rufus as comprising “several knots all so tightly
entangled that it was impossible to see how they were fastened.”[3]
The ox-cart still stood in the palace of the former kings of Phrygia
at Gordium in the fourth century BC when Alexander arrived, at which point
Phrygia had been reduced to a satrapy or province of the Persian Empire. An
oracle had declared that any man who could unravel its elaborate knots was
destined to become ruler of all of Asia.[3] Alexander wanted to untie the knot
but struggled to do so without success. He then reasoned that it would make no
difference how the knot was loosed, so he drew his sword and sliced it in half
with a single stroke.[3] In an alternative version of the story, Alexander loosed
the knot by pulling the linchpin from the yoke.[3]
Sources from antiquity agree that Alexander was confronted with the challenge
of the knot, but his solution is disputed. Both Plutarch and Arrian relate that,
according to Aristobulus,[4] Alexander pulled the knot out of its pole pin,
exposing the two ends of the cord and allowing him to untie the knot without
having to cut through it. Some classical scholars regard this as more plausible
than the popular account.[5] Literary sources of the story include Alexander's
propagandist Arrian (Anabasis Alexandri 2.3) Quintus
Curtius (3.1.14), Justin's epitome of Pompeius Trogus (11.7.3),
and Aelian's De Natura Animalium 13.1.[6]
Alexander later went on to conquer Asia as far as the Indus and the Oxus, thus
fulfilling the prophecy.
Interpretations[edit]
The knot may have been a religious knot-cipher guarded by Gordian/Midas's
priests and priestesses. Robert Graves suggested that it may have symbolised the
ineffable name of Dionysus that, knotted like a cipher, would have been passed
on through generations of priests and revealed only to the kings of Phrygia.[7]
Unlike fable, true myth has few completely arbitrary elements. This myth taken
as a whole seems designed to confer legitimacy to dynasticchange in this
central Anatolian kingdom: thus Alexander's "brutal cutting of the knot... ended
an ancient dispensation."[8] The ox-cart suggests a longer voyage, rather than
a local journey, perhaps linking Gordias/Midas with an attested origin-myth in
Macedon, of which Alexander is most likely to have been aware.[9] Based on the
myth, the new dynasty was not immemorially ancient, but had widely
remembered origins in a local, but non-priestly "outsider" class, represented by
Greek reports equally as an eponymous peasant "Gordias"[10] or the locally
attested, authentically Phrygian "Midas"[11] in his ox-cart.[12] Other Greek
myths legitimize dynasties by right of conquest (compare Cadmus), but the
legitimising oracle stressed in this myth suggests that the previous dynasty was
a race of priest-kings allied to the unidentified oracle deity.