In Greek mythology, Ariadne (; ; ) was a Cretan princess, the daughter of Minos of Cretan. There are variations of Ariadne's myth, but she is known for helping Theseus escape from the Minotaur and being abandoned by him (or herself dying) 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.
Ariadne is associated with and 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.
Etymology
by Titian: Dionysus discovers Ariadne on the shore of Naxos. The painting also depicts the Corona Borealis.Ariadne
is derived from the Doric Greek elements ari
(ἀρι-) "most" (which is an intensive prefix) and adnós'' (ἀδνός) "holy". Conversely, Stylianos Alexiou has argued that despite the belief being that Ariadne's name is of Indo-European origin, it is actually pre-Greek.
Linguist Robert S. P. Beekes has also supported Ariadne having a pre-Greek origin; specifically being Minoan language from Crete because her name includes the sequence dn (δν), rare in Indo-European languages and an indication that it is a Minoan loanword.[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. .]
Family
Ariadne was the daughter of
Minos, the King of
Crete[Homer, Odyssey, 11.320; Hesiod, Theogony, 947; and later authors.] and son of
Zeus, and of Pasiphaë, Minos' queen and daughter of
Helios.
[Pasiphaë is mentioned as mother of Ariadne in Apollodorus , --therefore making Ariadne a granddaughter of Helios, the titan of the sun. 3.1.2 (Pasiphaë, daughter of the Sun); Apollonius, Argonautica , 3.997; and Hyginus, Fabulae'', 224.] Others denominated her mother Crete, daughter of Asterius, the king of Crete and husband of Europa.
Ariadne was the sister of Acacallis, Androgeus, Deucalion, Phaedra, Glaucus, Xenodice, and Catreus.[Apollodorus, 3.1.2.] Through her mother, Pasiphaë, she was also the half-sister of the Minotaur (who was known in Crete as Asterion).
Ariadne married Dionysus and became the mother of Oenopion, the personification of wine, Staphylus, who was associated with grapes, as well as Thoas, Peparethus, Eurymedon, , Ceramus, Maron, Evanthes, Latromis, and Tauropolis.
| Relation
! rowspan="3" | Names
! colspan="14" | Sources |
|
| Ody. | Sch. Ili. | Ehoiai | Arg. | Sch. | Her. | Met. | Theseus | Fabulae | Autolycus |
| Parentage | Minos | ✓ | | ✓ | | | ✓ | | ✓ | | ✓ | | | | |
| Minos & Pasiphae | | | | ✓ | | | ✓ | | | | ✓ | | | |
| Consort | Dionysus | | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | | | ✓ | ✓ or | | | ✓ | ✓ |
| Theseus | | | | | | | | | | ✓ | | | | |
| Children | Enyeus | | ✓ | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| Thoas | | | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | | ✓ | | ✓ | | | | ✓ | ✓ |
| Oenopion | | | | | ✓ | ✓ | | | ✓ | ✓ | | | | |
| Staphylus | | | | | ✓ | | | | ✓ | ✓ | | | | ✓ |
| Latromis | | | | | ✓ | | | | | | | | | |
| Euanthes | | | | | ✓ | | | | | | | | | |
| Tauropolis | | | | | ✓ | | | | | | | | | |
| Peparethus | | | | | | | | | ✓ | | | | | |
| Phliasus | | | | | | | | | | | ✓ | | | |
| Eurymedon | | | | | | | | | | | ✓ | | | |
| Ceramus | | | | | | | | | | | | ✓ | | |
| Maron | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ✓ |
| Eunous | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ✓ |
Mythology
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.
[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).][Fiana Sidhe, "Goddess Ariadne in the Spotlight" , MatriFocus, 2002.]
Minos and Theseus
Because
Ancient Greece 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).
One year, the sacrificial party included
Theseus, the son of King
Aegeus, who volunteered in order to kill the
Minotaur.
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.
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.
Naxos
In
Hesiod’s work, among others,
Dionysus discovered and wedded her on Naxos. In a number of versions of the myth,
[Diodorus Siculus, 4.61 and 5.51; Pausanias, 1.20, § 2, 9.40, § 2, and 10.29, § 2.] 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.
Vase painters often depicted
Athena or
Hermes leading Theseus from the sleeping Ariadne to his ship.
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.[Nonnus, Dionysiaca, 47.665] The Odyssey relates that Theseus took Ariadne away from Crete only for Artemis to kill her in Dia (usually identified with Naxos) on Dionysus' witness.[Homer, Odyssey 11.321–25] An ancient scholiast wrote that Ariadne and Theseus had sex on a sacred grove, and an angry Dionysus revealed that to Artemis, who proceeded to punish Ariadne with death.[Scholia on the Odyssey 11.325]
According to Plutarch, one version of the myth tells that Ariadne hanged herself after being abandoned by Theseus.[Plutarch, Theseus, 20.1] Dionysus then went to Hades, and brought her and his mother Semele to Mount Olympus, where they were deified.
Some scholars have posited, because of Ariadne's associations with thread-spinning and winding, that she was a weaving goddess,[
]
like Arachne, and support this theory with the mytheme of the Hanged Nymph[
]
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!"
( The Elegies of Tibullus)
[
]
(see weaving in mythology).
As a goddess
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
Mother goddess of
Crete, "the first divine personage of Greek mythology to be immediately recognized in Crete",
[.] 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. Professor Barry Powell suggested that she was the
Snake Goddess of Minoan Crete.
[Barry B. Powell, Classical Myth, 2nd ed., with new translations of ancient texts by Herbert M. Howe, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, USA, Prentice-Hall, 1998, p. 368.]
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:
In a kylix by the painter Aison (), Theseus drags the Minotaur from a temple-like labyrinth, yet the goddess who attends him in this Attic representation is Athena.
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 Biography 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 , one of silver and one of bronze, erected.
At the observation in her honour on the second day of the month , 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".[Edmund P. Cueva, "Plutarch's Ariadne in Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe", American Journal of Philology, 117.3 (Autumn 1996), pp. 473–84.] According to Cypriot legend, Ariadne's tomb was located within the temenos of the sanctuary of Aphrodite-Ariadne.
Libera
The
ancient Rome author Hyginus identified Ariadne as the Roman Libera, bride to
Liber.
Festivals
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.
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, . One silver and one bronze statuette were also constructed in her honor.
In Etruscan culture
Ariadne, in Etruscan
Areatha, 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,
[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.] lending an especially Etruscan air
["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.).] of familial authority.
Reference in post-classical culture
Non-musical works
-
Ariadne: A Tragedy in Five Acts, a play by Thomas Corneille.
-
In Letitia Elizabeth Landon's poem from Ideal Likenesses (1825), she sees her as "a lesson how inconstancy should be repaid again by like inconstancy".
-
Johann Heinrich von Dannecker's marble sculpture Ariadne on the Panther (1814), was well known in 19th-century Germany.
-
The narrative of Ariadne is a theme throughout the second volume of George Eliot's novel Romola.
-
"Ariadne auf Naxos", a poem by Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg
-
"Ariadne", a story by Anton Chekhov
-
"Klage der Ariadne", a poem by Friedrich Nietzsche
-
Metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico painted eight works with a classical statue of Ariadne as a prop.
-
Ariadne (1924), a play by A. A. Milne
-
Ariadne (1932), an epic poem by F. L. Lucas.
Musical works
-
Richard Strauss's standard repertory opera Ariadne auf Naxos of 1912 was preceded by a L'Arianna each by Claudio Monteverdi in 1608, and Carlo Agostino Badia in 1702; Ariadne by German composer Johann Georg Conradi in 1691; Arianna in ca. 1727 by Benedetto Marcello; Arianna e Teseo (1727) and Arianna in Nasso (1733) by Nicola Porpora; Arianna in Creta (1734) by George Frideric Handel; and by non-operatic Ariadne auf Naxos works including a cantata based on the Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg poem, Georg Benda's 1775 melodrama Ariadne auf Naxos, and Joseph Haydn's 1790 cantata Arianna a Naxos.
-
Albert Roussel's 1931 ballet score Bacchus and Ariadne
Notes
Bibliography
-
-
Karl Kerenyi. 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.
-
Roland Barthes, "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.
External links
