It may be permissible to indulge
the imagination with the thought that we can still behold the very
place where, while the grim King and his gaily-bedecked courtiers
looked on at the sports which were meant only as a prelude to a
dreadful tragedy, the actors in one of the great romances of the
world found love waiting for them before the gates of death. In
any case, the spot may well have been a most fitting one for the
birth of an immortal tale of love. For it is not improbable that,
in its religious aspect, it had a connection with a greater, a
Divine namesake of the human Ariadne. The great goddess of Knossos,
in one aspect of her nature, was the same whom the Greeks knew
later as Aphrodite, the foam-born Goddess of Love. To this goddess
there was attached in Crete the native dialect epithet of 'The
Exceeding Holy One,' 'Ariadne,' and the Theatral Area may well
have been the place where ceremonial dances were performed in her
honour.
Within the palace walls abundant remains of fine polychrome ware of
the Middle Minoan period were found as the season's work went on.
The dungeons of the preceding year's excavations were supplemented
by the discovery of four more, making six in all, and it was shown
that these pits must have belonged to a very early period in the
history of the buildings, for they have no structural connection
with the walls of the Later Palace, which, indeed, cross them in
some places.
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