… he is but one wound …

She speaks in the blithe, careless manner of classical gods, all of them sociopaths.

I first enabled the long flute to produce notes
Through spaced holes in perforated boxwood.
The sound pleased; but the limpid water reflected
My face, and I glimpsed puffed virgin cheeks.
'Art is not worth this to me; farewell, my flute,' I said.
The bank receives my cast-off on its turf.

Along comes a gullible, simple, agreeable fellow, delighted by what seems to him a lucky break. He doesn’t know the flute is tainted with disdain.

A satyr finds it and marvels at first, ignorant
Of its use. He learns that breath creates sound;
And, fingering the pipe, he blows and draws in air,
And now boasted of his art to the nymphs.

— Fasti by Ovid, translated by A.J. Boyle and R.D. Woodard*

Marsyas has discovered both the joy of creation and the prestige it gives him with girls, a happy confluence of good feelings that spirals upward into euphoria, then into mania, but at last turn delusional — so much so he challenges Apollo, god of music, to a music contest. Of course Marsyas loses. Ovid skips over the sporting details, but other poets* tell how Apollo cheats and wins on a sly technicality. Gods do not recognize rules. Neither do they bother with compassion or pity. Apollo hands down a sentence that is gratuitously violent: Marsyas will be skinned alive.

Ovid continues the story in Metamorphoses where Marsyas decides, as Minerva did, that art is not worth some sacrifices.

… The Satyr cried:
'Why do you tear me from myself? Oh, I
repent! A flute is not worth such a price.'
He screams; the skin is flayed off all his form,
and he is but one wound; upon all sides,
his blood pours down; his sinews can be seen;
his pulsing veins glow with no veil of skin;
you could have tallied up his throbbing guts;
the fibers in his chest were clear, apparent.

— The Metamorphoses of Ovid*, translated by Allen Mandelbaum

Here is an excellent metaphor for the mental pain of self-loathing … a writhing disgust and self-hatred that strips one naked of all human pretense and then goes further to strip off the very skin of one’s animal being. The mortal is reduced to glistening viscera.

Epilogue:
Tender-hearted readers appalled by this story may take comfort in a different interpretation, that the legend is a metaphor for the conquest of archaic Greek nature religions by newer Mt. Olympus gods. The old-order shaman-priest in his animal skin vestments is forcibly “disrobed” so he loses sacred authority. Classical scholar Karoly Kerenyi* wrote that Marsyas “was defeated and stripped of his shaggy hide: a penalty which will not seem especially cruel if one assumes that Marsyas’s animal guise was merely a masquerade.”

Still others call this a metaphor of the spirit’s agony when it struggles to rise above mundane flesh. Dante seems to compare the effort of poetic creation to Marsyas’ flensing. At the beginning of Paradiso* (Mandelbaum’s translation), Dante invokes Apollo, praying for inspiration:
O good Apollo, for this final task
make me the vessel of your excellence,
what you, to merit your loved laurel, ask….
Enter into my breast; within me breathe
the very power you made manifest
when you drew Marsyas out from his limbs’ sheath.

The Greeks recognized the beastliness of Apollo’s behavior, even as they worshiped him. Ovid tells how all who knew Marsyas, all who witnessed his death, mourned the satyr and wept.

…. And the fertile soil was soaked
with tears that fell; and these, Earth gathered up
and drank them deep into her veins; then these
she changed into a watercourse and sent
into the open air. From there the river,
within its sloping banks, ran down to sea:
it is called Marsyas — Phrygia’s clearest stream.

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