Gordian Knot
 |
Alexander cuts the Gordian Knot, by Jean-Simon Berthélemy (1743â€"1811) |
The
Gordian Knot is a
legend associated with
Alexander the Great. It is often used as a
metaphor for an intractable problem, solved by a bold stroke ("cutting the Gordian knot").
According to a Phrygian tradition, an
oracle at Telmissus, the ancient
capital of
Phrygia, decreed to the Phrygians, who found themselves temporarily without a legitimate
king, that the next man to enter the city driving an ox-cart should become their king.
Midas, a poor
peasant, happened to drive into town with his father
Gordias and his mother, riding on his father's ox-cart. Before Midas' birth, an eagle had once landed on that ox-cart, and this was explained as a sign from the gods. Midas was declared a king by the priests. In gratitude, he dedicated his father's ox-cart to the Phrygian
god Sabazios, whom the
Greeks identified with
Zeus, and either tied it to a post or tied its shaft with an intricate
knot of
cornel (
Cornus mas)
bark. It was further prophesied by an oracle that the one to untie the knot would become the king of
Asia (today's
Asia Minor).
The ox-cart, often depicted as a
chariot, was an emblem of power and constant
military readiness. It still stood in the
palace of the former kings of
Phrygia at
Gordium in the
4th century BC when Alexander arrived, at which point Phrygia had been reduced to a
satrapy of the
Persian Empire.
In
333 BC, wintering at Gordium, Alexander attempted to untie the knot. When he could find no end to the knot, to unbind it, he sliced it in half with a stroke of his sword, producing the required ends (the so-called "Alexandrian solution").
Plutarch disputes this, relating that according to
Aristobulus, Alexander pulled the knot out of its pole pin rather than cutting it. Either way, Alexander did go on to conquer Asia, fulfilling the prophecy.
The knot may in fact have been a religious knot-cipher guarded by Gordium's
priests and priestesses.
Robert Graves suggested that it may have symbolized the ineffable name of
Dionysus that, enknotted like a
cipher, would have been passed on through generations of priests and revealed only to the kings of Phrygia.
Unlike
fable, true
myth has few completely arbitrary elements. This myth taken as a whole seems designed to confer legitimacy upon a
dynastic change in this central
Anatolian kingdom. To judge from the myth, apparently the new dynasty was not immemorially ancient, but had widely remembered origins in a local, but non-priestly "outsider" class, represented by the peasant Gordias in his oxcart. Other
Greek myths legitimize dynasties by right of conquest (compare
Cadmus), but the legitimizing oracle in this myth suggests that the previous dynasty had been a race of priest-kings allied to the oracle deity.
*
Egg of Columbus*
Endless knot*
Robert Graves,
The Greek Myths, 1993. ISBN 0140171991
*
Robin Lane Fox,
Alexander the Great, 1973, pp 149–151. ISBN 0140088784
*
Plutarch,
Lives*
Alexander the great and the Gordian knot
