Daedalus and Icarus: the Myth of the Wax Wings and the Fall

Daedalus and Icarus are a father and son held captive on Crete by King Minos, who escape by flying on wings made of feathers and wax. Daedalus, the craftsman who built the Labyrinth, warns his son to fly a middle course, between the damp of the sea and the heat of the sun. Icarus, thrilled by flight, climbs too high: the wax melts, the feathers come loose and he plunges into the sea that takes his name. Daedalus flies on alone to Sicily. The story barely appears in early Greek literature and owes its famous form to the Roman poet Ovid, yet it has become one of antiquity’s most enduring images of the price of daring.

Why Minos held Daedalus captive

Daedalus is an Athenian, descended from the royal line of Erechtheus, and the most admired craftsman in Greek myth: Homer already credits him with a dancing floor built at Knossos for Ariadne (Iliad 18.590-592). His exile begins with a crime. Jealous of his nephew and apprentice, called Talos in Apollodorus and Diodorus and Perdix in Ovid, who had invented the saw, he throws the boy off the Acropolis. Condemned, he flees to Crete.

Minos takes him in, and Daedalus betrays him twice. First he builds a hollow wooden cow for Queen Pasiphae, who has fallen for the bull Poseidon sent, so that she can mate with the animal; the child of that union is the Minotaur. He then designs the Labyrinth to contain the monster and, according to Apollodorus (Epitome 1.9), gives Ariadne the idea of the thread that lets Theseus find his way out after killing the Minotaur, as told in Theseus and the Minotaur.

When Minos learns that Theseus and Ariadne have fled, he locks Daedalus inside the Labyrinth with his son Icarus, born to a palace slave named Naucrate (Epitome 1.12). The architect becomes a prisoner of his own building.

Wings of feathers and wax

In Ovid, Minos controls the island and the sea, so no ship can carry Daedalus away. The craftsman turns that into a solution: “He may block the land and the waves, but the sky at least is open; that is the way we will go” (Metamorphoses 8.185-186).

Ovid describes the work like a craftsman’s bench. Daedalus lays the feathers out by size, shortest to longest, like the uneven reeds of a shepherd’s pipe. He ties them in the middle with thread, fixes them at the base with wax, then bends them slightly to imitate a bird’s wings. Meanwhile Icarus plays beside him, snatching at feathers lifted by the breeze and kneading the wax with his thumb, never guessing he is handling the instrument of his death. Daedalus tests the wings, hovers in the air, then straps on his son’s.

The middle way

Before they leave, Daedalus gives his instructions: “I warn you, Icarus, to keep to the middle course” (medio ut limite curras, 8.203). Fly too low and the spray will weigh down the feathers; fly too high and the sun’s fire will scorch them. He also tells him not to steer by the stars, Boötes, the Great Bear or Orion: Icarus is simply to follow his father. Apollodorus (Epitome 1.12) gives the same double warning more drily: do not fly high, or the glue will melt in the sun, and do not fly near the sea, or the damp will loosen the wings.

The warning is not an abstract moral. It describes the physical limits of a device, which is what makes Icarus’ mistake so human: he does not defy a god, he forgets an operating rule.

The flight and the fall

Father and son take off. Ovid imagines the people below: a fisherman with his rod, a shepherd leaning on his crook and a ploughman bent over his plough see them pass and take them for gods. The two fugitives leave Samos, Juno’s island, and then Delos and Paros behind on their left, with Lebinthos and honey-rich Calymne on their right.

Then Icarus, delighting in his bold flight, leaves his guide and soars toward the sky. The sun softens the fragrant wax that holds the feathers. His bare arms beat the air and find no grip. He falls crying his father’s name, and his mouth is swallowed by the blue water that has borne his name ever since (8.223-230).

Daedalus, “a father no longer”, calls out: “Icarus, Icarus, where are you?” He sees feathers on the waves, curses his own skill, recovers the body and buries it on an island, ever after called Icaria. Ovid adds a cruel detail: a partridge claps its wings as it watches him bury his son. It is Perdix, the nephew he murdered, whom Athena turned into a bird as he fell; that, says the poet, is why the partridge flies low and fears heights.

How the ancient versions differ

• Homer and Hesiod say nothing of Icarus. In Homer, Daedalus is just a craftsman at Knossos, with no escape and no wings.
• Ovid tells the flight twice. In the Metamorphoses (8.183-235) it is tragic and vivid. In the earlier Art of Love (2.21-96) it is an amused comparison: Minos could not hold back a man with wings, so how can the poet hope to restrain Love, a winged god? Ovid is also the one who links the story to Perdix.
• Apollodorus (Epitome 1.12-15) gives the standard prose version, names Icarus’ mother and adds elsewhere (Library 2.6.3) that it was Heracles who found the body washed up on the island of Doliche, buried it and renamed the island Icaria.
• Diodorus Siculus (4.77) and Pausanias (9.11.4-5) offer rationalized readings. For Pausanias, Daedalus escapes in small boats fitted with sails, his latest invention, which outrun Minos’ oared ships; Icarus, a poor helmsman, capsizes. Diodorus also says Pasiphae supplied the escape ship, and that Icarus, leaping ashore too hastily on an island, fell into the sea and drowned.
• Virgil (Aeneid 6.14-33) has Daedalus land at Cumae in Italy. There he dedicates his wings to Apollo and carves the whole Cretan story on the temple doors. Twice he tries to depict his son’s fall in gold, and twice his father’s hands fail him.

The end of Daedalus: Sicily and the death of Minos

Daedalus finds refuge at Camicus in Sicily, at the court of King Cocalus. Minos hunts for him from island to island with a trick: he offers a reward to anyone who can pass a thread through a spiral seashell. Cocalus brings back the shell threaded. Daedalus had bored a hole in the tip, tied the thread to an ant and let it work its way through the spirals. Minos knows the craftsman is there and demands him. Cocalus promises to hand him over, but his daughters scald Minos to death in his bath (Epitome 1.14-15; Diodorus 4.79). The king who had shut off land and sea dies in a bathtub far from Crete.

The legacy of Icarus

Icarus passed from Latin poetry into European painting and literature. Several frescoes at Pompeii already show the falling body under Daedalus’ gaze. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder and held in Brussels, turns Ovid’s scene inside out: the ploughman, the shepherd and the fisherman no longer look up, and all we see of Icarus are two legs vanishing into the sea. W. H. Auden built his 1938 poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” on that painting, a meditation on the world’s indifference to suffering. William Carlos Williams answered with his own “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (1960), and in 1947 Henri Matisse cut out a black Icarus with a red heart against a field of stars for his book Jazz.

The myth also speaks to that of Phaethon, the son of Helios struck down after losing control of the sun’s chariot. Ovid draws the parallel himself: in both stories a father tells his son to keep to the middle way (medio tutissimus ibis, “you will go safest in the middle”, the Sun tells Phaethon in Metamorphoses 2.137), and the son, carried away, falls from the sky.

Further reading

Both characters have their own entries: Daedalus, the inventor and architect, and Icarus, the son who ignored the warning. For Minos’ Crete, read the entries on King Minos, Pasiphae and the Minotaur, then the one on the Labyrinth that held it. The escape follows on from Theseus and the Minotaur, and the daughter of Minos who received the thread has her own entry, Ariadne. For the other famous fall from the Greek sky, see Phaethon.