No longer was my world one of brave heroes; I was learning all too swiftly the women's pain that throbbed unspoken through the tales of their feats. As she grows up, Ariadne realizes that there is a darker side to the stories of gods and men she so often heard:"No longer was my world one of brave heroes; I was learning all too swiftly the women's pain that throbbed unspoken through the tales of their feats. One year Theseus, Prince of Athens, offers himself as a sacrifice to the beast and Ariadne is instantly infatuated with him. How much agency do you think Ariadne and Phaedra have over their choices, and how much are they manipulated by the gods and Fates?

Ariadne is a major character in Mary Renault's historical novel The King Must Die (1958), about the Bronze Age hero Theseus.Ariadne lives on the island of Crete with her controlling father Minos and her bull brother The Minotaur. Ariadne is associated with mazes and labyrinths because of her involvement in the myths of Theseus and the Minotaur. In this version, Ariadne is only nominally the keeper of the Labyrinth (which seems to be a rather poor maze since the one time she enters it the Minotaur is able to immediately find her, and she escapes in the nick of time).

The novel's epigraph is taken from Ovid's Heroides, in which Ariadne addresses Theseus: "You will stand before the crowds reciting the glorious death of the man-bull in those great winding passages cut from the rock. The primitive nature of the cult at Amathus in this narrative appears to be much older than the Athenian sanctioned shrine of Aphrodite, who at Amathus received "Ariadne" (derived from " hagne", "sacred") as an epithet. There's a somewhat garbled thread about the misogynistic treatment of women in classical myth, but simply pointing this treatment out is not original or noteworthy, and is directly contradicted by the overall plot of the book. When young poultry farmer Chinonso sees a woman about to jump off a bridge his whole life is set off course, and the aftermath of this event takes him further and further away from his dreams.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. I was hoping the ending would give me the satisfaction I was looking for, I mean you hear “feminist retelling” and you get a little excited. But after a second read, I've decided that yes, this is one of my all-time favourites and yes, it deserves a 5-star rating. For example on the mirror engraving reproduced in Larissa Bonfante and Judith Swaddling, Etruscan Myths, The Legendary Past series, University of Texas/British Museum, 2006, fig.

There’s something oddly very comforting about crime fiction and its structure, being presented with a mystery to be solved and knowing that by the end, after a person dies, there will be some kind of resolution in these uncertain times. The closed door approach can be fine, but we don't even see the thoughts and feelings that lead up to those moments, or much of feelings after the fact. Minos put Ariadne in charge of the labyrinth where sacrifices were made as part of reparations either to Poseidon or Athena, depending on the version of the myth; later, she helped Theseus conquer the Minotaur and save the children from sacrifice. Told from the perspective of Chinonso’s “chi” (a guardian spirit of Igbo cosmology), this novel is unlike any other. The characters were vividly brought to life and I enjoyed reading from both Ariadne and Phaedra’s perspectives.

I loved seeing their sisterhood and growing up in Crete shrouded in shame, ruled over by their tyrannical father. We are trying not to alienate anybody, we do not uphold age-old stereotypes that only further expand patriarchy.