The Myth of Icarus and Daedalus
In ancient and mythological Greece, towering over Crete with wings made of wax and feathers, Icarus, son of Daedalus, defied the laws of both nature and man. Ignoring his father’s warnings, his flight went higher and higher. To those witnesses who could see him from the earth, he looked like a god, and as he looked down from the sky, he also felt like one. But, in ancient Greece, the line separating a god from a man was absolute, and the punishment for mortals who dared to cross it was severe. And so it was for Icarus and Daedalus.
Years before Icarus was born, his father, Daedalus, was considered a genius inventor, craftsman, and sculptor of high esteem in his homeland, Athens. He invented carpentry and all the tools used in it. He made sculptures so realistic that Hercules came to confuse them with real men. But although he was very skilled and famous, Daedalus was selfish and jealous. He was so proud of his accomplishments that he couldn’t bear the thought of having a rival. His sister had left him in charge of her son, Perdix (also called Talus or Calus), to learn about the mechanical arts. The boy was a capable student and showed surprising signs of possessing a unique wit. But Daedalus was so envious of his nephew’s achievements that one day when they were together atop the temple of Athena on the Acropolis of Athens, he seized the opportunity and pushed him. But the goddess, who favors ingenuity, seeing him fall, changed his destiny and transformed him into a bird baptized with his name: the partridge. This bird does not build its nest in the trees, nor take lofty flights, but nestles in the hedges, and mindful of his fall, avoids high places. For this crime, Daedalus was tried and banished from Athens, which made Crete his next destination.
Preceded by his reputation, Daedalus was welcomed with open arms by King Minos of Crete. There, in the role of technical advisor to the palace, Daedalus continued to push the boundaries of human creation. For the king’s sons, he made animated toys that seemed to be alive. He also invented the sail and the mast of ships, which gave humans control over the wind. With each creation, Daedalus increasingly challenged the human limitations that had hitherto kept mortals separate from the gods; until finally, he broke them. At that time, Naucrate, a slave of Minos, fell in love with Daedalus for his cunning and intelligence, and they conceived in Crete their only son, Icarus.
Sometime before, Minos, invoking Poseidon in front of the Mediterranean Sea, asked him, if he agreed that the reign of the island of Crete should belong to him and not to his brother, Sarpedon, to make a bull appear. Right there, next to Minos, an imposing white bull appeared. Eventually, Minos ended up becoming the king of the island but enraptured by the animal’s magnificence, he decided to add it to his cattle instead of sacrificing it in honor of the sea god; instead, he sacrificed a normal and more modest bull, thus ignoring customs and generating the god’s anger towards him. Poseidon, furious with Minos for not keeping his promise to sacrifice the best of his bulls, caused Pasiphae, his wife, to fall prey to an irrepressible passion and desire for the animal. Pasiphae, cursed by the god to fall in love with the king’s precious bull, asked Daedalus for help to help her seduce the animal. With characteristic audacity, Daedalus agreed. He built a hollow wooden cow so lifelike that he managed to fool the bull. Pasiphae, hidden within Daedalus’ creation, conceived and gave birth to the Minotaur, a half-human, half-bull, whom she named Asterion. This, of course, angered the king, who blamed Daedalus for allowing such horrible perversion against natural laws. As punishment, Daedalus was forced to build, under the palace, a labyrinth for the Minotaur, from which it was impossible to escape. When it was finished, Minos imprisoned Daedalus and his son, Icarus, inside the top of the island’s tallest tower, where they would remain for the rest of their lives.
But Daedalus was still a genius inventor. As he watched the birds flying around his prison, the means of escape overtook him. He and Icarus would fly away from their prison as only birds or gods could. Using the fallen feathers of the birds that perched on the tower and the wax of the candles sent by the king so that even at night they could see the world they would never set foot in again, Daedalus built two pairs of giant wings. Once built, while tying the first pair to his son, Icarus, he gave an important warning: flying too close to the sea could soak the wings and make them too heavy for use; flying too close to the sun would cause the heat to melt the wax and the wings would disintegrate. In either case, the wings would eventually break and they would surely die. Therefore, the key to their escape would be to stay halfway between both threats.
With clear instructions, they jumped from the tower. They were the first mortals to ever fly. While Daedalus carefully stood at a prudent height, between the sea and the sun, Icarus was overwhelmed with the ecstasy of flight and overcome by the sense of divine power that this act entailed. Daedalus could only watch in horror as Icarus ascended higher and higher, unable to do anything to change his son’s fatal fate. Feeling the wings fall apart, Icarus waved his arms in despair, but there were not enough feathers left to hold him in the air and he fell into the sea. Just as Daedalus had so many times ignored the consequences of defying the natural laws of mortals in the service of his ego; Icarus also allowed himself to be carried away by his arrogance and paid the price. Daedalus wept and, bitterly lamenting his arts, named Icaria the island closest to the place of the fall in memory of his son. It is said that, while Daedalus was burying his son there, he heard the joyful song of the partridge in which Athena had transformed her nephew.
The sources vary as much as the versions we can find of this myth. For this same reason, it is not strange to find contradictions and incongruities between the different stories of history. In certain versions, the reason for the imprisonment was Daedalus’ collaboration with Theseus ‘ escape from the labyrinth. Daedalus would have shown Ariadne, daughter of King Minos, how Theseus could find the right path in the labyrinth where the Minotaur was located and, with this help, Theseus was able to kill the Minotaur and finally escape the enclosure. In other versions, where the fantastic element is eliminated, it is said that Daedalus had killed his nephew Thallus, so he had had to flee Athens, and Icarus had left in search of his father, but he was shipwrecked in the waters of Samos, so the sea received a name derived from his own. It is also said that Icarus and his father had fled Crete in two sailboats, invented by Daedalus, but the young man did not know how to master the sails and was shipwrecked, or rather, when he arrived near the island later named Icaria, he threw himself awkwardly towards land and drowned. Other sources also state that Icarus was not the only son that Daedalus had, but that he also had another son named Yápige.
The importance and purpose of this legend, beyond all this, is to demonstrate how both men paid dearly for stepping off the path of moderation: Icarus with his life and Daedalus with his repentance.
