THE NAXOS GUIDE TO ARIADNE AND THESEUS
| According to
mythology, Theseus abandoned princess Ariadne, daughter of
Minos,
king of Crete, after she helped him kill the Minotaur,
her half brother, and escape from the Labyrinth. The island of
Naxos was her place of abandonment. Dionysus, ("A
convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk"
- Ambrose Bierce) god of the island and protector of wine,
festivities and cheerfulness, met her and fell in love with her. Ariadne,
in one version, unable to bear the separation from Theseus and to escape Dionysus's lustful
advances, killed herself by throwing herself into the sea from Palatia
(nowadays, it is the young, foreign workers who take this jump as a rite of
passage - although, a couple of years ago, one jumper broke his neck. Not
Recommended.)
In another story she, more sensibly, forgot the dour Theseus and married the much more
exciting, Dionysus. It is said that Ariadne, in her rage at Theseus,
put a curse on the island that no foreign couple settling there would
ever prosper - alas for some of our friends!
Another version has Dionysus kidnapping Ariadne from Theseus - the latter eventually leaving the island in deep despair. Dionysus is the Greek original of Bacchus with many of the same attributes, young, handsome, wild - the god of fertility and wine. He had a follower, Silenus, an old man both deeply wise and profoundly drunk, accompanied by Bacchantes and satyrs. In Naxos, Ariadne was leader of the Maenads, a wandering group of frenzied, usually naked, women dedicated to the cult of Dionysus. They armed themselves with ivy-twined staffs tipped with pine cones and went in for ecstatic dance and song. Beware should you meet them in the mountains of Naxos should you be male - they are quite likely to rip you apart and devour your flesh. The painting that is the background to this page is the only Ariadne where the painter (John Vanderlyn) might, possible, have been to Naxos or at least might have known the geography. If you look closely, that could be the silhouette of Paros against the sky. Ariadne auf Naxos - Richard Strauss, book Hofmannsthal. A strange work. A "bourgeois gentilhomme" (the character from Molière's play) has hired both a theatrical and an opera company to perform at his house but, to finish before the fireworks' display, they have to stage their productions simultaneously. So we have the comedians commenting and laughing at the operatic excesses of Ariadne. She sings of her longing for death while Zerbinetta, the lead actor, advises her to take a lighter attitude to life. When she, eventually, ascends to heaven with Bacchus, she believes she has taken her advice. |