Ariadne was born in the palace at Knossos, the great labyrinthine complex that was the centre of Minoan power, to King Minos and Queen Pasiphae. Her brothers and sisters included Phaedra, who would later marry Theseus and die by her own hand, Androgeus, whose death in Athens had caused the terrible tribute of youths and maidens, and the monstrous Minotaur, the creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man who was her half-brother by her mother's cursed union with a white bull. Ariadne grew up in the shadow of the Labyrinth, the vast maze built by Daedalus, the master craftsman, beneath the palace where the Minotaur was imprisoned. She knew its corridors because Daedalus had shown her the secret, or because she had learned from the builder himself how the threads of the maze were woven together. She was a princess of the most powerful kingdom in the Aegean, the sea between Greece and the coast of Asia Minor, but her life was overshadowed by the monster that fed on her father's tribute and the shame of her mother's unnatural passion.

When the third tribute of Athenian youths and maidens arrived at Knossos, among them was Theseus, the prince of Athens who had cleared the road to his city of murderers and monsters. Ariadne saw him at the dock or in the palace and fell in love with him at first sight. She went to him in secret and offered him a sword and a ball of thread, a clew, instructing him to tie one end to the entrance of the Labyrinth and unwind it as he walked, so he could follow it back out. She also told him how to find the centre where the Minotaur slept. Theseus entered the dark maze, the thread trailing behind him, and in the heart of the Labyrinth he killed the beast with the sword she had provided. He followed the thread back to the entrance, gathered the other Athenian youths, and fled to his ship. But he did not leave alone. He took Ariadne with him, promising her marriage and a new life in Athens, a promise that would carry them across the Aegean to an island where the promise would break.

The ship stopped at the island of Naxos, a rocky place in the Aegean sacred to Dionysus, the god of wine, madness, and ecstasy. There, according to the most common telling, Theseus abandoned Ariadne while she slept, whether because he had grown tired of her, because the goddess Athena commanded him in a dream to leave her, or because Dionysus himself appeared and claimed her as his bride. The Athenian ship sailed away with its black sails still raised, and Ariadne woke to find herself alone on the shore, the sound of the waves replacing the voice of the hero she had saved. She wept, or she raged, or she simply waited, until the god came. Dionysus, returning from his wanderings in the East, found her on the beach and fell in love. He married her in a great celebration attended by satyrs, the half-goat followers of the god, and maenads, the frenzied women who danced in his cult, and the gods themselves gave her gifts.

Dionysus took Ariadne to Olympus and made her immortal, or in some accounts she was already granted immortality by the gods as a wedding gift. Hephaestus, the divine smith who forged the armour of the gods, gave her a crown of gold so exquisite that when she wore it the stars themselves seemed dim by comparison. Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, blessed the marriage, and the crown was later placed in the heavens as the constellation Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown, where it still shines in the northern sky. Ariadne bore Dionysus several children, including Oenopion, who became king of Chios, and Staphylus and Thoas, who carried the wine god's legacy across the islands of the Aegean. She was worshipped on Naxos as a goddess, and her tomb was shown to visitors there, though the Greeks knew she had ascended to Olympus and was not truly dead.

In the earliest traditions, Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, killed Ariadne on the island of Dia, a small island near Naxos. But the story that endured was the one where Dionysus found her on the shore and made her his bride. By the time of the tragedians and the lyric poets, Ariadne had become the wife of Dionysus, a symbol of transformation from mortal despair to immortal joy. Her story was painted on the walls of Pompeii, sung by the poets of Athens, and woven into the fabric of the Dionysiac cult that spread across the Mediterranean. Every ball of thread that guides a lost soul, every crown of stars in the northern sky, and every woman who saves a man only to be left behind carries the memory of Ariadne, the princess of Crete who traded a monster for a god and found that the labyrinth was only the first of her journeys.