Gordian Knot
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The cutting of the Gordian Knot is an Ancient Greek legend associated with Alexander the Great in Gordium in Phrygia, regarding a complex knot that tied an oxcart. Reputedly, whoever could untie it would be destined to rule all of Asia. In 333 BCE, Alexander was challenged to untie the knot. Instead of untangling it laboriously as expected, he dramatically cut through it with his sword. This is used as a metaphor for using brute force to solve a seemingly-intractable problem. Template:Poemquote
Legend
[edit]The Phrygians were without a king, but an oracle at Telmissus (the ancient capital of Lycia) decreed that the next man to enter the city driving an ox-cart should become their king. A peasant farmer named Gordias drove into town on an ox-cart and was immediately declared king.Template:Efn Out of gratitude, his son Midas dedicated the ox-cart<ref>Arrian, Anabasis Alexandri (Αλεξάνδρου Ανάβασις), Book ii.3): "Template:Lang" which means "and he offered his father's cart as a gift to king Zeus as gratitude for sending the eagle".</ref> to the Phrygian god Sabazios (whom the Greeks identified with Zeus) and tied it to a post with an intricate knot of cornel bark (Cornus mas). The knot was later described by Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus as comprising "several knots all so tightly entangled that it was impossible to see how they were fastened".<ref name="Andrews">Template:Cite web</ref>
The ox-cart still stood in the palace of the former kings of Phrygia at Gordium in the fourth century BCE when Alexander the Great arrived, at which point Phrygia had been reduced to a satrapy, or province, of the Persian Empire. An oracle had declared that any man who could unravel its elaborate knots was destined to rule over all of Asia.<ref name="Andrews"/> Alexander the Great wanted to untie the knot but struggled to do so before reasoning that it would make no difference how the knot was loosed. Sources from antiquity disagree on his solution. In one version of the story, he drew his sword and sliced it in half with a single stroke.<ref name="Andrews"/> However, Plutarch and Arrian relate that, according to Aristobulus,Template:Efn Alexander pulled the linchpin from the pole to which the yoke was fastened, exposing the two ends of the cord and allowing him to untie the knot without having to cut through it.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite Plutarch</ref> Some classical scholars regard this as more plausible than the popular account.<ref>Template:Cite journal citing Tarn, W.W. 1948</ref> Literary sources of the story include Arrian (Anabasis Alexandri 2.3), Quintus Curtius (3.1.14), Justin's epitome of Pompeius Trogus (11.7.3), and Aelian's De Natura Animalium 13.1.<ref>The four sources are given in Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great (1973) 1986: Notes to Chapter 10, p. 518; Fox recounts the anecdote, pp. 149–151.</ref>
Alexander the Great later went on to conquer Asia as far as the Indus and the Oxus, thus partially fulfilling the prophecy.
Interpretations
[edit]The knot may have been a religious knot-cipher guarded by priests and priestesses. Robert Graves suggested that it may have symbolised the ineffable name of Dionysus that, knotted like a cipher, would have been passed on through generations of priests and revealed only to the kings of Phrygia.<ref name="Graves">Template:Cite book</ref>
The ox-cart suggests a longer voyage, rather than a local journey, perhaps linking Alexander the Great with an attested origin-myth in Macedon, of which Alexander is most likely to have been aware.<ref>"Surely Alexander believed that this god, who established for Midas the rule over Phrygia, now guaranteed to him the fulfillment of the promise of rule over Asia", (Fredricksmeyer, 1961, p 165).</ref> Based on this origin myth, the new dynasty was not immemorially ancient, but had widely remembered origins in a local, but non-priestly "outsider" class, represented by Greek reports equally as an eponymous peasant<ref>Trogus apud Justin, Plutarch, Alexander 18.1; Curtius 3.1.11 and 14.</ref> or the locally attested, authentically Phrygian<ref>Arrian</ref> in his ox-cart. Roller (1984) separates out authentic Phrygian elements in the Greek reports and finds a folk-tale element and a religious one, linking the dynastic founder (with the cults of "Zeus" and Cybele).<ref>Template:Cite journal Both Roller and Fredricksmeyer (1961) offer persuasive arguments that the original name associated with the wagon is "Midas", "Gordias" being a Greek back-formation from the site name Gordion, according to Roller.</ref>
Other Greek myths legitimize dynasties by right of conquest (compare Cadmus), but in this myth the stressed legitimising oracle suggests that the previous dynasty was a race of priest-kings allied to the unidentified oracular deity.