The story, in the classic version
Every few years, the story goes, Athens had to send seven young men and seven young women to Crete, to be fed to the Minotaur in the Labyrinth, the bull-headed son of Minos’s queen. Theseus, son of King Aegeus of Athens, volunteered to go. In Crete, Minos’s daughter Ariadne fell in love with him and gave him a ball of thread. He tied one end at the entrance, unwound it as he went in, killed the monster and followed the thread back out. Then he sailed away with Ariadne.
The sad ending came twice. On the island of Naxos, Theseus left Ariadne behind while she slept. And he had promised his father to change the ship’s black sails for white ones if he came home alive; he forgot. Aegeus, watching from a cliff, saw the black sails and threw himself into the sea, which, according to one ancient explanation, is why it is called the Aegean. Most of these details come from Plutarch’s Life of Theseus, written in the late first century CE, which collects the versions known in his day.
Abandoned, killed or married?
Ancient writers did not agree on what happened to Ariadne. In the oldest mention, in Homer’s Odyssey, she never reaches Athens because Artemis kills her on the island of Dia “because of the witness of Dionysus”, a line nobody has fully explained. In the version that became most popular, told by the Roman poets Catullus and Ovid, Theseus abandons her on Naxos, and she wakes alone on the beach; then Dionysus arrives with his followers, falls in love with her and marries her. Ovid adds that the god threw her crown into the sky, where it became a constellation, the Northern Crown.
Some scholars think Ariadne was originally a goddess of Bronze Age Crete, later turned into a princess by Greek storytellers. It cannot be proved, but it would explain her marriage to a god. Her setting is certainly real: the palace of Knossos in Minoan Crete, whose maze of rooms may lie behind the idea of the Labyrinth.
A thread or a crown?
Not every early version has a thread. Pausanias, the second-century travel writer, describes a famous carved chest dedicated at Olympia, the Chest of Kypselos, made around the seventh or sixth century BCE and now lost. On it, he says, Theseus held a lyre, and beside him Ariadne held a crown. In some later accounts that crown gave off light and guided Theseus through the dark corridors. For artists, the thread was easier: a single line joining two hands.
On Greek vases
The most famous early image is on the François Vase, a large Athenian wine-mixing bowl signed by the potter Ergotimos and the painter Kleitias around 570-560 BCE and found in an Etruscan tomb at Chiusi in 1844. On one of its bands the Athenian boys and girls, freed from the Minotaur, dance hand in hand behind Theseus, who plays a lyre, towards Ariadne and her nurse. The vase has had its own adventures: in 1900 a museum guard smashed it into hundreds of pieces, and it was put back together twice.
Later, Greek vase painters showed every stage: Theseus dragging the Minotaur out of the Labyrinth, the couple meeting, the departure from Naxos with Athena urging the hero on, Dionysus claiming Ariadne. The Romans preferred the abandonment. Several houses in Pompeii had paintings of Ariadne asleep or waking on the shore as Theseus’s ship sails off.
From Titian to Picasso
The Renaissance turned the ending into a love story. In Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1520-1523), painted for the Duke of Ferrara, the god leaps from his chariot towards the startled princess, while Theseus’s ship is a speck on the horizon and the crown already shines as stars in the sky. Four centuries later Pablo Picasso made the Minotaur his alter ego. In the etching Minotauromachia (1935) the monster gropes forward, half blinded, towards a little girl holding up a candle and flowers, a figure many critics read as a new Ariadne lighting the way.
The story still draws crowds. In 2023 the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford put on “Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth and Reality”, which set the finds from Arthur Evans’s excavation beside the myth they had inspired.
Where to see it
The François Vase is in the National Archaeological Museum of Florence, and Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne in the National Gallery in London. Paintings from Pompeii with the abandoned Ariadne are in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples and on the walls of the ancient town itself. Picasso’s Minotauromachia exists in several impressions, held by major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Sources
- Plutarch, Life of Theseus; Homer, Odyssey 11.321-325; Catullus 64; Ovid, Heroides 10 and Metamorphoses 8.
- Pausanias, Description of Greece, 5.19.1, transl. W. H. S. Jones (Perseus Digital Library).
- Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Firenze, “Vaso François”.
- The National Gallery, London, Titian, “Bacchus and Ariadne”.
- Ashmolean Museum, “Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth and Reality” (2023), press release and catalogue (A. Shapland).
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