What Is the Story of Icarus?

Icarus was the son of Daedalus, a brilliant craftsman working for King Minos of Crete. Daedalus had built the labyrinth that held the Minotaur, and knowing its secret made him too dangerous to release. Father and son were imprisoned.

Daedalus built wings from feathers and wax so they could escape by air. He warned Icarus not to fly too low, where sea spray would soak the feathers, and not to fly too high, where the sun would melt the wax. Icarus flew too high, the wax melted, and he fell into the sea and drowned.

The instruction was not simply do not fly high. It was do not fly too low either. Daedalus warns against both extremes and prescribes a middle course, which changes the meaning considerably.

Read that way, the myth is less about ambition being punished and more about the difficulty of holding a middle path. It is a story about judgement rather than about aiming high, and the Greeks had a strong cultural attachment to moderation that fits this reading.

The background matters. Daedalus was the archetype of the ingenious craftsman, and he had already built the labyrinth and helped Theseus escape it. His skill is what imprisoned him and what freed him.

There is a bleak symmetry in the myth. The father's genius produces the means of escape and also the means of his son's death, and he arrives safely in Sicily alone. Some ancient versions add that Daedalus never made anything again.

Icarus has stayed in the language because the image is so compact. Flying too close to the sun works instantly as a phrase without any explanation.

It is used across very different contexts:

• •Warnings about overreaching ambition in business or politics
• •Descriptions of brilliant careers that collapsed
• •Art and poetry, including a famous Bruegel painting where the fall is barely visible
• •Aviation and space history, invoked both admiringly and as caution

The best known artistic treatment is a sixteenth-century painting, long attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, called Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. What makes it remarkable is how little attention it gives its subject.

The painting is dominated by a ploughman working a field, a shepherd looking the wrong way and a ship sailing on. Icarus appears only as a pair of legs disappearing into the water in a corner. W. H. Auden wrote a famous poem about it, observing how suffering takes place while everyone else is busy with something else.

The version most people know comes largely from the Roman poet Ovid, who told it in his Metamorphoses and in another poem about the art of love. Ovid gave the story its vivid details, such as the fishermen and farmers who look up and mistake the flying pair for gods. Greek writers knew the myth earlier, and the sea where Icarus fell was called the Icarian Sea, near an island still named Ikaria. Some ancient writers also offered a rationalised version in which the wings were really sails on a boat.

The myth also runs on story logic rather than physics. In reality, air generally gets colder as you climb through the lower atmosphere, which is why high mountains keep snow all year. Flying closer to the Sun on wings of any practical height would not warm the wax, because the Sun is about 150 million kilometres away and a few kilometres of altitude make no meaningful difference. That does not spoil the myth, but it is a useful reminder that ancient stories were built to carry meaning, not to explain how heat actually works.

Ancient writers did not end the story with the fall. Ovid adds that while Daedalus buried his son, a partridge watched and beat its wings with pleasure. The bird was Perdix, Daedalus's nephew and former apprentice, a gifted boy said to have invented the saw. Jealous of his talent, Daedalus had pushed him from a high place, and the goddess Athena saved him by turning him into a partridge. Ovid explains that partridges, remembering that fall, fly low and nest near the ground, which gives the story a dark echo of the instruction Icarus ignored.

King Minos did not give up either. According to later Greek accounts, he searched for Daedalus by carrying a spiral seashell and offering a reward to anyone who could pass a thread through it, knowing only the great inventor could solve it. In Sicily, King Cocalus brought the shell to Daedalus, who tied a thread to an ant and let it walk through the spirals. When the solved puzzle came back, Minos knew he had found his man. In most versions Minos then died in Sicily, killed in his bath through the scheming of Cocalus's daughters.

Icarus had real imitators. The twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury recorded that Eilmer, a monk at his abbey roughly a century earlier, fastened wings to his hands and feet and leapt from a tower. According to the account he glided a considerable distance before crashing and breaking both legs, and he later blamed the lack of a tail. Similar stories are told of Abbas ibn Firnas in ninth-century Cordoba. Such attempts failed for a reason the myth never considers: human arm muscles are far too weak, relative to body weight, to power flapping flight.

Modern science has borrowed the name more kindly. An asteroid discovered in 1949 was named Icarus because its stretched orbit carries it closer to the Sun than Mercury ever gets. In 2010 Japan launched a small spacecraft called IKAROS, which unfurled a sail of extremely thin plastic film and became the first craft to show that sunlight alone could push a spacecraft through interplanetary space. Instead of being destroyed by the Sun, this Icarus used the gentle pressure of its light to steer and gain speed, a twist the original storytellers could never have imagined.

Human-powered flight finally succeeded in the twentieth century by using the legs, the strongest muscles in the body, rather than flapping arms. In 1959 the British industrialist Henry Kremer offered a prize for the first human-powered aircraft to fly a figure-of-eight course. It was won in 1977 by the Gossamer Condor, designed by Paul MacCready, a fragile craft with huge wings covered in thin plastic film and driven by a pedalled propeller. Two years later its successor, the Gossamer Albatross, was pedalled across the English Channel by Bryan Allen in just under three hours.

In 1988 a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology deliberately retraced the myth. Their aircraft, named Daedalus, had a wingspan of about 34 metres yet weighed only around 31 kilograms. The Greek cycling champion Kanellos Kanellopoulos pedalled it from Crete to the island of Santorini, about 115 kilometres, in just under four hours, flying low over the sea. Just short of the beach a gust broke the tail and the aircraft dropped into the water a few metres from shore, and the pilot swam to land. He had followed Daedalus's advice to keep low, and still ended in the sea, though far more safely than Icarus.

The story of Icarus is about a boy who ignored an instruction to hold a middle course between the sea and the sun, and reading it as a simple warning against ambition loses the half of the warning that told him not to fly too low.