Icarus

Three working men looked up and thought they were seeing gods. A fisherman with his long rod out over the water, a shepherd propped on his crook, a ploughman lifting his eyes off the furrow, all of them stopped and stared at two figures crossing the sky above the Aegean and drew the obvious conclusion. One of the two was a middle-aged Athenian with a murder conviction. The other was a boy who had about an hour left.

He is the emptiest famous character in Greek myth, and that is not an insult. Apollodorus gives him a mother, Naucrate, a slave woman in the household of Minos, which means Icarus was born inside the palace he later had to escape and had no standing in it whatsoever. Nobody records his age. Nobody describes him. The earliest surviving mention of his father, on the shield Hephaestus makes for Achilles, is about a dancing floor Daedalus laid at Knossos for Ariadne and has nothing at all to say about a son. Icarus arrives in the tradition with one action already attached to him and nothing else, and every telling since has had to build a person out of that single movement upward.

What the sources do give, with real tenderness, is the afternoon before. Ovid puts the boy at his father’s elbow for the whole business of making the wings, laughing, grabbing at the down that lifted off the bench in the draught, pushing his thumb into the yellow beeswax to feel it give under the heat of his own hand. He is playing with the mechanism. He does not know what it is for, or rather he knows what it is for and not what it costs. The old man’s cheeks were wet the entire time he worked, and his hands were shaking, and he gave his son a kiss he was never going to get to give again.

The instruction was not a moral. It was an operating envelope. Fly the middle course: too low and the sea spray will soak the feathers and drag you down, too high and the sun will soften the wax and the whole assembly will come apart in your hands. Apollodorus states it in exactly that symmetrical way, damp below and heat above, a machine with a working band and a hard limit at each end of it. Ovid adds a piece of navigation on top: do not steer by the Herdsman, or by the Great Bear, or by the drawn sword of Orion. Then they went off the cliff, the father first, glancing back the way a bird does when it has brought its fledgling out of the nest.

For a while it worked. That is the part people forget. The wings held, Crete fell away behind them, the islands came up one after another, Samos on the left with Delos and Paros beyond, and the boy learned in about twenty minutes to do a thing no human being had ever done. Then he began to enjoy it. He left his guide and went up.

The wax went soft. Then it ran. There is a moment, and none of the sources will tell us how long it was, in which the feathers are coming away and the arms are still going, and then he was beating bare skin against air that would not hold him. The word in his mouth as he went in was his father’s name, and the sea took the word with the boy. What is left on the surface afterwards is feathers.

Daedalus, no longer a father, flew in circles calling for him and then saw the down riding on the swell, and cursed the arts he had spent his life on. He gathered what he could reach and buried it, and the island has been called Icaria ever since, and the stretch of water the Icarian Sea. The name is the only monument. There is no tomb cult, no festival, no shrine.

Diodorus Siculus, who is allergic to marvels, preserves a flat version underneath the flying one, and it is worth knowing. In that account there are no wings at all. Pasiphae supplied Daedalus with a ship, the two of them put out from Crete by sea, and Icarus was careless disembarking, went into the water and drowned. Diodorus tells the winged flight as a story people tell and leaves the reader to choose. A boy drowning in a harbour accident during a prison break is a perfectly ordinary death, and the tradition preferred the other one so strongly that almost nobody has heard this.

He has no powers, and the myth is unusually clear-eyed about it. His father is the one with the gift; Icarus is a passenger wearing a borrowed pair of hands. The only thing he ever does under his own initiative is climb, and the climb is not a feat, it is the boy discovering that the machine goes higher and finding out why it was told not to. What kills him is not a god. No Olympian objects to the flight, no punishment is handed down, nothing is avenged. It is heat acting on a low-melting-point adhesive, exactly as specified in the warning he had been given an hour earlier.

He had one instruction and he broke it.

Because the death is so bare, everyone since has filled it in. Virgil has Daedalus land at Cumae, hang the wings up in Apollo’s temple and carve his whole life onto the doors, and then try twice to work his son’s fall in gold, and twice the father’s hands go down and will not do it. The painting in Brussels long given to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and now usually thought to be a copy of a lost original, puts the ploughman in the foreground filling most of the canvas, the shepherd looking the wrong way, ships passing under sail, and Icarus reduced to a pair of legs going into the water in the bottom right corner, so small that a viewer who does not know the title will miss him.

That is the reversal the myth has been travelling towards. In Ovid the fisherman, the shepherd and the ploughman all stop and look up and take him for a god. A millennium and a half later they have gone back to work.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Icarus?

Icarus was the son of the Greek master craftsman Daedalus and, according to Apollodorus, of Naucrate, a slave woman in the household of King Minos of Crete. He is known for a single episode: escaping Crete on wings his father built, flying too high, and falling into the sea. He has no other myths and no cult.

Why did Icarus fly too close to the sun?

Because he began to enjoy the flight. Ovid describes him taking pleasure in it, leaving his father’s course and climbing on his own, and Apollodorus simply says he disregarded his father’s instructions and soared ever higher. No god tempted or punished him, and the ancient accounts present it as a boy ignoring a safety warning rather than as a crime against heaven.

What exactly was Daedalus’s warning to Icarus?

It set an upper and a lower limit. Flying too low would let sea spray soak the feathers and weigh the wings down; flying too high would let the sun melt the wax holding them together. Ovid adds that Icarus was not to steer by the constellations Bootes, the Great Bear or Orion, and to keep to the middle course between the two dangers.

What happened to Icarus’s body?

Ovid says his father saw feathers floating on the water, recovered what he could and buried the boy, and that the island of Icaria took its name from him. The surrounding stretch of the Aegean has been called the Icarian Sea ever since. No ancient source describes a tomb cult, a shrine or any festival in his honour.

Did Icarus really have wings?

Not in every ancient version. Diodorus Siculus records a plainer tradition in which Pasiphae gave Daedalus a ship, the pair escaped Crete by sea, and Icarus drowned through carelessness while coming ashore. Diodorus reports the winged flight as a marvellous tale rather than as fact, and leaves his readers to judge between the two accounts.

Related Entries

Daedalus, Minos, Minotaur, Ariadne, Theseus, Cretan Bull, Talos, Phaethon, Apollo, Athena, Hephaestus, Aeneas, Sisyphus