Perdix was born to the sister of Daedalus, though her name varies in different tellings, some calling her Perdix and making the boy Talos, others calling the boy Perdix and leaving the mother unnamed. His father is not recorded, and the boy grew up in the shadow of his uncle's fame. Daedalus was the architect of the Labyrinth, the maze built to imprison the Minotaur, the half-man half-bull creature born to Queen Pasiphae of Crete, and he was the inventor of moving statues, automata so lifelike they seemed to breathe. He was the most skilled craftsman in Greece, and when his nephew showed signs of equal or even greater talent, Daedalus took the boy into his workshop on the Acropolis of Athens, the sacred citadel that towered above the city, and began to teach him the secrets of his art.

Perdix learned quickly, too quickly for his uncle's comfort. While walking along the seashore, the boy noticed the spine of a fish, its teeth arranged in a row so fine and sharp that it could cut through flesh with ease. He took the spine as a model and fashioned the first saw from iron, a blade with teeth set in a line that could cut through wood as cleanly as the fish's spine cut through water. In another moment of inspiration, he took two iron rods and joined them at one end with a rivet, creating the first pair of compasses, an instrument that could measure equal distances and draw perfect circles, the foundation of all geometric construction. He also invented the potter's wheel, a disc that spun on an axle and allowed clay to be shaped with a symmetry no hand alone could achieve. Each invention was simple in concept but revolutionary in application, and the people of Athens began to speak of the boy as a second Daedalus, a young mind that might one day eclipse the master who had taught him.

Daedalus could not bear the praise. He had built his identity upon being the greatest craftsman in the world, the man whose inventions were unmatched, and the thought that his own nephew, a boy he had taken under his wing, might surpass him filled him with a jealousy so bitter that it overcame every bond of blood and affection. One day, while they stood together on the summit of the Acropolis, or in some versions on a high tower or cliff, Daedalus saw his chance. He pretended to admire the view and led Perdix to the edge, and then, with a sudden shove, he pushed the boy over the precipice. Perdix fell, his arms flailing, his voice crying out in terror and betrayal, the uncle he had trusted watching from above as the ground rushed up to meet him.

But Athena, the goddess who presided over all crafts and who loved ingenuity wherever she found it, was watching. She caught the boy in mid-air, or in some tellings she transformed him just before his body struck the rocks below, and Perdix became a partridge, the bird called perdix in Greek, a small brown creature that skulks in the underbrush and never flies higher than the low bushes, as if it still remembers the terrible fall from which the goddess saved it. The partridge's habit of staying close to the ground, of never soaring or climbing to great heights, was said to be the legacy of Perdix's trauma, the mortal fear of falling that had been etched into his very nature by the betrayal of his uncle. In some versions, the goddess also placed the image of the partridge among the stars, though this constellation is not one of the major Greek asterisms.

Daedalus did not escape punishment. The murder of Perdix was discovered, and Daedalus was brought before the Areopagus, the court of Athens that sat on the rocky hill of the same name and judged cases of homicide. He was tried for murder and found guilty, or in some versions he fled before the trial could conclude, but either way he was forced to leave Athens forever. He went to Crete, the large island in the southern Aegean, where he entered the service of King Minos and his queen Pasiphae. There he built the Labyrinth, the maze of twisting passages from which no one could escape without a thread to trace their path, and there he fashioned the wings of wax and feathers that he and his son Icarus used to fly away from Crete when Minos imprisoned them. Icarus, ignoring his father's warnings, flew too close to the sun, the wax melted, and the boy fell into the sea and drowned. The irony was not lost on the Greeks: Daedalus, who had murdered his nephew by casting him from a height, lost his own son to a fall from the sky, a punishment that mirrored his crime.

Perdix's inventions lived on long after his death. The saw, the compass, and the potter's wheel became essential tools of Greek civilisation, and every carpenter who drew a saw across a plank, every potter who centred clay upon a spinning wheel, and every architect who measured a circle with compasses was using the gifts of the boy whom jealousy had destroyed. The story of Perdix became a cautionary tale about the danger of envy, the sin of the master who cannot bear to be surpassed by the student, and it was told alongside the story of Icarus as part of the larger tragedy of Daedalus, the genius whose gifts were matched only by his flaws.