Greek PantheonSacred Site
Naxos
The island where Theseus abandoned Ariadne, only for Dionysus to find and marry her, making it sacred to the wine god.
About Naxos
Ariadne left, Dionysus found
Naxos is where Theseus puts Ariadne ashore and sails on. Homer already knows Artemis killed her there; later poets give her to Dionysus as wife, with a crown set among the stars. The island's real cult of Dionysus is well attested. Catullus 64 and Ovid retell the abandonment as pathos. Apollodorus files it in the Theseus dossier. The myth does not invent Naxos; it uses a wine-island as the hinge between Athenian hero-tale and Dionysian marriage.
On the map
Naxos among other places of the Greek Pantheon.
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- Homer, Odyssey 11
About this entry
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
Coordinates mark where the myths place a site, or where the tradition locates it today. Mythic realms are left off the map or marked as symbolic placements.
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