Marsyas

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.

[3] 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).

[16] Later, however, Melanippides's story became accepted as canonical [15] and the Athenian sculptor Myron created a group of bronze sculptures based on it, which was installed before the western front of the Parthenon around 440 BC.

[15] In the second century AD, the travel writer Pausanias saw this set of sculptures and described it as "a statue of Athena striking Marsyas the Silenos for taking up the flutes [aulos] that the goddess wished to be cast away for good".

[17] In the contest between Apollo and Marsyas, which was judged by the Muses or the Nysean nymphs,[18][19] the terms stated that the winner could treat the defeated party any way he wanted.

Apollo then nailed Marsyas' skin to a pine tree,[22] near Lake Aulocrene (Karakuyu Gölü in modern Turkey), which Strabo noted was full of the reeds from which the pipes were fashioned.

His brothers, nymphs, gods, and goddesses mourned his death, and their tears, according to Ovid's Metamorphoses, were the source of the river Marsyas in Phrygia (called Çine Creek today), which joins the Meander near Celaenae, where Herodotus reported that the flayed skin of Marsyas was still to be seen,[26] and Ptolemy Hephaestion recorded a "festival of Apollo, where the skins of all those victims one has flayed are offered to the god".

Among the Romans, Marsyas was cast as the inventor of augury[33] and a proponent of free speech (the philosophical concept παρρησία, "parrhesia") and "speaking truth to power".

Gaius Marcius Rutilus, who rose to power from the plebs, is credited with having dedicated the statue that stood in the Roman forum, most likely in 294 BC, when he became the first plebeian censor and added the cognomen Censorinus to the family name.

[41] In 213 BC, two years after suffering one of the worst military defeats in its history at the Battle of Cannae, Rome was in the grip of a reactionary fear that led to excessive religiosity.

Among the literature confiscated was an "authentic" prophecy calling for the institution of games in the Greek manner for Apollo, which the Roman senate and elected officials would control.

[42] The power relations between Marsyas and Apollo reflected the continuing Struggle of the Orders between the elite and the common people, expressed in political terms by optimates and populares.

[49] The poet Ovid, who was ultimately exiled by Augustus, twice tells the story of Marsyas's flaying by Apollo, in his epic Metamorphoses and in the Fasti, the calendrical poem left unfinished at his death.

[53] A sarcophagus depicting the competition between Marsyas and Apollo, dating to around 300 CE, was discovered in 1853 on the bank of the river Chiarone in Tuscany, on the former Emilia-Aurelia road.

Its gathering of deities reads visually from left to right, starting from Athena with her staff and Erichthonius, forming her caduceus, which is partially broken along with a portion of her arm.

[citation needed] In 2002, British artist Anish Kapoor created and installed an enormous sculpture in London's Tate Modern entitled, "Marsyas".

Consisting of three huge steel rings and a single red PVC membrane, The work was impossible to view as a whole because of its size, but had obvious anatomical connotations.

[55] The late composer Kyle Rieger wrote a duet for saxophone and piano based on the contest between Marsyas and Apollo titled "Aulos & Lyre".