Fourteen-year-old Ariadne, princess of Crete, helps her beloved Theseus escape death in the labyrinth of the monstrous Minotaur.

The myths of ancient Crete, her people, and their gods twine through our minds like the snakes around the priestess's arms in those ancient temples. They call to us across the millennia, asking us to remember. In answer to that call, Ariadne’s Thread provides a window into the spirituality, culture and daily life of the Minoan people, and commemorates the richness of a world in which women and men worked and worshiped as equals. In these pages, the glory of Crete once again springs to life; the history, the culture, and most of all, the intense spirituality of these fascinating people and their gods can inspire and transform our modern ways of thinking, worshiping and being. The ruined temples and mansions of ancient Crete may crumble along the coastline of this tiny island, but Ariadne’s thread still leads us into the labyrinth and safely back out again.

Saberhagen, continues the Book of the Gods series that began with The Face of Apollo. Shiva has overthrown the rightful King Minos of Crete and in his place put a minion of the gods of Death. Sacrifices are demanded. Theseus, a young hostage, and his companions are doomed, unless Princess Ariadne, her brother Ariadne is the daughter of the King Minos. The creature in the Labyrinth is her brother Theseus is a young man sentenced to be sacrificed by the gods, with whom Ariadne falls deeply in love. She conspires to spare him from his grisly fate, but doesn't count on Dionysus stepping in to complicate matters. With mystical beasts and whimsical gods confronting them at every turn, Ariadne and Theseus must find their way through a maze of events that are as twisted as they are dangerous.

Indeed, relatively little work has been done on the Cretan myth cycle as a whole, a mixture of heroic Greek legend and savage, pre-Greek elements generally considered to be antithetical to evolved literary languages. As a result, although Ariadne has been extremely important in Western art from the time of ancient Greece through the nineteenth century, she is rarely included in studies of Greek myth.

Nonnus of Panopolis (fifth century CE) composed two poems once thought to be incompatible: the Dionysiaca, a mythological long epic with a marked interest in astrology, the occult, the paradox and not least the beauty of the female body, and a pious and sublime Paraphrase of the Gospel of St John. Little is known about the man, to whom sundry identities have been attached. The longer work has been misrepresented as a degenerate poem or as a mythological handbook. The Christian poem has been neglected or undervalued. Yet, Nonnus accomplished an ambitious plan, in two parts, aiming at representing world-history. This volume consists mainly of the Proceedings of the First International Conference on Nonnus held in Rethymno, Crete in May 2011. With twentyfour essays, an international team of specialists place Nonnus firmly in his time's context. After an authoritative Introduction by Pierre Chuvin, chapters on Nonnus and the literary past, the visual arts, Late Antique paideia, Christianity and his immediate and long-range afterlife (to modern times) offer a wide-ranging and innovative insight into the man and his world. The volume moves on beyond stereotypes to inaugurate a new era of research for Nonnus and Late Antique poetics on the whole.

This festschrift honors UCLA professor emerita Susan Downey and her meticulous scholarship on religious architecture and imagery in the Roman/Hellenistic world. The iconography of gods and goddesses, the analysis of sacred imagery in the context of ancient cult practices, and the design and decoration of sacred spaces are the main themes of the book. Authors examine such subjects as painting from Dura-Europos, Hellenistic sculpture at Saqqara in Egypt, Roman cameo glass, Pompeian fresco, and aspects of Venus in portrait sculpture. The essays on Dura-Europos are especially valuable in light of the present turmoil in the region. Professor Downey's influence shines through in these discussions, which echo her mentorship of several generations of art history and archaeology students and recognize her scholarly achievements. The broad temporal and geographic parameters of the volume are expansive, and the juxtaposition of images and analyses leads to surprising new conclusions.

"Ariadne's Thread is a mini-encyclopedia of more than a hundred such international oral tales, all present in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. It takes into account writings, including early Jewish and Christian literature, recorded in or translated into Greek or Latin by writers of any nationality. As a result, this book will be invaluable not only to classicists and folklorists but also to a wide range of other readers who are interested in stories and storytelling."--BOOK JACKET.

Organized into an easy-to-use, alphabetical dictionary format, a guide to dream interpretation focuses on both classic and contemporary dream symbols and explains how dreams can reveal hidden truths about the physical, emotional, and metaphysical realms of life. Original.

An Englishman sets out for an ancient Greek palace in Crete to clear his family's name. The man's father and grandfather excavated it and they have been accused by the archeological community of fabricating artifacts. A first novel.