Daedalus

A killing in Athens

Daedalus is a craftsman from Athens. The ancient writers do not agree on his family. Apollodorus, who retold the Greek myths in a book called the Library, makes Eupalamus his father and Metion his grandfather. The historian Diodorus reverses those two generations.

Daedalus takes on a young apprentice, his sister’s son. The boy makes a saw from the jagged jaw of a snake. Daedalus sees a rival in him, not an heir, and throws him from the Acropolis of Athens. Apollodorus calls the boy Talos and his mother, the sister of Daedalus, Perdix. The poet Ovid calls the boy himself Perdix. In Ovid’s version, the goddess Athena catches him as he falls and turns him into a partridge, a bird that keeps away from high places.

Apollodorus and Diodorus agree on what happens next. The Areopagus, a court in Athens, finds Daedalus guilty, and exile sends him towards Crete. Diodorus adds that he first hid in a deme, a country district, of Attica, the land around Athens. The killing costs him his city.

The dancing floor at Knossos

In Crete, Daedalus works for Minos, its ruler.

The oldest surviving mention of him is in the Iliad, Homer’s epic poem. The god Hephaestus makes a shield for the hero Achilles and decorates it with scenes. On one, young people dance on a floor like the one Daedalus made at Knossos for Ariadne, the daughter of Minos.

In this first glimpse, the craftsman has no monster to hold in. He builds a place for dancing. The maze, the bull and the thread come into the written record later.

The cow and the Labyrinth

Apollodorus gives Daedalus a darker task on Crete. Minos has kept back a bull that should have been sacrificed. The god Poseidon punishes him by making his wife, Pasiphae, desire the bull. Daedalus builds her a wooden cow on wheels. It is hollow inside and sewn into the hide of a real cow, so that she can satisfy her desire.

Pasiphae gives birth to the Minotaur, a creature that is part bull. Minos then has Daedalus build the Labyrinth to hold him.

Apollodorus describes the building in a single borrowed line: “a chamber that with its tangled windings perplexed the outward way.” The line was probably taken from a lost tragedy, a play now missing, and not written for the Library itself.

The wings and the death of Icarus

The way Daedalus gets out of Crete comes from the Epitome, a shortened version of the Library. He makes two pairs of wings, for himself and for his son Icarus, from feathers set in wax. He warns his son not to fly too high, in case the sun melts the wax, and not too low, in case the sea soaks the feathers.

Icarus climbs too high all the same. The wax melts, and he falls and drowns in the sea that the Greeks named the Icarian Sea after him.

Daedalus reaches Kamikos in Sicily, where King Cocalus takes him in. Diodorus also has him arrive there safely by the same route.

The riddle of the shell

Minos hunts for his runaway builder. He sets a test that looks like a contest with a prize. He shows a spiral shell and promises a reward to whoever can pass a thread through it.

In Apollodorus, Daedalus solves it. He bores a hole at the tip of the shell. He ties a thread to an ant and lets the ant carry the thread through the spiral. Cocalus hands the solved shell back to Minos. The answer tells Minos exactly where Daedalus is hiding.

A name for finely made things

The Greek word daidalos means cunningly or curiously made. Homer uses it for worked objects, and daidala can mean clever works in general. So the name Daedalus is a description of craft before it is a person. The man whose name means a cunningly made work first uses his skill to protect his reputation.

Ancient writers had already turned his name into a byword. Pausanias, a Greek travel writer, lists several old wooden images as works of Daedalus. One is a naked Heracles at Corinth. He admits he cannot vouch for the claim. He writes that all the works credited to Daedalus are somewhat uncouth in appearance, yet carry a touch of the divine.

The Daedalic style

Modern archaeologists and art historians use the word “Daedalic” for a style of Cretan sculpture and clay figures of the seventh century BC. The label dates from the nineteenth century. Some modern scholars think it rests on no better evidence than the ancient habit of crediting anything old and finely made to the same name.

One example is in the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion. It is the lintel, the stone beam over a doorway, from Temple A at Prinias. It is carved with two goddesses seated on thrones and dates to 650 to 600 BC. The style is named after Daedalus, but no ancient source links this work to him.