A Phrygian satyr or Silenus in classical myth. He probably originated as a water spirit native to Asia Minor and Syria; the myths of many peoples concerning the origins of music also concern water. From an early period, however, he was associated with the double Aulos, introduced into Greece from the Near East, and with the composition of aulos music for the Asiatic mother-goddess Cybele.
Various Greek mythographers, followed by Ovid (Metamorphoses, vi.383–7; Fasti, vi.695–710), told the story of his contest with Apollo. Athena invented the double aulos but threw it away because it distorted her features (Plutarch, On the Control of Anger, 456b; Athenaeus, xiv, 616e–f, quoting Melanippides, Marsyas; cf Pausanias, Description of Greece, i.24.1). Marsyas found the pipes and mastered them, then challenged Apollo to a musical competition judged by the Muses. Apollo, victorious, had the satyr flayed (Diodorus Siculus, iii.59; Apollodorus, i.4.2). From the blood that ran down (as the more common version has it) came the river Marsyas; other aetiological connections were known to antiquity. Many recent scholars have interpreted the myth as reflecting the victory of Hellenic song, accompanied by the kithara, over Asiatic aulos music; this perhaps exaggerates the degree of actual rivalry.
Various late classical writers made Marsyas the inventor of the double aulos, or the son of its inventor Hyagnis. Marsyas in turn is supposed to have taught Olympus (see Olympus the Mysian), a legendary figure from the beginning of Greek music history (Plato, Symposium, 215c; Pseudo-Plutarch, On Music, 1132e–f; Apuleius, Florida, i.3.11), although in some sources (e.g. Apollodorus, i.4.2), Marsyas is the son of Olympus. According to a fragment preserved in Plutarch's On the Control of Anger (456b–c), perhaps by Simonides, Marsyas invented the Phorbeia, which is commonly though by no means universally worn by performers playing the aulos. A striking feature of the myth is the ambivalent attitude displayed towards the instrument itself, at once claimed and disowned by native Greek tradition.
H. Abert: ‘Antike Musikerlegende’, Festschrift zum 90. Geburtstage … Rates Rochus Freiherrn von Liliencron (Leipzig, 1910/R), 1–16
M. Wegner: Das Musikleben der Griechen (Berlin, 1949), 18–19
G. Wille: Musica romana (Amsterdam, 1967), 533ff
M.J. Kartomi: On Concepts and Classifications of Musical Instruments (Chicago, 1990), 116–18
D.A. Campbell, ed. and trans.: Greek Lyric, iii (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1991), 272–85
T.J. Mathiesen: Apollo's Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Lincoln, NE, 1999), 178–82
For further bibliography see Aulos; Greece, §I; and Phorbeia.
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN