luents: it was there that the towns and strongholds of their most
venerated leaders, such as Midaion, Dorylaion, Gordiaion, Tataion, and
many others stood close together, perpetuating the memory of Midas,
Dorylas, Gordios, and Tatas. Its climate was severe and liable to
great extremes of temperature, being bitterly cold in winter and almost
tropical during the summer months; forests of oak and pine, however, and
fields of corn flourished, while the mountain slopes favoured the growth
of the vine; it was, in short, an excellent and fertile country, well
fitted for the development of a nation of vinedressers and tillers of
the soil. The slaying of an ox or the destruction of an agricultural
implement was punishable by death, and legend relates that Gordios,
the first Phrygian king, was a peasant by birth. His sole patrimony
consisted of a single pair of oxen, and the waggon used by him in
bringing home his sheaves after the harvest was afterwards placed as an
offering in the temple of Cybele at Ancyra by his son Midas; there was
a local tradition according to which the welfare of all Asia depended on
the knot which bound the yoke to the pole being preserved intact.
Midas did not imitate his father's simple habits, and the poets, after
crediting him with fabulous wealth, tried also to make out that he was a
conqueror. The kingdom expanded in all directions, and soon included the
upper valley of the Masander, with its primeval sanctuaries, Kydrara,
Colossae, and Kylsenae, founded wherever exhalations of steam and boiling
springs betrayed the presence of some supernatural power. The southern
shores of the Hellespont, which formed part of the Troad, and was
the former territory of the Ascania, belonged to it, as did also the
majority of the peoples scattered along the coast of the Euxine between
the mouth of the Sangarios and that of the Halys; those portions of the
central steppe which border on Lake Tatta were also for a time subject
to it, Lydia was under its influence, and it is no exaggeration to say
that in the tenth and eleventh centuries before our era there was a
regular Phrygian empire which held sway, almost without a rival, over
the western half of Asia Minor.

[Illustration: 095.jpg MONUMENT COMMEMORATIVE OF MIDAS]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a plate in Perrot and Chipiez.

It has left behind it so few relics of its existence, that we can only
guess at what it must have been in the days of its prosperity.