Unfinished white marble nude woman at the entrance of Apollo's temple, in Naxos. According to Greek mythology, Theseus abandoned the princess Ariadne of Crete on Naxos after she helped him kill the Minotaur and escape from the Labyrinth. Naxos was an important center in Archaic Greece (800 BC–480 BC): it is the largest of the Cyclades island group in the Aegean Sea. Ariadne auf Naxos is an opera by Richard Strauss with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.