Island-Hopping:
Ovid’s Ariadne and Her Texts

Barbara Weiden Boyd (Bowdoin College)

Ariadne enters Latin poetry trapped and inaccessible, abandoned on a deserted island; yet she is not, intertextually speaking, alone. Both Catullus and his Ariadne display an already-sophisticated awareness of themselves in relation to their literary predecessors: his virtuoso evocation of earlier literary heroines, especially Medea (not coincidentally Ariadne’s cousin), gives Ariadne a pedigree ranging from Euripides, Callimachus, and Apollonius to the Roman tragedians Ennius and Accius (Thomas). When she next appears at the opening of Aeneid 6, she figures the repetitiousness of her own story. Aeneas, having arrived in Italy, studies the elaborately crafted doors on the temple of Apollo at Cumae, and on them sees—or at least interprets what he sees as—a visual allusion to Ariadne, out of pity for whom Daedalus devised a route out of the labyrinth (Putnam). Mutatis mutandis, Dido in turn reprises Ariadne’s role as woman abandoned in Aeneid 4; Aeneas’ subsequent sympathetic response to the scenes on the temple doors comes as no surprise, therefore, as he recognizes a familiar story.

The repetition of a familiar story presents both risks and rewards for any writer; it is all the more remarkable, therefore, to consider the challenge Ovid sets for himself in returning repeatedly to Ariadne. Not once, not twice, not three times, but four—on four occasions, in four separate poems, Ovid features the story of Ariadne’s abandonment by Theseus, along with the events preceding and following it (Heroides 10, Ars Amatoria 1.525-64, Fasti 3.459-516, and Metamorphoses 8.169-82). Looking briefly at each of these treatments of her story, I shall follow Ovid in revisiting Ariadne’s island repeatedly (and so paradoxically redeeming her from the isolation that makes her Ariadne in the first place). The repetition Ovid enacts functions as an investigation by our poet into the cognitive processes that allow readers to recognize a character they have “met” elsewhere in a text and to appreciate the intertextual play between and among similarities and differences that enables the invention of tradition.

Putnam, M.C.J. “Daedalus, Virgil and the End of Art.” AJP 108 (1987) 173-98.

Thomas, R.F. “Catullus and the Polemics of Poetic Reference (Poem 64.1-18).” AJP 103 (1982) 144-64.