Graham Whitaker examines the appeal of the Ariadne myth
You shall know a man by the company he keeps." Truer perhaps of figures in Greek myth. The story of Ariadne is soon told. Her background (Zeus as grandfather, her mother Pasipha in love with a bull) was never likely to lead to stability. Having helped Theseus to kill the Minotaur, progeny of Pasipha and the bull, she escaped from Crete with her lover as far as Naxos. There Theseus abandoned her; thence she was rescued by Dionysos. A third figure hovers in the background: Daidalos, homo faber, maker of the maze.
In the subtlest literary account, Vergil (Aeneid VI) describes how Daidalos took pity on Ariadne and contrived the means for Theseus to escape from the labyrinth, "guiding unseeing steps with thread (filo)". The letter of protest faxed from Naxos by Ariadne with Ovid's help (Heroides X) suggests the thread was her own idea. So too in the most detailed ancient description of the Naxos episode by Nonnos (Dionysiaka XLVII), the poet who describes himself as weaving his poem, as though into a web.
Echoes occur in art, literature, music. The story lends itself readily to depiction and Ariadne is celebrated on Greek vase, Pompeian wall-painting and Roman mosaic (favourite episodes are the thread or her discovery by Dionysos/Bacchus). Using other Latin sources which tell of Ariadne's second abandonment, Titian painted the wanderer Dionysos, the second Theseus, as a young god - not yet the bloated god of wine or leader of wild rites. Tintoretto added an ethereal Aphrodite/Venus and Ariadne's crown of stars. Motifs are picked up and handed on, thread-like. A French craftsman (Daidalos his ancestor) shows Ariadne riding in a bronze chariot, in just-married splendour.
Heroines suffer. Literature and opera have not always been kind to Ariadne. Her story became the plaything of poets in the nineteenth century, attractive to women in particular. L.E.L. (Laetitia Elizabeth Landon) mixes art and poetry in her Bacchus and Ariadne. The artist stands before his painting, patiently explaining the details to his lover, who finds fault with his theme: Ariadne is too ready to cast off the old love (for all that he abandoned her) and put on the new. And another link backwards is Elizabeth Barrett Browning, lighting on the Ariadne episodes from Nonnos. Of two operas with the same title, Georg Benda's Ariadne auf Naxos is a duodrama. Theseus debates the right course of action before sailing away. Ariadne awakes and is cross with Theseus. Informed that she must become an offering to Poseidon, she is struck by lightning during a storm and falls into the sea. Dionysos is nowhere. Richard Strauss mixed lyric opera and commedia dell'arte in his collaboration with Hofmannsthal. Ariadne is comforted by Zerbinetta and puts on the new (Bacchus), in a way that would have distressed L.E.L.
And now? In addition to a crown of stars, Ariadne has secured new fame. Computer scientists and engineers in Bologna and Kalamazoo already greet her as an old friend. Or is this, too, transitory?
Material on this page is copyright Ariadne/original authors. This page last updated on July 15th 1996