Athens sends its children
The Library connects the Athenian tribute to the death of Minos’s son Androgeus and the conflict that follows. When disaster afflicts Athens, the settlement requires seven young men and seven young women to be sent to Crete without weapons as food for the Minotaur. The monster is confined in a structure designed to defeat anyone trying to find a way out.
Theseus joins the third group. The epitome says he is numbered among those being sent, while also reporting the alternative that he volunteers. Such alternatives are part of the record, not a problem that an editor needs to solve. Before departure, Aegeus gives his son instructions about the return signal. If Theseus survives, the ship should display white sails. The father must wait at a distance for a visible sign of an outcome he cannot control.
Source: Library and Epitome · Library 3.15.7–9; Epitome 1.7
The thread belongs to a collaboration
On Crete, Ariadne falls in love with Theseus and offers help if he will marry her and take her to Athens. Theseus agrees under oath. Ariadne obtains from Daedalus the means of navigating the labyrinth: a thread whose beginning is secured at the entrance. Theseus unwinds it as he advances.
He reaches the Minotaur in the innermost part of the building and, in this telling, kills it with blows of his fists. He then follows the thread back out and leads the young people away. The solution has two distinct parts. Strength defeats the creature, but practical knowledge makes survival possible afterward. Ariadne and Daedalus therefore belong inside the causal account of the rescue. A retelling that leaves them as decorative companions changes how the success is achieved. The thread is a guide through an engineered space, not a magical weapon that kills the monster.
Source: Library and Epitome · Epitome 1.8–9
A victory with unsettled endings
The escaping party reaches Naxos, where the epitome says Dionysus takes Ariadne. Theseus continues without her. Grieving over her loss, he forgets the white sails. Aegeus sees the dark ship and throws himself from the Acropolis, believing his son dead. Theseus returns as a survivor but also as the cause, however unintended, of his father’s death.
This version should remain distinct from accounts in which Theseus abandons Ariadne on his own initiative, or from the Odyssey’s brief notice of her death. The maze story supplies no single ending for her across antiquity. It also offers no archaeological identification of the labyrinth with a surviving Cretan palace. Here the enclosure is a narrative instrument: it turns royal violence into a problem that requires a local woman’s intervention, an artisan’s knowledge, and a hero willing to enter.
Sources: Library and Epitome; Odyssey · Epitome 1.9–11; Odyssey 11.321–325
- Period / witness
- Greek mythographic compilation, probably first or second century CE; Frazer translation 1921
- Recording context
- The Library attributed to Apollodorus survives through medieval manuscripts; its lost ending is known through epitomes. This later compilation preserves earlier traditions without dating their beginnings.
A recording location is not necessarily a story’s origin. Dates of texts, copies, and translations answer different questions.
Explore time & place →Read the sources
These references support the explanation above. Rights and edition notes are recorded individually.
Library and Epitome ↗
Pseudo-Apollodorus (ancient author uncertain); translated by Sir James George Frazer · Greek compilation probably first or second century CE; ending survives through later epitomes; Frazer translation 1921; host text page dated 2026-10-05
Edition & rights noteOdyssey ↗
Homer (traditional attribution); translated by Samuel Butler · Ancient Greek epic conventionally dated late eighth or seventh century BCE; translation first published 1900; electronic edition updated 2026-11-02
Edition & rights note