Icarus

Icarus was the son of Daedalus, the master craftsman and inventor whose skill was said to have been taught by Athena herself, the goddess of wisdom and craft. His mother was Naucrate, a slave woman in the household of King Minos on Crete, though some accounts say little of her and focus entirely on the boy's relationship with his father. Icarus grew up in the palace at Knossos, the great labyrinthine complex that was the centre of Minoan power, where Daedalus served as the king's architect. He would have known the dancing floor his father built for Ariadne, the princess daughter of Minos, and he would have heard the rumours about the Labyrinth beneath the palace where the Minotaur, a creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man, was kept. But his childhood ended when Minos discovered that Daedalus had helped Pasiphae, the queen of Crete and daughter of the sun god Helios, to satisfy her cursed passion for a white bull, and that he knew the secret of the maze.

King Minos, enraged by Daedalus's role in the birth of the Minotaur and fearful that the craftsman might reveal the secret of the Labyrinth, imprisoned both father and son. Some say he cast them into the maze itself, the very structure Daedalus had designed, where the twisting corridors and false turnings would confuse any prisoner. Others say he locked them in a tower on the coast, blocking all ships and guarding every harbour. Either way, the sea was closed to them and the land was watched. Icarus, still a boy, found himself trapped not by his own deeds but by his father's genius. Minos believed he had sealed their fate, but he underestimated the mind of the man who had invented the saw and the axe. Daedalus looked at the birds that wheeled above the prison and conceived a plan that would make his son either the most famous flyer in history or its most famous victim.

Daedalus gathered every feather he could find, from the seabirds that nested on the cliffs and the smaller birds that flew through the prison windows. He bound them together with thread and sealed the joints with wax, shaping two great wings like those of a bird. He fitted a pair to his own shoulders and a smaller pair to Icarus, showing the boy how to move his arms to catch the air. Before they leapt from the tower or the prison wall, Daedalus gave his son a warning that has echoed through three thousand years. He told Icarus not to fly too low, where the sea spray would dampen the feathers and drag him down into the waves, and not to fly too high, where the heat of the sun would melt the wax and cause the wings to fall apart. Then father and son launched themselves into the sky. At first they flew together, passing the islands of the Aegean, the sea between Greece and the coast of Asia Minor, the wind beneath their arms, the coast of Crete falling away behind them. But Icarus, intoxicated by the freedom and the power of flight, began to climb.

The boy soared upward, higher and higher, ignoring his father's cries. The sun beat down upon the wax, and the bonds that held the feathers began to soften. One by one the feathers loosened and fell away, spinning down into the blue water far below. Icarus flailed his arms, but without the feathers he had no way to stay aloft. He plummeted from the sky, falling through the air with nothing to catch him, and struck the sea with a terrible splash. The waves closed over him and he drowned, his body sinking into the dark water. Daedalus, flying ahead, turned back to find his son gone. He searched the surface and saw only feathers floating on the water. The sea into which Icarus fell was named the Icarian Sea, and the island where his body washed ashore was called Icaria, a rocky place in the Aegean where the boy would be remembered.

Heracles, the hero forced to complete twelve impossible labours, was travelling through the islands when he found the body of Icarus on the shore of Icaria. He buried the boy with proper rites and raised a mound over his grave, or in some accounts he gave him to the local people for burial. The islanders honoured Icarus with a small shrine, and the spring near his tomb was called by his name. Daedalus, meanwhile, landed safely in Sicily at the city of Camicus, where he was taken in by King Cocalus, but he never recovered from the loss of his son. The story of Icarus became one of the most enduring warnings in Western culture, a tale told by fathers to sons, by poets to princes, by painters to popes. Every image of a boy falling from the sky, every warning about the dangers of ambition, and every father who watches a child rush toward destruction carries the memory of Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun and fell.