Ariadne: the Cretan princess who became a goddess

Ariadne was a princess of Crete who rose from the mortal world to godhood, the wife of Dionysus and the mother of his sons Staphylus and Oenopion. Born to King Minos and Queen Pasiphaë, she was a granddaughter of Zeus and of the sun god Helios, and her name was bound forever to the great maze of Crete, for it was her thread that guided Theseus past the Minotaur and out of the maze that Daedalus had raised. Loved by a hero and claimed by a god, she passed out of Crete and into the halls of Mount Olympus, while the grief of the man she once saved festered until it drove him into the service of the Sisters of Fate and, at the last, into the path of Kratos.

A princess of Crete#

Ariadne was born into the royal house of Crete, the island kingdom ruled by King Minos. Minos was a son of Zeus, raised alongside his brothers Rhadamanthus and Sarpedon by King Asterion of Crete, and after his death he sat as one of the judges of the dead in the underworld of Hades. By his wife Pasiphaë, herself descended from Helios, Minos fathered a large brood of children. Ariadne grew up among many siblings, among them Androgeus, Deucalion, Phaedra, Glaucus, Catreus, and Acacallis.

Her father's court held a terrible secret. Beneath Crete, the master craftsman Daedalus had built the great maze, one of such cunning that no one cast into it could find the way out, and within it Minos kept the Minotaur, a monstrous creature that was part man and part bull. The same craftsman was also said to have fashioned a wide dancing ground for the princess, so that Ariadne's earliest fame and her later worship alike were tangled up with the works of Daedalus. It was through the maze and the beast confined within it that her name entered legend, and she came to be honored above all as a goddess of mazes and of the paths that lead through them.

The thread of the maze#

The turning point of Ariadne's mortal life came with the arrival of Theseus. The Athenian, a son of Poseidon, was challenged to kill the Minotaur, a task that had devoured every warrior sent into the maze before him, for even those who survived the beast could never find their way back to the light. Ariadne loved him, and she chose him over her own blood. She gave Theseus the thread by which he traced his path through the maze, slew the Minotaur, and returned alive.

In doing so she gave up everything she had been. She betrayed her father and her country for the Athenian's sake, forsaking Crete and the house of Minos to follow him. The image of the princess with her ball of thread endured long after, and some likened it to the spindle wound with mortal threads that Clotho, the vast spinner among the Fates, tended in the Loom Chamber. What the Fates' thread was to all mortal lives, Ariadne's thread had been to one hero in the dark of the maze.

Bride of the wine god#

Ariadne did not remain with the man she had saved. The tellings of what passed between them differed. In some, Theseus abandoned the princess, and Dionysus came upon her sleeping and fell in love with her at the sight. In others it was simply said that the wine god desired her and took her with him, with no regard for the hero's claim. However it came about, the result was not disputed. Ariadne became the wife of Dionysus, the Olympian lord of wine and revelry, and her loyalty thereafter lay with him.

Marriage to a god remade her. The mortal princess of Crete was transformed into a goddess in her own right, numbered among the Olympians and worshiped as the goddess of forgiveness, of paths, of mazes, and of passion, and reckoned in the tallies of the Greek pantheon as the goddess of labyrinths. Godhood carried immortality with it. Age could no longer touch her, and only a weapon of sufficient power or a being of extraordinary strength could have ended her life. She bore Dionysus two sons, Staphylus and Oenopion, and dwelt with her husband on Mount Olympus. A few accounts told her story otherwise and named Rhadamanthus, her father's own brother, as her husband and the father of Oenopion, Staphylus, and Thoas, but it was as the bride of Dionysus that she was remembered and raised to the heights.

The grief of Theseus#

For Theseus, the loss of Ariadne was a wound that never closed. The theft of his beloved hardened him against Dionysus, and the years that followed heaped grief upon grief, for his father, King Aegeus, cast himself into the sea and died believing his son was dead. Aging and desperate, the old hero bound himself to the service of the Sisters of Fate, the three sisters who measured and cut the threads of every destiny, in the hope of earning an audience and undoing what had been done.

He confessed as much to Kratos when the Spartan came seeking the Fates for his own purposes. Asked why he served, Theseus spoke of the daughter of King Minos, whom he had loved dearly, and of how Dionysus had taken her from him. His wish was strange and precise. He wanted the Sisters of Fate to find a new lover for the wine god, so that Dionysus might release Ariadne and Theseus could have her back, and he hoped as well that the Fates would restore his father to life. Kratos, who had sacrificed his own service to gods before, questioned why the old hero would give up so much for it. The answer never mattered. Theseus fell to the Spartan's blades, and whatever hope of reunion he had carried through his long servitude died with him. Whether any word of his end ever reached Ariadne in the halls of Olympus was never told, and her own fate after the ruin that Kratos brought upon the Olympians went unrecorded.