Ovid's treatment of the Icarus myth and its connection with that of Phaëton influenced the mythological tradition in English literature as received and interpreted by major writers such as Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, and Joyce. Ovid narrates the story of Icarus at some length in the Metamorphoses (viii.183–235), and refers to it elsewhere. Hyginus narrates it in Fabula 40, beginning with the bovine love affair of Pasiphaë, daughter of the Sun, resulting in the birth of the Minotaur. In the literature of ancient Rome, the myth was of interest to Augustan writers.
Icarus' flight was often alluded to by Greek poets in passing, but the story was told briefly in Pseudo-Apollodorus. Hellenistic writers give euhemerising variants in which the escape from Crete was actually by boat, provided by Pasiphaë, for which Daedalus invented the first sails, to outstrip Minos' pursuing galleys, and that Icarus fell overboard en route to Sicily and drowned. Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realized that he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his bare arms, and so Icarus fell into the sea in the area which today bears his name, the Icarian Sea near Icaria, an island southwest of Samos. Overcome by the giddiness that flying lent him, Icarus soared through the sky curiously, but in the process he came too close to the sun, which melted the wax. Daedalus tried his wings first, but before taking off from the island, warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, nor too close to the sea, but to follow his path of flight.
Minos imprisoned Daedalus himself in the labyrinth because he gave Minos' daughter, Ariadne, a clew (or ball of string) in order to help Theseus, the enemy of Minos, to survive the Labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur.ĭaedalus fashioned two pairs of wings out of wax and feathers for himself and his son. Icarus's father Daedalus, a talented and remarkable Athenian craftsman, built the Labyrinth for King Minos of Crete near his palace at Knossos to imprison the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster born of his wife and the Cretan Bull. The Lament for Icarus by Herbert James Draper.