Ariadne was the daughter of the Cretan king Minos and his wife Pasiphae. Homer mentions her story in his epic poem The Iliad, describing the exploits of the heroes of the Trojan War. Ariadne became famous thanks to the myth of Theseus, a brave Athenian who came to Crete to fight the monstrous Minotaur.
Minos - King of Crete
The origins of the legend of the Minotaur should be sought in the biographies of King Minos and Queen Pasiphae. Minos was the son of the supreme god Zeus and the beauty of Europe that he abducted. Having become the king of the island of Crete, he became famous for his state acts - he created the first laws, built a mighty fleet and seized supremacy at sea. His wife Pasiphae was the daughter of the sun god Helios and the sister of the famous sorceress Circe.
Minos and Pasiphae had many children, including Ariadne, Phaedra, Androgea, and Katrei. In addition, the unfortunate Pasiphae, at the behest of the vengeful goddess of love Aphrodite, gave birth to a child from a white bull. It was a monster with the head of a bull and the body of a man, called the Minotaur.
To hide the shame of his wife, Minos ordered the construction of a labyrinth next to the Palace of Knossos and imprisoning the monster there. At the same time, another misfortune happened: the heir to the king Androgeus died in Athens in sports. The enraged Minos demanded a terrible tribute from the Athenians - every year to send seven girls and seven young men to Crete so that the Minotaur could devour them in his labyrinth.
The mournful tribute drove the Athenian king Aegeus to despair, but salvation appeared in the form of Theseus' son, who grew up far from Athens. On the way to his father, Theseus managed to accomplish many glorious feats and in the end turned out to be the heir of Aegeus, who had no other sons. The young hero went to Crete with more victims in order to kill the Minotaur and free Athens from the claims of Minos.
Love of a young princess
Minos was glad of the new entertainment - he hoped that even in case of victory, the hero would never find a way out of the cunning labyrinth. The king's daughter Ariadne fell in love with the brave hero at first sight. She did not sleep at night, figuring out how to save her lover from death, and before dawn she came to Theseus' chambers. After taking the young man into the labyrinth, she handed him a skein of thread. At the entrance to the labyrinth, Theseus had to fix the end of the thread and, moving on, gradually unwind it. Theseus listened to the advice of a girl in love and marked the path traveled with a thin thread. After killing the Minotaur, he went back, reeling the thread back into a ball.
Fleeing from the wrath of King Minos, Theseus and Ariadne fled to the island of Naxos. Here Theseus left Ariadne. According to one version, he could not fall in love with the girl and did not want to take her with him to Athens, according to another, the god of winemaking Dionysus appeared to Theseus and demanded to leave the princess to him. Dionysus married Ariadne and gave her immortality, and she bore him children. Theseus was destined to marry another daughter of Minos - Phaedra, but the story of their marriage was much sadder and became famous thanks to the tragedy of Sophocles “Phaedra”.
The thread of Ariadne in a ball from the ancient Greek myth has entered modernity, and now it means an opportunity to understand a tangled story, to find a way out of a difficult situation.
