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The cutting of theGordian Knot is anAncient Greeklegend associated withAlexander the Great inGordium inPhrygia, regarding a complexknot that tied an oxcart. Reputedly, whoever could untie it would be destined to rule all of Asia. In 333 BC, Alexander was challenged to untie the knot. Instead of untangling it laboriously as everyone expected, he dramatically cut through it with his sword. This is used as ametaphor for inventing an unexpected method to solve a seemingly intractable problem.
Turn him to any cause of policy,
The Gordian Knot of it he will unloose,
Familiar as his garter
— Shakespeare,Henry V, Act 1 Scene 1. 45–47
ThePhrygians had noking, but anoracle atTelmissus (the ancient capital ofLycia) decreed that the next man to enter the city driving an ox-cart should become king. A peasant farmer namedGordias drove into town on an ox-cart and was immediately declared king.[a] Out of gratitude, his sonMidas dedicated the ox-cart[1] to the Phrygian godSabazios (whom the Greeksidentified with Zeus) and tied it to a post with an intricate knot ofcornel bark (Cornus mas). The knot was later described by Roman historianQuintus Curtius Rufus as comprising "several knots all so tightly entangled that it was impossible to see how they were fastened".[2]
The ox-cart still stood in the palace of the former kings of Phrygia atGordium in the fourth century BC when Alexander the Great arrived, at which point Phrygia had been reduced to asatrapy, or province, of thePersian Empire. An oracle had declared that any man who could unravel its elaborate knots was destined to rule over all of Asia.[2] Alexander the Great wanted to untie the knot but struggled to do so before reasoning that it would make no differencehow 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.[2] However,Plutarch andArrian relate that, according toAristobulus,[b] 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.[3][4] Some classical scholars regard this as more plausible than the popular account.[5] Literary sources of the story includeArrian (Anabasis Alexandri2.3),Quintus Curtius (3.1.14),Justin's epitome ofPompeius Trogus (11.7.3), andAelian'sDe Natura Animalium 13.1.[6]
Alexander the Great later went on to conquer Asia as far as theIndus and theOxus, thus partially fulfilling the prophecy.
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 ofDionysus that, knotted like a cipher, would have been passed on through generations of priests and revealed only to the kings of Phrygia.[7]
Unlike popularfable, genuinemythology has few completely arbitrary elements. This myth taken as a whole seems designed to confer legitimacy todynastic change in this centralAnatolian kingdom: thus Alexander's "brutal cutting of the knot … ended an ancient dispensation."[7]
The ox-cart suggests a longer voyage, rather than a local journey, perhaps linking Alexander the Great with an attested origin-myth inMacedon, of which Alexander is most likely to have been aware.[8] 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 aneponymous peasant[9] or the locally attested, authentically Phrygian[10] 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" andCybele).[11]
OtherGreek myths legitimize dynasties by right of conquest (compareCadmus), but in this myth the stressed legitimisingoracle suggests that the previous dynasty was a race of priest-kings allied to the unidentified oracular deity.
Media related toGordian Knot at Wikimedia Commons
The dictionary definition ofGordian knot at Wiktionary
