Icarus

The escape from Crete

In the version told by the ancient writer Apollodorus, Icarus was the son of the craftsman Daedalus and of Naucrate, an enslaved woman who belonged to Minos, the ruler of Crete. No other surviving source names his mother.

After the hero Theseus escaped from Crete, Minos shut Daedalus and his son inside the Labyrinth, a maze on the island. Daedalus made wings of feathers and wax for them both.

Before they set off, he warned his son to keep between two dangers. If Icarus flew too low, the sea would soak the feathers. If he flew too high, the sun would soften the wax. Daedalus could plan a route through the air, but he could not make his son follow it. Icarus climbed. The wax melted, and he fell into the water that would carry his name. The escape saved the inventor and killed the child it was meant to save.

The wings in Ovid’s poem

The Roman poet Ovid describes the wings in the most detail. Daedalus laid out feathers from short to long. He tied them together in the middle with thread and fixed their bases with wax, then bent them so they curved like a bird’s wing. He told his son more than once to fly the middle way.

Icarus climbed anyway. He called out to his father only once the wax had gone and he was beating his arms with no wings left on them.

Ovid also has Daedalus himself find the body and bury it in a tomb on the island now named for his son. A partridge watched from a tree. It was Perdix, Daedalus’s gifted nephew, whom the goddess Athena had turned into a bird after his uncle tried to kill him. Ovid is the only writer who brings this earlier victim to the grave.

These details put more of the weight on the father. Icarus disobeyed, but Daedalus had built the wings, chosen the escape and led his son along a route with danger above and below. Daedalus could solve the puzzle of a spiral shell with an ant and a thread, but he could not reach his son before he fell into the sea.

A boat instead of wings

Other writers tell the escape without wings. The historian Diodorus Siculus gives two accounts side by side. In the first, Pasiphae, the wife of Minos, provides a ship. Icarus falls into the sea as he leaves the ship at an island. Diodorus credits the wings only to “certain writers of myths”.

The Greek traveller Pausanias rejects the flight more firmly. In his account Daedalus invents the sail, which lets his ship outrun the oared ships of Minos. Icarus proves an inexperienced helmsman, and his boat capsizes. The current carries his body to an island off Samos, where the hero Heracles recognises it and buries it. Pausanias says a mound to Icarus still stood on the headland in his own day. That mound belongs to the sailing story, not to the wings.

The versions differ in more than detail. In one, Icarus ignores a clear warning in the air. In another, he loses control of a boat. In a third, he drowns as he lands.

Why Ikaria carries his name

The place stays the same while the cause of death changes. The geographer Strabo says Icarus lost control near Samos and fell onto the island itself. The island, Ikaria, and the Icarian Sea around it then took his name. Diodorus gives the same names after the fall from the ship. Pausanias links the naming to Heracles burying the drowned boy.

None of these writers needs melting wax to explain the name. What ties Icarus to the island is his body reaching it. In one account he falls from the sky, in another he falls while landing, and in a third the current carries him there.