Ariadne- Greek FigureMortal"Princess of Crete"

The Princess of the Labyrinth

Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos of Crete and his queen Pasiphaë, daughter of Helios. Her father was a son of Zeus and Europa, who had been carried across the sea on a bull's back. Her mother, cursed by Poseidon, had coupled with a white bull from the sea and borne the Minotaur, Asterion: a creature with a human body and a bull's head, who ate human flesh. Minos had Daedalus build the Labyrinth beneath Knossos to imprison it, a maze so tangled that no one who entered could find the way out.

The tribute began after Minos's son Androgeos was killed in Attica. Minos besieged Athens and forced the city to send seven youths and seven maidens every nine years, to be cast into the Labyrinth and hunted. Ariadne grew up with the knowledge of what lived beneath her feet.

The Coming of Theseus

Theseus, son of Aegeus of Athens, volunteered as one of the seven youths in the third tribute. He swore to slay the Minotaur and end the blood debt. His father made him promise to change the ship's sails from black to white on the return voyage, so Aegeus could know from the cliffs whether his son lived.

When the tribute ship reached Knossos, Ariadne saw Theseus among the prisoners. Apollodorus describes what followed simply: she fell in love. She resolved to save him, even at the cost of betraying her father and her country.

The Thread and the Sword

She went to Daedalus. The architect knew his own creation: the passages doubled back on themselves and split into dead ends that led nowhere, but a thread tied at the entrance and unwound while walking would always lead back out. Ariadne brought Theseus the thread and a sword to kill the creature. In return, she asked one thing: that he take her with him to Athens as his wife.

Theseus tied the thread at the entrance and walked into the dark. Deep in the maze, where the passages reeked of blood and bones lay scattered on the floor, he found the Minotaur and killed it with Ariadne's sword. Then he followed the thread back to where she waited. Before dawn, they fled Knossos with the other Athenian captives and put to sea.

Naxos

The fleet stopped at the island of Naxos. In Ovid's Heroides, Ariadne wakes in the dark and reaches for Theseus. The bed is empty. She runs to the shore and climbs a headland, the wind tearing at her hair. The sea stretches in every direction, and the sails are already gone. She is alone on an island she cannot name, with no ship and no way home. She had betrayed her father and her homeland for Theseus, and he had left her sleeping on a foreign shore.

Why he left her, the sources disagree. Homer has Artemis kill Ariadne on Naxos "at Dionysus's testimony," without explaining why. Apollodorus says Dionysus appeared to Theseus in a dream and demanded her; Theseus obeyed a god's command. Plutarch records a Naxian tradition in which Theseus brought her ashore because she was pregnant and seasick, but a storm drove his ships out before he could return. By the time he came back, she had died in labor.

The God on the Shore

Dionysus found her weeping on the beach. In Ovid's telling, she had torn her hair and beaten her breast, crying out to the empty sea. The god arrived from his conquests in the East, wreathed in vine leaves, with his retinue of Maenads and Satyrs. The island shook with music. He told her to put aside her grief: they would ascend the heavens together. She had shared his bed, and now she would share his sky.

He gave her a crown of gold and gems, crafted by Hephaestus. At their wedding on Naxos, with the gods looking on, he threw the crown into the sky. Its jewels became stars: the constellation Corona Borealis, which still circles the northern heavens. Ariadne bore Dionysus sons. Zeus granted her immortality, and she lived among the gods on Olympus.

The Dancing Floor

In the Iliad, Homer describes a dancing floor that Daedalus built at Knossos for Ariadne, where young men and women in fine linen wove in and out in an intricate pattern. After escaping the maze, Theseus and his companions stopped at the island of Delos and performed the geranos, the crane dance, tracing the labyrinth's winding turns with their feet. Plutarch reports the dance survived on Delos for centuries.

On Naxos, two festivals honored Ariadne: one joyful, celebrating her marriage to Dionysus; one mournful, for her abandonment and death. On Cyprus, the women of Amathus held rites in which a young man lay down and imitated the cries of a woman in labor, mourning the princess who had died giving birth far from home. Plutarch records that the Amathusians called the grove where these rites took place the grove of Ariadne Aphrodite.