The story of Ariadne and Theseus illustrates the process whereby Athens freed itself from Crete, which, until about 1200 BCE, was a the leading power in the Mediterranean world. The Athenian Theseus puts an end to Cretan demands for reparations and gains a princess as his bride.
Ariadne herself, whose name means “most pure” or “most pleasing,” was at one time worshiped as a fertility goddess in Crete and the eastern Mediterranean. Her union with Dionysus, the god of not only wine but also dance, excess, and abundance, seems to be a link between earlier Eastern and later Greek divinities of renewal and growth.
A circular fertility dance led by Theseus is described in Callimachus’s Hymn to Delos, written in the third century BCE, and Ariadne herself may well have led such a dance in Crete, on a labyrinthine-patterned floor constructed for this purpose by Daedalus.
The image of the solitary and inconsolable Ariadne was a popular theme in the visual art and poetry of antiquity, and she has remained a symbol of loss and abandonment in Western art. The Renaissance Italian artists Titian and Guido Reni both painted her, as did the French artist Jean-Baptiste Regnault at the start of the 19th century. In the early 20th century, Ariadne was the subject of an opera, Ariadne on Naxos, by German composer Richard Strauss. More recently, because of Ariadne’s part in overcoming the horrors of the Labyrinth, her name has been used by a variety of projects related to information retrieval on the Internet.
Peter Connor
Bibliography
Bulfinch, Thomas. Bulfinch’s Mythology. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006.
Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. New York: Penguin,
1993.
World History
