Ariadne

Ariadne was a daughter of King Minos of Crete, the king who kept the Minotaur in the Labyrinth. Every few years Athens sent young men and women to Crete as food for the monster. When Theseus came among them, Apollodorus's Epitome says Ariadne fell in love with him. She offered to help if he would take her to Athens as his wife, and Theseus swore an oath to do so.

Ariadne did not solve the maze herself. She asked Daedalus, who had built it, how to get out. At his suggestion she gave Theseus a clew, a ball of thread. Theseus tied it to the door and unwound it as he went in. He killed the Minotaur with his fists in the last part of the Labyrinth, then followed the thread back out. The full episode is told in Theseus and the Minotaur.

That night Theseus sailed off with Ariadne and the Athenian youths. What happened next is the great disagreement of her myth. In Apollodorus, they reached Naxos, where Dionysus fell in love with Ariadne and carried her off. He took her to Lemnos, and she bore him Thoas, Staphylus, Oenopion and Peparethus. Apollodorus adds that Theseus, grieving for her, forgot to change his black sail. His father Aegeus saw it from the acropolis, thought his son was dead, and threw himself down.

The oldest source tells a harsher story. In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus sees Ariadne among the dead. Theseus wanted to bring her to Athens but had no joy of her, because Artemis killed her on sea-girt Dia on the word of Dionysus. Homer does not say what Dionysus witnessed. Hesiod's Theogony gives the opposite ending. There golden-haired Dionysus makes Ariadne his wife, and Zeus makes her deathless and unageing for him.

Catullus gives the abandonment its most famous voice. His Poem 64 describes a wedding coverlet embroidered with Ariadne on the shore of Dia, watching Theseus's ship sail away. In her lament she calls him a traitor and prays to the Furies that the same forgetful mind that left her should ruin him and his house. Jupiter nods, and Theseus forgets his father's order to raise white sails. Aegeus sees the dark sail and throws himself from the heights. On another part of the coverlet Iacchus, a name for Dionysus, arrives with his satyrs, burning with love for her.

Ovid's Metamorphoses compresses the story into a few lines. Theseus leaves Ariadne on Dia, and Bacchus finds her lamenting and takes her for his own. To make her name last forever, he sets the crown from her brow in the sky. It becomes the constellation called Ariadne's Crown, between the Serpent-holder and the Kneeler.

Plutarch's Life of Theseus says frankly that the traditions about Ariadne do not agree at all. Some said she hanged herself after Theseus deserted her. Others said sailors took her to Naxos, where she married Oenarus, a priest of Dionysus, while Theseus had left her for love of Aegle. The poet Ion of Chios made Oenopion and Staphylus her sons by Theseus, not by Dionysus. Paeon of Amathus set her death on Cyprus, pregnant and dying before the birth, with a tomb in a grove the locals called that of Aphrodite Ariadne. Some Naxians spoke of two Ariadnes: one who married Dionysus on Naxos, and a later one whom Theseus carried off and abandoned.

Places in Greece kept their own versions. Pausanias saw a painting in the oldest sanctuary of Dionysus at Athens showing Ariadne asleep, Theseus putting out to sea, and Dionysus arriving to carry her off. At Argos he was shown a temple of Cretan Dionysus. The Argives said the god buried Ariadne there when she died, and a local writer, Lyceas, claimed her earthenware coffin was found during rebuilding. At Delphi, Pausanias describes a painting of the underworld with Ariadne seated on a rock, watching her sister Phaedra on a swing. There he gives his own opinion: Dionysus took Ariadne from Theseus with a superior fleet, either meeting her by chance or setting an ambush.

Homer knew one more detail. On the shield Hephaestus makes for Achilles in the Iliad is a dancing floor like the one Daedalus built in Cnossus for fair-tressed Ariadne.

Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, painted in 1520 to 1523 and now in the National Gallery in London, shows Bacchus leaping from his chariot toward her. According to the gallery, the stars above her head are her crown, set in the sky as the constellation Corona Borealis, and the picture draws on Ovid and Catullus. Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal staged her in the opera Ariadne auf Naxos. It premiered in Stuttgart in 1912, and its revised version with a new prologue opened in Vienna in 1916. In it Bacchus arrives on Naxos and promises to set Ariadne among the stars.