Ariadne: The Mesmerising Sunday Times Bestselling Retelling of Ancient Greek Myth

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Paeon, as stated by Plutarch, attributes the Ariadneia festival in Cyprus to Theseus, who left money to the island so sacrifices could be made to commemorate Ariadne. Karl Kerenyi and Robert Graves theorized that Ariadne, whose name they thought derived from Hesychius' enumeration of "Άδνον", a Cretan-Greek form of " arihagne" ("utterly pure"), was a Great Goddess of Crete, "the first divine personage of Greek mythology to be immediately recognized in Crete", [29] once archaeological investigation began. this book is the perfect addition to my greek mythology shelf and fits right in with ‘circe,’ ‘the silence of girls,’ and ‘a thousand ships.

Ariadne was the daughter of Pasiphae — herself daughter of the sun god Helios — and Minos, king of Crete. And I think my favorite part about this story is that in the end, Ariadne's understanding of Perseus is the reason she only gets half a story. Ariadne, played by Aiysha Hart, is a major character in the BBC series Atlantis (2013), which is loosely based on Greek myths. As an avid reader of Greek mythology I was so curious to see which myths of Ariadne Jennifer Saint would include. There aren’t as many retellings of Phaedra as there are Ariadne, and I am so glad the author provides Phaedra, as well as Ariadne, with a voice and fully fleshed out characters.

Johann Heinrich von Dannecker's marble sculpture Ariadne on the Panther (1814), was well known in 19th-century Germany. The story is ladened with tragedy and also times of happiness, but there was always that overwhelming sense of foreboding. There's been a spate of these Greek myth re-tellings in honeyed modern prose and I have to say I'm a sucker for them.

Ariadne’s relationship with Dionysus is fascinating and the alternate perspective of Theseus a refreshing take in light of past misogynistic retellings. I also loved the exploration of the sisters individual characteristics; Ariadne as the gentler, introspective sister with bravery and cunning when deciding to help Theseus: Phaedra as the outgoing, daring and confident of the two. Conversely, Stylianos Alexiou has argued that despite the belief being that Ariadne's name is of Indo-European origin, it is actually pre-Greek.There’s something really timeless and universal about those familiar stories that is quite comforting in uncertain times. from Ideal Likenesses (1825), she sees her as "a lesson how inconstancy should be repaid again by like inconstancy". Kerenyi observed that her name was merely an epithet and claimed that she was originally the "Mistress of the Labyrinth", both a winding dancing ground and, in the Greek opinion, a prison with the dreaded Minotaur in its centre. Hypnotic, propulsive, and utterly transporting, Jennifer Saint's Ariadne forges a new epic, one that puts the forgotten women of Greek mythology back at the heart of the story, as they strive for a better world.