Summary
The Legend of Ariadne recounts the dishonesty of Ariadne’s lover Theseus. The story begins in Crete, with the king Minos. His son Androgeus has been killed, and in revenge he lays siege to the city Alcathoe. The city mounts a noble resistance, but one day the king’s daughter sees Minos and, admiring his beauty and chivalry, betrays the city into his hands. However, he does not rescue her, but leaves her to suffer the consequences of her betrayal. He then goes on to conquer other cities, including Athens, and bids them send their children to be killed as his son was killed.
Minos keeps a monster in a labyrinth, the wicked Minotaur. Every three years, the people must cast lots to select one young man to be killed by the Minotaur. One year, the lot lands on Theseus, the son of the king of Athens. Minos’s daughters Ariadne and Phedra see his grief and, feeling compassion for the unjustly doomed man, vow to save his life.
They decide to advise him on how to defeat the Minotaur and escape the maze, and get the jailer to allow Theseus to bring a weapon with him. In gratitude, Theseus swears to be Ariadne’s servant, but she tells him he should accept a role appropriate to his station as a king’s son, and be her husband instead.
Following her instructions, Theseus defeats the minotaur and, the next day, slips out of the castle, taking the two sisters with him. While sailing home, he alights on an island and abandons Ariadne, wishing to marry her more beautiful sister instead. Ariadne wakes up to see Theseus sailing away without her. Left behind, Ariadne cannot even return home because she has betrayed her father. Eventually, one of the goddesses takes pity on her and transforms her into a constellation.
The Legend of Philomela recounts her rape at the hands of the tyrant Tereus. It is the most brutal story in The Legend. Tereus was the lord of Trace, married to Progne, the beautiful daughter of King Pandiones. Progne begins to miss her sister Philomela, and Tereus sends ships to take her to Trace for a visit of a few months.
When Tereus sees Philomela’s youth and beauty, he resolves to have her. When they return to Trace, he takes her to a cave and rapes her. Then, to prevent her from recounting what has happened, he cuts out her tongue and locks her in a castle, where he can return and continue to assault her. Then he returns to Progne and pretends he found her sister already dead.
In the castle, Philomela has no pen to write with, but she does have the tools to weave. Over the course of a year, she weaves a tapestry telling the story of all Tereus did to her. When it is done, she gets a young man to agree to take the tapestry to her sister. When Progne sees it, she pretends to go on pilgrimage and finds her sister. The story ends with the two grieving in each other’s arms.
Analysis
The Legend of Ariadne closely resembles the previous stories in both theme and plot, especially The Legend of Hypsipyle and Medea and the Legend of Dido. Once again, Chaucer reframes a classical hero as a villain by emphasizing his actions towards women rather than his heroic deeds.
Throughout The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer alludes to classical sources for these stories, especially Virgil’s Aeneid and the work of Ovid, in Middle English Naso. Today, Ovid is best known for the Metamorphoses, and these were certainly an important reference for Chaucer, but several stories draw most extensively from the Heroides, Ovid’s own collection of stories about female heroes. In Ovid’s version, the story of Ariadne ends happily. Athena, seeing her abandoned on the island, sends the wine god Dionysus, who marries her and, when she dies, enshrines her as a constellation. Her eventual happy union makes Ariadne an odd choice for The Legend.
Indeed, Chaucer’s Ariadne has somewhat complex motivations. Unlike Dido and Hypsipsyle, she seems motivated less by desire than a sense of personal ethics. She identifies Theseus’s fate as unjust, even though doing so leads her to betray her father. Nor does she provoke Theseus’s affections. In gratitude for her help, he swears to be her servant, and she asks him to marry her because she feels servitude would be unworthy of a king’s son.
Chaucer’s decision not to include Dionysus’s marriage to Ariadne makes her a more tragic figure than she is in Ovid’s version of the myth, but she is still the first character in The Legend who neither kills herself nor dies of grief. In this sense, Ariadne’s fatal decision is not her marriage to Theseus, but her choice to betray her father. The beginning of the story emphasizes the importance of this choice, as Alcathoe similarly chooses to betray her father for Minos’s sake. However, while she is motivated by romantic admiration of his beauty and chivalry, Ariadne is motivated primarily by compassion and a sense of justice. At the end of the story, she begins by lamenting the loss of Theseus, but ends up mourning that she cannot go home to her own country. In the end, this is her most lasting loss, and it is the consequence not of Theseus’s betrayal, nor even her own romantic desire, but rather of her ethical decisions. Unlike the many female characters in the Legend who are purely victims of male dishonesty, Ariadne is partially master of her own fate.
Like the story of Ariadne, Chaucer adapts the Legend of Philomela from the Roman poet Ovid. The story was well-known in the Middle Ages. In Ovid, the reunited sisters take horrific revenge, murdering Progne and Tereus’s son and feeding his stewed flesh to the king. When Tereus learns what they have done, he hurries to murder the women, but at this point the gods intervene, turning Progne, Tereus, and Philomela into birds.
In the opening of the Legend of Philomela, Chaucer cheekily alludes to this ending, referring to Tereus’s “foule story” and in the next line writing that the poet’s own eyes “wexe foule [become painful]…also.” For an audience familiar with the story, this repetition of the word “foul” would recall the word “fowl,” the Middle English word for birds, and appear as a clever allusion to the ending to come. However, Chaucer subverts this expectation, never actually telling the story of their revenge.
Philomela is one of the most brutally victimized characters in the Legend. Like Lucrece, she is raped by a tyrannical king, but her story is made even more disturbing because she is the sister of Tereus’s own wife, because he assaults her repeatedly, and because he cuts out her tongue. He thus violates her sexual autonomy, the boundaries of her body, and the expectations of family. Furthermore, while in the Legend of Lucrece Chaucer chooses to skip over the rape itself, in Philomela he recounts the scene, “By force has this traitor done a deed, / That he has stripped her of her virginity, / against her will, by strength and power” and even records Lucrece’s cries to her sister and to “God in heaven.”
Critics have disagreed on why Chaucer changed the story. Given that he explicitly recounts Philomela’s rape and mutilation, it’s unlikely that he removed the revenge because it was too gory. Perhaps he sought to bring the story into closer accordance with the rest of the Legend; after all, none of the other women, even the unusually independent Ariadne, take their own revenge. Yet his deliberate allusion to the familiar ending would have left audiences highly aware of what was missing. The pointed absence of the revenge might enable Chaucer to emphasize that the simplified account of gender relations given in the Legend is merely a construction, at odds with the complexity of history and human behavior. Finally, Chaucer’s deliberately fractured and incomplete version of the story seems in tune with the violence of Tereus’s actions. Like Philomela, the story has lost part of itself. Given that Philomela loses her capacity to express herself freely, the analogy between woman and story is especially poignant.
