Daedalus

The apprentice thrown from the Acropolis

Daedalus watches his young apprentice make a saw from the serrated jaw of a snake and sees a rival rather than an heir. He throws the boy from the Athenian Acropolis. Apollodorus calls the victim Talos, son of Daedalus’s sister Perdix; Ovid calls the boy Perdix and has Athena catch him in the fall, changing him into a partridge that avoids high places.

Apollodorus and Diodorus agree that the Areopagus convicts Daedalus and that exile sends him towards Crete. They disagree over his line: Apollodorus makes Eupalamus his father and Metion his grandfather, while Diodorus reverses those generations. The man whose name means a cunningly made work first uses his skill to protect his reputation, and the killing costs him his city.

The name and the dancing floor at Knossos

The adjective daidalos means cunningly or curiously made; Homer uses it for worked objects, while daidala can mean ingenious works in general. Daedalus therefore carries a craft description as a name. The Iliad’s earliest surviving mention gives that craftsman no monster to contain. On Achilles’s shield, young people dance on a floor like the one Daedalus made at Knossos for Ariadne. The maze, bull and thread enter the record later.

The cow and the Labyrinth

Apollodorus gives Daedalus his darker task on Crete. Poseidon curses Pasiphae with desire for the bull Minos has withheld from sacrifice, and Daedalus builds her a wooden cow on wheels, hollow inside and sewn into a real cow’s hide, so that she can satisfy it. She bears the Minotaur, and Minos has Daedalus build the Labyrinth to hold him. Apollodorus quotes a single borrowed line describing the building, “a chamber that with its tangled windings perplexed the outward way,” probably lifted from a lost tragedy rather than composed for the Library itself.

The wings, and the trick at Kamikos

In Apollodorus’s Epitome, Daedalus’s own way out of Crete is a pair of wings, built for himself and Icarus from feathers set in wax, and he warns his son to fly neither too high, in case the sun melts the glue, nor too low, in case the sea dampens the feathers. Icarus climbs too high anyway; the wax melts, and he drowns in the sea the Greeks called the Icarian after him. Daedalus reaches Kamikos in Sicily and the protection of King Cocalus; Diodorus has him arrive there safely by the same route. Minos tracks him down with a test disguised as a reward: a spiral shell, and a prize promised to whoever can pass a thread through it. In Apollodorus, Daedalus solves it by boring a hole at the point of the shell, tying a thread to an ant, and letting the ant carry the thread through the spiral — and the solved riddle, once Cocalus hands it back, tells Minos exactly where his fugitive builder is hiding.

What the Daedalic label means now

Ancient writers had already stretched Daedalus’s name into a byword before archaeology existed to need one. Pausanias catalogues several old wooden images as works of Daedalus, a naked Heracles at Corinth among them, while admitting he cannot vouch for the attribution, and writes that all the works credited to him, though somewhat uncouth to look at, nevertheless carry a touch of the divine. A modern study of Greek sculptors, hosted alongside the ancient texts on Perseus, calls the later label a matter of nineteenth-century wishful thinking: archaeologists and art historians apply “Daedalic” to the distinct style of Cretan sculpture and terracotta figures of the seventh century BC, on no better evidence than the ancient habit of crediting anything old and finely made to the same name. The Archaeological Museum of Heraklion dates the lintel from Temple A at Prinias, carved with two enthroned goddesses and now in its collection, to 650–600 BC, and describes it as one of the most important sculptural works of that style.