ARIADNA, MEDEA AND GRATITUDE. SOME REMARKS By Elżbieta Wesołowska In his tragedy Medea, Lucius Annaeus Seneca presents a final episode of Medea and Jason's relationship. Abandoned by her husband in Corinth, the Colchian takes bloody revenge, killing their children. In Phaedra, on the other hand, the eponymous heroine Phaedra, Theseus' unhappy wife hopelessly in love with her step-son, remembers with bitterness her sister Ariadne who helped Theseus when he ventured into the Labyrinth to be then left behind on the isle of Naxos 1 . The cases of Ariadne and Medea offer examples of gratitude quickly withered. Both women helped their beloved men in their great and extraordinarily difficult missions. They were related to each other via Aeetes 2 . Medea used her supernatural potential to help, while Ariadne relied on her intelligence, feminine indeed, as her instruments were the attributes of the strictly womanly task of spinning 3 . Now in his Aeneid (7, ) Vergil claims it was Daedalus who invented the thread of the labyrinth. Even had that been the case, the yarn in her hand guided the hero to her as his prize as well as to the exit 4 . They both left their fathers and their childhood homes 5 for men they hardly knew 6 . Aeetes hated and feared the sons of his daughter Chalciope and thus, by contrast, he would love Medea and Apsyrtus; he even cared for Chalciope herself. 7 . Both Ariadne and Medea had a hand in destroying their brothers. 1 v. 662 - 665 2 Ariadne was his granddaughter as a daughter of Pasiphae; Medea was his daughter and a niece to the famous sorceress Circe. According to Diodorus' version, unsupported elsewhere, Medea was a daughter of Minos and the goddess Hecate, and Circe's sister. 3 We do have a poem by Sappho in which a girl complain that she can no longer hold the shuttle for missing her boy so much (fr. 102 –t 1977). 4 A connection between Daedalus and Ariadne shows already in Iliad 18, 440 sqq., although it mentions, not a labyrinth or a ball of yarn, but rather a „dance floor”, a work of the genius artisan. 5 The father is important here. Neither story mentions the mother. It is the father that links to the past, and it is betraying the father that weighs specially heavy and morally doubtful, as breaking the law that he constitutes (Bachofen 2007). 6 Apollonius, Vallerius Flaccus and Catullus all imply that both entering the labyrinth and obtaining the golden fleece took place on the first days after the Greeks arrived. 7 Apollonius, Argonautica 3.603–605.