Daedalus and Icarus

Also called: Fall of Icarus, Icarian Sea, Daidalos, Ikaros

A legend handed down over the centuries.

A Greek myth and legend told in Book 8 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and by Apollodorus. Imprisoned on Crete, the craftsman Daedalus made wings of feathers and wax and flew away with his son Icarus, but Icarus flew too high, the sun melted the wax and he fell into the sea.

This Greek myth and legend is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book 8) and Art of Love (Book 2) and in the Epitome of Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca, among others. Daedalus, the famous Athenian craftsman, served King Minos of Crete and built the Labyrinth. According to Apollodorus, when Theseus escaped from it with Ariadne’s thread, Minos imprisoned Daedalus, who had suggested the trick, together with his son Icarus (in the Labyrinth itself, or in a tower). With sea and land closed to him, Daedalus declared that “the sky is open” and bound birds’ feathers with thread and wax into two pairs of wings.

He warned his son to fly a middle course: too near the sea and the feathers would get wet, too high and the sun would burn them. But Icarus, delighting in flight, soared upward; the wax melted, the wings came apart and he fell into the sea and drowned. The sea where he fell was named the Icarian Sea, and the island where he was buried Icaria. Daedalus took refuge with King Cocalus in Sicily, where Minos, pursuing him, met his death.

The real island of Icaria (in the eastern Aegean, west of Samos) and the Icarian Sea have long been linked with the story. Here the legend is placed in that sea, but it has no fixed date.