ARIADNE & DIONYSUS

Image Information: Bacchus and Ariadne by Titian: Dionysus discovers Ariadne on the shore of Naxos. The painting also depicts the constellation named after Ariadne.

BEFORE READING: THIS IS A TWO PART STORY. THE WHOLE STORY IS WITHIN ONE FILE, BUT IT'S A LENGTHY READ, HENCE IT'S CONSIDERED TWO PARTS.

Author's Note:

The source that I used for this retelling is from the book titled Anthology of Classical Myth: Primary Sources in Translation edited and translated by Stephen M. Trzaskoma, R. Scott Smith, and Stephen Brunet. I personally own this book, so I used it and primarily derived my knowledge from Apollodorus' small excerpt over Theseus going to Crete and killing the Minotaur.
If you're unfamiliar with this myth, here is a brief synopsis:

Minos, Ariadne's father, was warring against Athens and was unable to overtake it so he prayed to Zeus to cause a devastating blow. Zeus does so and the Athenian people ask an oracle for help; as a result, the Athenian people followed Minos' demand of seven men and seven women being sent to Crete to be sacrificed to the Minotaur in the labyrinth. Theseus offers himself up to go and kill the Minotaur and Ariadne falls in love with him, thus she helps him navigate the labyrinth on the condition he take her as his wife. Everything goes as planned until Theseus leaves her on Naxos where eventually Dionysus comes upon her, and decides to turn her into his immortal wife. Theseus arrives back in Athens, but his father kills himself because Theseus forgot to raise white sails to let him know that he was alive, which was a thing they spoke about before he left.

There are various different interpretations of this myth ranging from Theseus abandoning her to Dionysus stealing her away from Theseus, so I simply decided to go with the most popular one: aka Theseus abandoning her. In my retelling, I wanted to focus more-so on Ariadne's want of freedom and to get away from her father; therefore, her love of Theseus is one formed out of her projecting her freedom on Theseus. Likewise, I made Theseus the way he is because, personally, I think it would be weird if someone demanded to be my wife like that, but also because I believe that Theseus would have some type of hatred/dislike of Cretans for what they've been doing to his people for years. There's not much about Dionysus speaking in the original myth, so he's entirely based off of how I'd see him. Finally, the ending doesn't happen in the original myth, of course, but I'm a fan of my horror romances so I just went with it.
Anyway, I hope you guys enjoy the play through and story; I tried to make it a little more interesting how it came about!

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