Ovid included Ariadne’s abandoned lament in the Heroides.
The Heroides is a collection of poetic letters written in the voices of mythological and legendary women. One poem presents Ariadne addressing Theseus after he has left her on Naxos. Ovid focuses on her grief, confusion, and sense of betrayal rather than narrating the Labyrinth adventure as a heroic triumph.
The poem helped establish Ariadne’s abandonment as a powerful literary episode in its own right. It also influenced later European treatments of the story, especially works interested in psychological emotion and the voice of the abandoned lover.
Virgil, Horace, and Propertius were major Roman poets, but Ariadne’s famous epistolary lament in this collection belongs to Ovid. The Heroides should also be distinguished from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the Minotaur story appears in a different poetic form.