ABSTRACT
Excluding the lost Alexandrine verse that may have inspired it, by Catullus, was the first work by a Roman poet to mention Ariadne, the Marriage of Peleus and Thetis. As well as providing the only version of the story of Ariadne in ancient Greek, it shows great qualities of strength and vividness in developing a theme that was to enjoy considerable success in the future: the marriage of Ariadne and Bacchus. However, the dual theme of Ariadne was to achieve its greatest expression only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first theatrical work on the theme of the Theseus's inconstancy and desertion of Ariadne was probably scripted by the major Dutch writer Pieter Cornelisz Hooft as early as 1601. The myth of Theseus and Ariadne is among those that the narrator of Emploi du Temps by uses to illustrate his own personal predicaments and is represented as being depicted on the eighteen panels of an eighteenth-century tapestry.
