Marsyas

Common card · No. 275758

In Greek mythology, the satyr Marsyas (; Ancient Greek: Μαρσύας) is a central figure in two stories involving music: in one, he picked up the double oboe (aulos) that had been abandoned by Athena and played it; in the other, he challenged Apollo to a contest of music and lost his hide and life. Literary sources from antiquity often emphasize the hubris of Marsyas and the justice of his punishment. One strand of modern comparative mythography regards the domination of Marsyas by Apollo 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. Marsyas was a devoté of the ancient Mother Goddess Rhea/Cybele, and the mythographers situate his episodes in Celaenae (or Kelainai), in Phrygia, at the main source of the Meander (the river Menderes in Turkey).

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