Ariadne, Theseus, and "Helpful Princesses"

      Ariadne is what mythology experts call a “helpful princess.” It sounds nice, but my advice is: don’t be a helpful princess. For all the help they give to various heroes, they don’t receive any gratitude in return. In fact, they’re often executed by the very heroes they help specifically because of their helpfulness. Ariadne, for her part, is not executed, but what happens might have turned out just as bad. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Ariadne is the daughter of King Minos, the best-known king of Crete, eponym of “Minoan” culture, and famously associated with the ruins at Knossos. Minos himself was one of those conquest-oriented kings who’s always looking for an excuse to expand his own kingdom and make his enemies miserable. He stringently demanded that others fulfill unreasonable obligations to him, even when he was not so keen on fulfilling his own obligations. In fact, he was once foolish enough to disappoint the god Poseidon this way: when about to perform a sacrifice, he prayed to Poseidon for a bull worthy to be sacrificed to so great a god. Instantly, the most gorgeous bull in the history of the world rose out of the sea. Then Minos decided that he didn’t feel like sacrificing the bull after all, so he just put it in with the rest of his herd. In Greek myth this is an object lesson that you shouldn’t try to fool the gods. Poseidon, irate that he hadn’t received his sacrifice, got revenge by making Minos’ wife Pasiphae fall in love with the bull. Cuckolding, bestiality, implied aspersions on Minos’ masculinity, it all blends into a hefty dose of humiliation for Minos. The wife became so infatuated with the thing that she got the famous inventor Daedalus to build a mechanical cow-suit for her so she could have sex with the bull, and in fact was impregnated by the bull, and later gave birth to a baby with a bull’s head, Asterius, more commonly known as the Minotaur.

      (“Minotaur” means “bull of Minos,” as if the creature was Minos’ own creation, or at least his possession, or at least his fault. The Minotaur apparently is named after his legal parent (his mother’s husband, that is) rather than his biological mother, Pasiphae, or his biological father, Poseidon’s sexy bull, which has no other name, although it is the titular character of a classic novel by Mary Renault.)

      (Interestingly enough, in the first century C.E. the Roman emperor Galba would claim to be descended from Minos’ wife. He even commissioned a huge decorative family tree to illustrate the line of descent--but we don’t still have the family tree, so we can’t look up the precise lineage he claimed for himself. It’s a rather puzzling claim, since it implies that Galba was NOT descended from Minos himself, and there are no genealogies that have the wife remarrying someone else. Was Galba implying that he was a descendent of the wife…and the bull?)

      Anyway, back to Ariadne. She was an ordinary human daughter of Minos and Pasiphae. After the Minotaur was born, Minos decided not to simply kill the abomination, but to keep it alive and imprison it in a giant maze called the labyrinth. I imagine he was excited about threatening everyone with his monster, like Jabba the Hutt with the Sarlacc. At this time Athens was a surprisingly weak political force and was subject to Minos’ thalassocracy (sorry, no one is allowed to write about Minos without shoehorning in that word somewhere), and as one of his conqueror-king moves, Minos demanded that Athens periodically send over a boatload of teenagers to be fed to the monster, as we’ve all heard re-imagined by Suzanne Collins. Then one year, one of the teenagers sent over was a boy by the name of Theseus. He was an extraordinary boy, as he himself would tell you. He once picked up a rock and found some shoes under it; that was how special he was. Naturally, when princess Ariadne got an eyeful of this prime specimen and his secondhand shoes, she was swooning before he got off the boat. She secretly gave Theseus a ball of yarn, that he could use to knit himself a sweater in case he got chilly in the labyrinth (or unwind as he walked through the paths, if he wanted to catch his death), as well as a sword, which he could use to cut off the Minotaur’s head. He was so grateful to her that, after he killed the Minotaur and was sailing back to Athens, he agreed to take Ariadne with him, then intentionally abandoned her on a desert island. (Later on, he would marry Ariadne’s sister Phaedra, who had so many of her own problems that she apparently never had time to worry about how Theseus had murdered her half-brother and abandoned her sister and effectively destroyed her father’s kingship, etc., etc.) There are so many depictions of Ariadne, both in art and in literature, innocently sleeping on the beach, never suspecting that Theseus and his crew have sailed away without her.

      I can’t imagine that princesses, at least not in Minoan Knossos, get much survival training, which is why I say that abandoning her like this and condemning her to die slowly of starvation or thirst was more cruel than simply executing her. But this is the fate of helpful princesses. A helpful princess is less a character than a device to aid a hero in a quest. Helpful princesses exist to be insiders in a hostile kingdom, to fall in love with foreign heroes who come on hostile missions (such as obtaining a valuable artifact that the kingdom guards as one of its treasures, or simply conquering the place), to help the heroes from inside and in doing so to betray their own countries, to be condemned by the hero as a traitor, and usually to be executed before the hero goes home to marry a different princess. There are a few, like Medea, who manage to get the better of the situation and against all odds outmaneuver the heroes who take advantage of them, but most of them are unfortunate young women who make themselves vulnerable to the hero and are punished through that very vulnerability.

      At least Ariadne avoided that, if only through dumb luck. When she woke up and found herself abandoned on the beach, she barely had time to start crying before the god Dionysus swooped down and offered to marry her. There are six million and eight poetic accounts of Ariadne weeping on the beach, so I won’t bother to enumerate them, but we know that Dionysus was the god of wine and he always hung out with a party crowd, so Ariadne should have had a carefree and zany future to look forward to. In particular, Dionysus wasn’t one of those gods overburdened with machismo who constantly needed to remind people of his masculinity--he even did a little gender-bending--so Ariadne shouldn’t have had to worry about spousal abuse or marital rape or her husband running around raping other women, unlike the wives of some Olympian gods. I’m willing to read this as a happy ending.

      And what about Theseus? Well, when he got home he accidentally signaled to his father (who spent every day on the cliffs at the shore near Athens, anxiously awaiting the return of the sacrifice ships) that he had died in Crete, so his father threw himself over the cliff and killed himself. (Must have been congenital--Theseus also died from falling off a cliff, and so did Theseus’ son.) Theseus succeeded to the Athenian kingship, beat up the Amazons, married Ariadne’s sister, traveled to the Underworld, avoided being conscripted for the Trojan War (which is why you never hear about any famous Athenians fighting alongside Achilles in the Iliad), and tried to kidnap Helen of Troy when she was the world’s sexiest nine-year-old, but finally his kingdom was overthrown and he died ignominiously in exile by falling off a cliff. Even his snazzy shoes couldn’t save him then. In my opinion, he got what he deserved.