Bone to Pick & Diadem

We know that Ariadne was a Princess, born and raised on Crete. You’ll find Ariadne mentioned in Homer, in Plutarch, in Catallus, in Seneca, in Ovid, and in many other classical texts, but as with so many long-gone figures, the stories about her disagree and vary tremendously. She was wily or she was naive. She was a lusty witch, or she was an innocent Princess with a pure heart, who drew the short straw from fate, or from men. What we know of Ariadne, these surviving stories and myths, these fragments and footnote mentions, are a pile of ancient ruins.

We know that she fell in love with the Athenian Prince Theseus, and she gave him the ball of golden thread that allowed him to escape from the terrifying, man-eating Minotaur that lived in the heart of Crete’s deadly labyrinth. We know that Theseus killed the Minotaur and escaped with Ariadne to Naxos, where he abandoned her before returning home to Greece. We know that Ariadne and the Minotaur shared a mother, the Queen Pasiphaë. Pasiphaë lay with her husband King Minos of Crete to produce Ariadne, and lay with a powerful, fearsome bull to produce the Minotaur. So, in a nutshell, we know that Ariadne helped Theseus, the handsome foreign prince, slay her monstrous brother, and we know it was because of love, and that it ended quite badly for her.

Well, we think so. To be fair, we don’t exactly know these exact things, because there is no definitive version of Ariadne’s tale; some versions of Ariadne’s story give other parents, other places, other timelines. We are pretty sure about these basic parts of the myth, and if we do not know “for sure,” we know “for sure enough.” What else do we know, or need to know?

We know that Ariadne’s mother Pasiphaë was the daughter of the sun-god Helios and the nymph Perseis. Her name means “wide-shining,” or “all-shining,” and she was born and raised as a Princess in Colchis, the palace of the sun, in the east. Rather than simply “bright like the sun,” we might think of her personality as “scorching hot.” We know that to lay with the bull who fathered the Minotaur, she employed the inventor Daedalus (also the creator of the labyrinth) to construct for her a box that she could climb into, an elaborate contraption that gave the appearance of a cow, so it both enticed the bull and allowed the queen to safely copulate with him. We don’t know for sure where the bull came from or who sent him, and in Diadem Ariadne doesn’t know either, and tells us some of the possibilities, some of the gossip, some of the contenders who might have thrown this one great problem into her parents’ marriage.

We know that although Pasiphaë was an adulteress who lay with a bull, she would not tolerate any infidelity from her husband Minos; she bewitched him with an herbal potion which ensured that if he lay with another woman, he would ejaculate serpents and scorpions, who would slaughter his paramour from the inside out. We can imagine Pasiphaë as raw, passionate, and larger than life. We know this is the woman who raised Ariadne, who set her expectations for how men and women treat each other.

We know that Ariadne’s life-long love and briefly-held husband Theseus was a prince of Athens. We do not know if his father was the powerful king Aegeus or the sea-god Poseidon; many versions of the story tell us it was both. We know that he killed the Minotaur. We know that the Minotaur beast required an sacrifice of live humans, seven beautiful girls and seven beautiful boys, every seven years – or every nine; we do not know for sure. We do know that King Minos of Crete, Ariadne’s father, was sending captured Athenian youths into the labyrinth to meet this quota of blood, and that Theseus went in disguise as one of these youths, in order to slay the monster.

We know that when Theseus arrived in Crete, he met Ariadne. She fell in love with him, and he promised that if he survived the labyrinth, he would take her away as his bride. She gave him the ball of golden string that would guide him through and out of the maze of tunnels, and he did escape safely, with all the virgin sacrifices safely in tow, having slain the Minotaur. We know he took Ariadne with him from Crete, as his bride, and then abandoned her, alone, on the island of Naxos, and never returned. Some stories say that Dionysus made the Prince do this out of jealousy, because the god had his eye on making Ariadne his own. Others simply don’t place any blame, or give any explanation, for Ariadne’s abandonment. We do know that later in life, Theseus married her younger sister Phaedra.

With Eugenie Chan, we imagine that before Theseus left Ariadne on Naxos, he promised her the world. We imagine they were lovers. We imagine the morning after. The decades after. The life after. We imagine, but we don’t know.

- Megan Cohen, dramaturg