0214NOTAriadne_Mason

Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). The Ariadne/Calypso myth discussed here covers pp. 186-196. (click for .pdf)

Mason invents a new mythology for Ariadne, equating her with Calypso as no classical source had. The novel tale is embedded within the narrative of Odysseus’s return to Ithaca. Mason’s chapter 38, entitled “The Long Way Back”, tells the story of Theseus and Ariadne.

In many details, Mason’s story of Ariadne covers new ground. Much of the interaction between Theseus and the Minoan princess is standard mythos as long as they stay within the halls of the king and until the Minotaur is dead, even if Mason suggests physical affection took place between them prior to her coaching him on the finer points of minotauricide. Mason’s tale diverges from his predecessors’ when he takes the pair to Athens, has them marry upon the Acropolis, and makes them parents of two Athenian princes. Years later, “when Ariadne’s golden hair was turning silver,” Theseus experiences a transformative dream in “the cellars beneath the castle” [i.e. the Acropolis?].

In an entirely new twist on the story of Ariadne and Theseus, the Athenian hero finds the thread of Ariadne, returns to the Labyrinth, effects his escape (without encountering the Minotaur, by the way), and finds Ariadne awaiting him. In this modification of the traditional mythos, Mason blurs the narrative’s intrinsic sequence: How did Theseus get back into an earlier existence here? Where does the character’s reality begin and end? Is this return to Knossos a fabrication devised by an aging witch for the straying king of Athens? Whatever the source of the narrative twist, marvelously, this time round, the golden-haired Ariadne is off-loaded on the island of Naxos because Theseus “needed to unship ballast.”

Further dyscontinuity ensues when Mason’s Ariadne on Naxos experiences long-term dispondency, years and years of solitude. In them she “practiced the black arts” and came to be the subject of rumor, the lovely white nymph of Naxos.

There is no hint of that Ariadne auf Naxos that suffers abject abandonment. No rescue from Dionysiac thiasos. In this unaccustomed state Mason’s Ariadne receives one day the blue-lipped and half-drowned Odysseus who names her “Concealer” [and Mason even tells us in a note “the Greek word for concealer is Calypso”].

Mason has altered the narrative with considerable intervention. Rather than mark the errors here, I think it more productive to consider the modern mythographer’s creation of contact between Odysseus and Ariadne/Calypso.

Apollodorus Epit. 7.24 “… Odysseus was carried to the island of Ogygia. There Calypso, the daughter of Atlas, welcomed him and after going to bed with him bore him a son, Latinus. He stayed with her for five years, then made a raft and sailed away.”

Simpson ad loc: “Homer says nothing about a child born to Odysseus by Calypso, although Eugammon in his Telegony attributed Telegonus to Odysseus by Circe and by Calypso. Hesiod Theogony 1011-13 says that Circe (not Calypso) bore Agrius and Latinus to Odysseus. According to Odyssey 7.259 Odysseus stayed with Calypso for seven years.

Plutarch, Theseus 20, notes the many variants of the Theseus-Ariadne myth and the inconsistencies among them. The Roman poets, i.e. Catullus then Ovid, differ from Apollodorus in their introducing Theseus’ culpability on Naxos. Apollodorus states, conversely, that while on the island, Dionysus abducted Ariadne and took her away to Lemnos where they conceived four children.

Classical variants for Ariadne’s disposition are listed by Reid:

“Having succeeded in his mission, Theseus left Crete, taking Ariadne with him. On the way back to Athens they stopped on the island of Naxos (Dia), where Theseus abandoned Ariadne. According to one legend, he simply forgot her and sailed away; others say that he left her in favor of her sister Phaedra. Ariadne was discovered on the island by Dionysus (Bacchus), who married her. In Homer’s version [Od. 11.321-25], Artemis killed Ariadne for eloping with Theseus while already engaged to Dionysus. According to Hesiod, Ariadne became immortal through her marriage to the god. In yet another legend, Ariadne died giving birth to Theseus’ child.”