About him bold Eros beat his wings, and Cythereia led, before the coming of Lyaios the bridegroom. Now Bacchus left the honey-flowing streams of Ilissos, and went in dainty revel to the vine-clad district of Naxos. Here is another example from a late Greek epic: Longing for death quickly turns to the erotic longing of a marriage bed.Īs we saw above, ancient sources also juxtapose images and moments of serenity and emotional excitement when depicting this myth. I know how it will be when you take me there.Īll that mattered in this world falls away.īacchus immediately falls in love with the heroine. Nichts gilt, was hier gegolten hat, ich weiß – Wer dort verweilet, der vergißt gar schnell!Įr hat vergessen, was ihn schmerzen sollte: Ich weiß, so ist es dort, wohin du mich führest! Instead she is surprised at the end of the opera by the arrival of the god Bacchus.Īt first, Ariadne is unaware of the god’s identity and she still longs for the serenity of death.
In fact, Ariadne expects and even hopes for the arrival of Hermes, the messenger of death and sleep. When she wakes, she begins to wonder if she is dead or alive and then immediately expresses her desire to die. In the opening scene, Ariadne is asleep on Naxos but she is crying in her sleep. Richard Strauss’ 1916 opera Ariadne auf Naxos begins in a time-frame after Ariadne has learned of Theseus’ departure. Her eyes are closed tight, and she will not awaken as Theseus departs, for the figure of Hypnos, Sleep, sits on her head with legs drawn up as he sleeps. In contrast to the morning after, when Ariadne in her Bacchic frenzy will come undone, the picture of Ariadne in the present is eerily peaceful:Īriadne faces us directly, an unusual pose that points to her oblivion to what is happening behind her as well as allowing us a clear view of the peaceful contentment registered on her face. And it is this same Bacchic frenzy, signaled by her disheveled hair, that will now attract Dionysus to her. I recall here the verse in Catullus 64.63 where the headdress that had held the hair of Ariadne together has now come undone, and she looks like a bacchant, a frenzied devotee of Bacchus, that is, of the god Dionysus. I interpret this figure as a prefiguring of Ariadne herself at a later moment, the morning after, when she wakes up to find that she has been abandoned by Theseus. I note that the small female figure who is “flying into the night” is disheveled, with her hair flying in the wind and with her clothing in disarray. In the upper left hand corner is a small female figure flying into the night. Athena tries to quiet him as he stretches out his arm, a gesture of remonstration or inquiry. Athena has just wakened Theseus, and as she bends over him he begins to rise, bending one leg and sitting up from the pillow on which he has lain next to Ariadne.
Here we see the couple at the moment of separation. The details have been described this way: The couple has fallen asleep after the lovemaking, but Athena awakens Theseus, gently gesturing for him to be quiet and not to awaken Ariadne, who is held fast in her sleep by a little figure of Hypnos perched on top of her head. This picture captures the moment when Athena appears to Theseus after he has made love with Ariadne. Lekythos attributed to the Pan Painter, dated around 470 BCE (Taranto IG 4545). In “ Virgil’s verse invitus, regina … and its poetic antecedents,” Gregory Nagy discusses an important multiform as it appears on a lekythos from 470 BCE. Many versions of the Ariadne myth focus on her sleeping while Theseus departs on his ship. What a sleep, Dionysus, and how sweet the breath! Whether it smells of apples or grapes, after making love you will tell. Her left hand lies upon her cloak, lest a breeze shame her. Her breasts are bare to her navel, her neck is back and her soft throat, and her armpit, the right one, is all visible. In a recent post we shared a description of Ariadne as offered by Philostratus the Elder:īut look at Ariadne, or rather her sleep. The Sleeping Ariadne in Naxos by John Vanderlyn (Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
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