Daedalus and Icarus

The Teller’s notebook

Before the wings

Before Ovid’s first feather, there is a maze. Riley’s explanation names Daedalus as an Athenian celebrated for sculpture and architecture. Minos welcomed him to Crete, where the king was at war with Athens, and Daedalus built the Labyrinth.

Apollodorus supplies the prison at the beginning of our telling. When Minos learned that Theseus and his companions had escaped, he confined Daedalus and Icarus in the Labyrinth. Icarus’s mother was Naucrate, an enslaved woman in Minos’s household. The father could design a maze. He still had to find a way off the island.

From the original

The open sky

In the meantime, Dædalus, abhorring Crete and his prolonged exile, and inflamed by the love of his native soil, was enclosed there by the sea. “Although Minos,” said he, “may beset the land and the sea, still the skies, at least, are open. By that way will we go: let Minos possess everything besides: he does not sway the air.” Thus he spoke; and he turned his thoughts to arts unknown till then; and varied the course of nature.

For he arranges feathers in order, beginning from the least, the shorter one succeeding the longer; so that you might suppose they grew on an incline. Thus does the rustic pipe sometimes rise by degrees, with unequal straws. Then he binds those in the middle with thread, and the lowermost ones with wax; and, thus ranged, with a gentle curvature, he bends them, so as to imitate real wings of birds.

His son Icarus stands together with him; and, ignorant that he is handling the source of danger to himself, with a smiling countenance, he sometimes catches at the feathers which the shifting breeze is ruffling; and, at other times, he softens the yellow wax with his thumb; and, by his playfulness, he retards the wondrous work of his father.

From the original

The middle way

After the finishing hand was put to the work, the workman himself poised his own body upon the two wings, and hung suspended in the beaten air. He provided his son with them as well; and said to him, “Icarus, I recommend thee to keep the middle tract; lest, if thou shouldst go too low, the water should clog thy wings; if too high, the fire of the sun should scorch them. Fly between both; and I bid thee neither to look at Boötes, nor Helice, nor the drawn sword of Orion. Under my guidance, take thy way.” At the same time, he delivered him rules for flying, and fitted the untried wings to his shoulders.

Amid his work and his admonitions, the cheeks of the old man were wet, and the hands of the father trembled. He gives kisses to his son, never again to be repeated; and, raised upon his wings, he flies before, and is concerned for his companion, just as the bird which has led forth her tender young from the lofty nest into the air. And he encourages him to follow, and instructs him in the fatal art, and both moves his own wings himself, and looks back on those of his son.

From the original

The fall

A person while he is angling for fish with his quivering rod, or the shepherd leaning on his crook, or the ploughman on the plough tail, when he beholds them, is astonished, and believes them to be Divinities, who thus can cleave the air.

And now Samos, sacred to Juno, and Delos, and Paros, were left behind to the left hand. On the right were Lebynthus, and Calymne, fruitful in honey; when the boy began to be pleased with a bolder flight, and forsook his guide; and, touched with a desire of reaching heaven, pursued his course still higher.

The vicinity of the scorching Sun softened the fragrant wax that fastened his wings. The wax was melted; he shook his naked arms, and, wanting his oar-like wings, he caught no more air. His face, too, as he called on the name of his father, was received in the azure water, which received its name from him.

From the original

The bird at the grave

But the unhappy father, now no more a father, said, “Icarus, where art thou? In what spot shall I seek thee, Icarus?” did he say; when he beheld his wings in the waters, and then he cursed his own arts; and he buried his body in a tomb, and the land was called from the name of him buried there.

As he was laying the body of his unfortunate son in the tomb, a prattling partridge beheld him from a branching holm-oak, and, by its notes, testified its delight. ’Twas then but a single bird of its kind, and never seen in former years, and, lately made a bird, was a grievous reproof, Dædalus, to thee.

For, ignorant of the decrees of fate, his sister had entrusted her son to be instructed by him, a boy who had passed twice six birthdays, with a mind eager for instruction. ’Twas he, too, who took the backbones observed in the middle of the fish, for an example, and cut a continued row of teeth in iron, with a sharp edge, and thus discovered the use of the saw.

From the original

Perdix

He was the first, too, that bound two arms of iron to one centre, that, being divided and of equal length, the one part might stand fixed, and the other might describe a circle.

Dædalus was envious, and threw him headlong from the sacred citadel of Minerva, falsely pretending that he had fallen by accident. But Pallas, who favours ingenuity, received him, and made him a bird; and, in the middle of the air, he flew upon wings. Yet the vigour of his genius, once so active, passed into his wings and into his feet; his name, too, remained the same as before.

Yet this bird does not raise its body aloft, nor make its nest in the branches and the lofty tops of trees, but flies near the ground, and lays its eggs in hedges: and, mindful of its former fall, it dreads the higher regions.

The Teller’s notebook

A shell in Sicily

Ovid leaves the partridge close to the ground. Apollodorus carries Daedalus on to Camicus in Sicily, where Cocalus shelters him. Minos keeps searching. In each country he offers a large reward to anyone who can carry a thread through a spiral shell. It is a puzzle shaped around the mind he wants to find.

At Camicus, Cocalus accepts the challenge and gives the shell to the man he is hiding. Daedalus ties a thread to an ant, bores a hole in the shell, and lets the insect travel through it. When Minos sees that the shell has been threaded, he knows who must be nearby and demands Daedalus.

Cocalus agrees to surrender him and entertains his royal guest. Then comes the bath. The daughters of Cocalus bring Minos’s pursuit to an end there. Apollodorus records another form of the ending in which Minos dies after boiling water is poured over him. The craftsman outlives the king who tried to catch him.

The Teller’s notebook

A different telling

There is also a telling without wings. The paragraph below belongs to Riley’s explanation after Ovid’s poem, where he treats the voyage by sail as the event behind the winged story. That is his interpretation, rather than an established history. It is a separate version of the escape, not a second journey after the flight.

Frazer’s notes to Apollodorus preserve further differences. In the account he attributes to Diodorus, Pasiphae provides a ship, and Icarus drowns while landing on an island. In the account attributed to Pausanias, father and son sail in separate ships with Daedalus’s new sails. Those details belong to their own tellings; they do not replace the feathers and wax in Ovid’s.

From the original

The voyage by sail

Minos, being informed that Dædalus had assisted Pasiphaë in carrying out her criminal designs, kept him in prison; but escaping thence, by the aid of Pasiphaë, he embarked in a ship which she had prepared for him. Using sails, which till then, according to Pausanias and Palæphatus, were unknown, he escaped from the galleys of Minos, which were provided with oars only. Icarus, either fell into the sea, or, overpowered with the fatigues of the voyage, died near an island in the Archipelago, which afterwards received his name. These facts have been disguised by the poets under the ingenious fiction of the wings, and the neglect of Icarus to follow his father’s advice, as here related.