Gold The glorious and accursed element

As befits the son of a satyr, Midas was a king who loved the pleasures of this world. He ruled over Phrygia in Asia Minor, where he planted wonderful rose gardens. 

It seems this was just what Dionysus expected. Laughing, he told the king to bathe in the Pactolus River, which flowed from Mount Tmolus in Anatolia. On doing so, Midas found that his golden touch 

Priam s wife Hecabe discovers the deed by finding Polydorus body washed up on the sea shore. She ensnares Polymnestor, her own son-in-law, with the bait of a promise to show him where to find a treasure horde in the ruins of Troy. When the king arrives with his own two natural sons, Hecabe stabs both children to death and claws out Polymnestor s eyes. In his version of the legend, the Roman writer Virgil displays his horror at Polymnestor s acts while identifying the real cause of such villainy  

To what indeed When money is denounced as the root of all evil, we should properly understand it not as banknotes but as bright, treacherous gold. During the Renaissance, people idealized classical times as a Golden Age but the Roman writer Propertius had no illusions about what that really meant, for with gold all doors are opened, and truth, honesty, and freedom can be overawed if the payment is large enough  

But that was long ago. The craving for gold in more recent times is as strong as ever, scarcely dampened by the fates of the ancients. In 

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