In Greek mythology, Ariadne (/ˌæriˈædni/; Greek: Ἀριάδνη; Latin: Ariadne) was a Cretan princess and the daughter of King Minos of Crete. There are different variations of Ariadne's myth, but she is known for helping Theseus escape the Minotaur and being abandoned by him on the island of Naxos. There, Dionysus saw Ariadne sleeping, fell in love with her, and later married her. Many versions of the myth recount Dionysus throwing Ariadne's jeweled crown into the sky to create a constellation, the Corona Borealis.[1][2]
Ariadne is associated with mazes and labyrinths because of her involvement in the myths of Theseus and the Minotaur.
There are also festivals held in Cyprus and Naxos in Ariadne's honor.[3][4]
Linguist Robert S. P. Beekes has also supported Ariadne having a pre-Greek origin; specifically being Minoan from Crete because her name includes the sequence dn (δν), rare in Indo-European languages and an indication that it is a Minoan loanword.[8]
Minos put Ariadne in charge of the labyrinth where sacrifices were made as part of reparations either to Poseidon or Athena, depending on the version of the myth; later, she helped Theseus conquer the Minotaur and save the children from sacrifice. In other narrations she was the bride of Dionysus, her status as mortal or divine varying in those accounts.[16][17]
Minos and Theseus
Because ancient Greek myths were orally transmitted, like other myths, that of Ariadne has many variations. According to an Athenian version, Minos attacked Athens after his son, Androgeus, was killed there. The Athenians asked for terms and were required to sacrifice 7 young men and 7 maidens to the Minotaur every 1, 7 or 9 years (depending on the source).[18] One year, the sacrificial party included Theseus, the son of King Aegeus, who volunteered in order to kill the Minotaur.[19] At first sight, Ariadne fell in love with him and provided him a sword and ball of thread (ο Μίτος της Αριάδνης, "Ariadne's string") so that he could retrace his way out of the labyrinth of the Minotaur.[12]
Ariadne betrayed her father and her country for her lover Theseus. She eloped with Theseus after he killed the Minotaur, yet according to Homer in the Odyssey "he had no joy of her, for ere that, Artemis slew her in seagirt Dia because of the witness of Dionysus". The phrase "seagirt Dia" refers to the uninhabited island of Dia, which lies off the northern coast of the Greek island of Crete in the Mediterranean Sea. Dia may have referred to the island of Naxos.
Most accounts claim that Theseus abandoned Ariadne on Naxos, and in some versions Perseus mortally wounds her. According to some, Dionysus claimed Ariadne as wife, therefore causing Theseus to abandon her.[20] Homer does not elaborate on the nature of Dionysus' accusation, yet the Oxford Classical Dictionary speculated that she was already married to him when she eloped with Theseus. According to Plutarch, Paion the Amathusian recounted Theseus accidentally abandoned Ariadne only to come back when it was too late.[12]
Naxos
A Greek Epigrams Pompeii Plate by Geremia Discanno depicting Ariadne abandoned on the island Naxos
In Hesiod and in most other versions, Theseus abandoned Ariadne sleeping on Naxos, and Dionysus rediscovered and wedded her. In a few versions of the myth,[21]Dionysus appeared to Theseus as they sailed from Crete, saying that he had chosen Ariadne as his wife and demanding that Theseus leave her on Naxos for him; this had the effect of absolving the Athenian cultural hero of desertion.[20] The vase painters of Athens often depicted Athena leading Theseus from the sleeping Ariadne to his ship.[citation needed]
Ariadne bore Dionysus famous children, including Oenopion, Staphylus, and Thoas. Dionysus set her wedding diadem in the heavens as the constellation Corona Borealis. Ariadne was faithful to Dionysus. In one version of her myth, Perseus killed her at Argos by turning her to stone with the head of Medusa during Perseus' war with Dionysus.[22] The Odyssey[23] relates that Artemis killed her. According to Plutarch, one version of the myth tells that Ariadne hanged herself after being abandoned by Theseus.[24] Dionysus then went to Hades, and brought her and his mother Semele to Mount Olympus, where they were deified.[25]
Karl Kerenyi and Robert Graves theorized that Ariadne, whose name they thought derived from Hesychius' enumeration of "Άδνον", a Cretan-Greek form of "arihagne" ("utterly pure"), was a Great Goddess of Crete, "the first divine personage of Greek mythology to be immediately recognized in Crete",[29] once archaeological investigation began. Kerenyi observed that her name was merely an epithet and claimed that she was originally the "Mistress of the Labyrinth", both a winding dancing ground and, in the Greek opinion, a prison with the dreaded Minotaur in its centre. Kerenyi explained that a Linear B inscription from Knossos "to all the gods, honey… [,] to the mistress of the labyrinth honey" in equal amounts, implied to him that the Mistress of the Labyrinth was a Great Goddess in her own right.[30] Professor Barry Powell suggested that she was the Snake Goddess of Minoan Crete.[31]
Plutarch, in his Life of Theseus, which treats him as a historical person, reported that in contemporary Naxos was an earthly Ariadne, who was distinct from a divine one:
Some of the Naxians also have a story of their own, that there were two Minoses and two Ariadnes, one of whom, they say, was married to Dionysos in Naxos and bore him Staphylos and his brother, and the other, of a later time, having been carried off by Theseus and then abandoned by him, came to Naxos, accompanied by a nurse named Korkyne, whose tomb they show; and that this Ariadne also died there.[32]
In a kylix by the painter Aison (c. 425 – c. 410 BC)[a]Theseus drags the Minotaur from a temple-like labyrinth, yet the goddess who attends him in this Attic representation is Athena.
The VaticanSleeping Ariadne, long erroneously identified as Cleopatra, a Roman marble in late Hellenistic style
An ancient cult of Aphrodite-Ariadne was observed at Amathus, Cyprus, according to the obscure Hellenistic mythographer Paeon of Amathus; his works are lost, but his narrative is among the sources that Plutarch cited in his vita of Theseus (20.3–5). According to the myth that was current at Amathus, the second most important Cypriot cult centre of Aphrodite, Theseus' ship was swept off course and the pregnant and suffering Ariadne put ashore in the storm. Theseus, attempting to secure the ship, was inadvertently swept out to sea, thus being absolved of abandoning Ariadne. The Cypriot women cared for Ariadne, who died in childbirth and was memorialized in a shrine. Theseus, overcome with grief upon his return, left money for sacrifices to Ariadne and ordered two cult images, one of silver and one of bronze, erected.
At the observation in her honour on the second day of the month Gorpiaeus, a young man lay on the ground and vicariously experienced the throes of labour. The sacred grove in which the shrine was located was denominated the "Grove of Aphrodite-Ariadne".[33] According to Cypriot legend, Ariadne's tomb was located within the temenos of the sanctuary of Aphrodite-Ariadne.[34] The primitive nature of the cult at Amathus in this narrative appears to be much older than the Athenian sanctioned shrine of Aphrodite, who at Amathus received "Ariadne" (derived from "hagne", "sacred") as an epithet.[citation needed]
Ariadneia (ἀριάδνεια) festivals honored Ariadne and were held in Naxos and Cyprus. According to Plutarch, some Naxians believed there were two Ariadnes, one of which died on the island of Naxos after being abandoned by Theseus. The Ariadneia festival honors Naxos as the place of her death with sacrifices and mourning.[3][37]Paeon, as stated by Plutarch, attributes the Ariadneia festival in Cyprus to Theseus, who left money to the island so sacrifices could be made to commemorate Ariadne. Sacrifices were held in the grove of Ariadne Aphrodite, where Ariadne's tomb resided. During these sacrifices, a young man shall lie down and mimic a woman in labour by crying out and gesturing on the second day of the month, Gorpiaeus. One silver and one bronze statuette were also constructed in her honor.
In Etruscan culture
Ariadne, in EtruscanAreatha, is paired with Dionysus, in Etruscan "Fufluns", on Etruscan engraved bronze mirror backs, where the Athenian cultural hero Theseus is absent, and Semele, in Etruscan "Semla", as mother of Dionysus, may accompany the pair,[38] lending an especially Etruscan air[39] of familial authority.
Ariadne is the subject of W. N. Herbert's poem Ariadne on Broughty Ferry Beach (1983).[43]
Ariadne, played by Aiysha Hart, is a major character in the BBC series Atlantis (2013), which is loosely based on Greek myths. She falls in love with Jason and helps him conquer the Minotaur and escape the labyrinth. Later, her stepmother, Pasiphae tries to prevent their union.
Ariadne is the name of the protagonist in the Korean Reincarnation Manhwa "Sister, In This Life I Have Become The Queen". The protagonist is loosely based on Greek mythology as she helps her original love interest kill his half brother to usurp the throne, only to be tossed aside at the last second for her sister.
In Christopher Nolan's Inception, the character Ariadne, played by Elliot Page, is a graduate student of architecture recruited to construct various dreamscapes, which are described as mazes. [44]
^Beekes, Robert S. P. (2010). Etymological Dictionary of Greek. Volume I, with the assistance of Lucien van Beek. Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series; 10. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2010. p. 130. ISBN978-90-04-17420-7.
^Homer, Odyssey, 11.320; Hesiod, Theogony, 947; and later authors.
^Pasiphaë is mentioned as mother of Ariadne in Apollodorus, 3.1.2 (Pasiphaë, daughter of the Sun); Apollonius, Argonautica, 3.997; and Hyginus, Fabulae, 224.
^In creating a "biography" for a historicized Ariadne, Theseus' having abandoned her on Naxos explains her presence there; in assembling a set of biographical narrative episodes, this would have had to be placed after her abduction from Knossos. In keeping with the office of Minos as King of Crete, Ariadne came to bear the late title of "Princess". The culmination of this rationalization is the realistic historicizing fiction of Mary Renault, The Bull from the Sea (1962).
^
Berg, Nicole M. (2020). "Inserting Sources in Spartacus". Discovering Kubrick's Symbolism: The Secrets of the Films. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. p. 207. ISBN9781476680491. Retrieved 12 February 2023. In the movie, Bacchus himself is reclining in the arms of Ariadne (the weaving goddess) [...].
^Wedeck, Harry E., ed. (1963). "Tibullus". Classics of Roman Literature. Translated by Elton, C. A. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 121–122. ISBN9781442233812. Retrieved 12 February 2023. Know, father Bacchus hates the mournful lay. So thou, O Cretan maid! didst once deplore A perjured tongue, left lonely on the shore, As skill'd Catullus tells, who paints in song The ingrate Theseus, Ariadne's wrong. Take warning, Youths! oh blest! whoe'er shall know The art to profit by another's woe. Let not the hanging nymph's embrace deceive, Nor protestations of base tongues believe [...].
Compare an alternative translation of the equivalent passage from Tibullus' Sixth Elegy by Theodore Chickering Williams:
"Delightful Bacchus at his mystery
Forbids these words of woe.
Once, by the wave, lone Ariadne pale,
Abandoned of false Theseus, weeping stood:—
Our wise Catullus tells the doleful tale
Of love's ingratitude.
Take warning friends! How fortunate is he,
Who learns of others' loss his own to shun!
Trust not caressing arms and sighs, nor be
By flatteries undone!"
^
Larson, Jennifer Lynn (1995). "The Wrongful Death of the Heroine". Greek Heroine Cults. Wisconsin studies in classics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. p. 141. ISBN9780299143701. Retrieved 12 February 2023. The motif of the hanged goddess or heroine is quite widespread. [...] the thread running through most of these stories is that they involve heroines who die a wrongful death. The same aetion is used all over the Greek world to explain hanging or swinging rituals. Hanging is a particularly feminine form of death in the Greek mind [...].
^Kerenyi (1976), Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, p. 89.
^Barry B. Powell, Classical Myth, 2nd ed., with new translations of ancient texts by Herbert M. Howe, Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA, Prentice-Hall, 1998, p. 368.
^For example on the mirror engraving reproduced in Larissa Bonfante and Judith Swaddling, Etruscan Myths, The Legendary Past series, University of Texas/British Museum, 2006, fig. 25, p. 41.
^"The married couple is ubiquitous in Etruscan art. It is appropriate to the social situation of the Etruscan aristocracy, in which the wife's family played as important a role in the family's genealogy as that of the husband." (Bonfante and Swaddling, 2006, 51f.).
Kerenyi, Karl. Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, part I.iii "The Cretan core of the Dionysos myth" Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976.
Peck, Harry Thurston. Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (1898).
Ruck, Carl A. P. and Danny Staples. The World of Classical Myth. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1994.
Barthes, Roland, "Camera Lucida". Barthes quotes Nietzsche, "A labyrinthine man never seeks the truth, but only his Ariadne," using Ariadne in reference to his mother, who had recently died.
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