Once, too, the maiden Ariadne, daughter of Minos, kindly freed Theseus from cruel trials, she whom Pasiphae bore, the daughter of the Sun. And when Minos had laid his anger to rest, she even boarded Theseus' ship and left her country with him; and the immortals themselves loved her, and in the middle of the sky her sign, a starry crown that they call Ariadne's, wheels all night among the heavenly figures.

Jason chooses his example with care. The ancient commentator saw the point: with this story he hints that Medea should sail away with him, and holds up Ariadne as the pattern. Mooney adds what Jason leaves out. In the Odyssey Artemis kills Ariadne on the island of Dia before she reaches Athens (11.321–325); in most other tellings Theseus abandons her on Naxos, either faithlessly (Plutarch, Theseus 20; Ovid, Heroides 10) or because Dionysus made him (Diodorus 4.61; Pausanias 1.20), and Dionysus takes her as his wife and sets her wedding crown among the stars. Minos' anger, the scholiast notes, never cooled. The crown is the constellation Corona Borealis. Aratus calls it the crown that Dionysus set in the sky as a memorial of the departed Ariadne (Phaenomena 71–72), and Catullus names it in the Lock of Berenice (66.60–61).