In Greek mythology, to get to the tragic story of Icarus you have to start by talking about his father, Daedalus. It had been the goddess Athena herself who taught Daedalus the secrets of blacksmithing, and he, a descendant of the royal house of Athens, soon distinguished himself in the city due to his ingenious mechanisms. However, one of his apprentices, named Talos, surpassed the master when he was just 12 years old. The boy, who had carefully studied a fishbone he had found, imitated its shape in iron, thus creating the first saw.
Daedalus was jealous of the prestige that the boy acquired thanks to this and other gadgets, such as the compass or the pottery wheel. So he asked Talos to accompany him to the Acropolis. There he showed the barely adolescent the sights when he, taking advantage of his distraction, pushed him into the void. Although he later put the body in a sack, Daedalus’s crime was not long in being discovered. The builder, tried by the Areopagus, the ancient court of the polis, was found guilty and banished from the country.
First he settled in a village in Attica. Then he sailed for Crete, where King Minos celebrated having such a useful servant. Daedalus, in effect, devised a series of prodigious machines for the monarch of Knossos. Just as he had made some automatons for himself that made domestic tasks easier, he conceived for the sovereign a bronze giant that could walk around the entire island.
He also made an articulated cow for Queen Pasiphae. This ingenuity was due to the fact that Minos’s consort wanted to seduce the magnificent white bull consecrated to Poseidon, the god of the sea. Hidden inside the cow, Pasiphae managed to mate with the animal. From this relationship a human creature with the head of a bull, the Minotaur, was born after a while.
Finding out about the help given to his wife by Daedalus, the monarch locked him up in the Labyrinth. It was the vast palace that, riddled with nooks and crannies to hide the Minotaur, the builder himself had designed for the sovereign. There also ended up Icarus, the son that Daedalus had had with a slave of Minos.
The prison was short-lived: Queen Pasiphae freed the captives. However, there was another hurdle to overcome. Crete was surrounded by the powerful military fleet of Minos, who had also offered a high reward to whoever captured the fugitives.
Daedalus then invented a device that would allow him and his son to leave the island safely. There were two pairs of wings made with tied bird feathers, to which other smaller ones were attached with wax. Daedalus instructed Icarus not to fly too high or too low: the sun could melt the wax in the first case, and the sea, if it hovered close to its surface, could weigh down the feathers with its moisture, making it impossible to soar. He also asked her not to be separated from him at any time.
Following the instructions, they inserted the arms into their respective mechanisms and took flight in a northwesterly direction. The peasants and fishermen who saw them go by could not believe their eyes. They took the couple for gods. The flight, meanwhile, was a success. It was like that for a long journey. They had already left the islands of Naxos, Delos, Paros and Lebintos behind when Icarus, disobeying his father, began to head to higher altitudes than recommended.
Daedalus turned and called to the young man to stop his ascent, but the son was no longer able to hear him. He soared through the sky excited about the freedom to fly like birds. He had forgotten all the advice of Daedalus, who soon lost sight of the boy in despair.
The builder, then, began to fly in circles over the sea. He feared that what, in fact, had already happened had happened. Some feathers floating in the water confirmed his worst fears. Icarus, beside himself, had risen too high. The heat of the sun, melting the wax, had gradually plucked his wings until the frame was useless. The young man plummeted and his body was swallowed by the sea.
The father kept flying over the area in the hope of recovering the body. It appeared moments later on the surface. Daedalus rescued him and took him to an island, where he buried him. Since then the island has received the name of Icaria, and henceforth the portion of the Aegean that surrounds the place to the west of Samos was called the Icarean Sea.
During the burial, a partridge perched on the branch of an oak near the grave. The bird seemed to laugh with satisfaction. Daedalus thought he saw in her the mother of Talos, the child he had killed in Athens years before conceiving the ill-fated Icarus.
Another victim of youthful impetus in Greek mythology would be Phaethon, the son of Helios, the god of the Sun. The boy longed to drive the chariot that, drawn by four magnificent white horses, his father used every day to cross the firmament and provide light. .
Phaethon begged Helios so much to lend it to him that he finally agreed. But the young man’s forces began to falter shortly after starting his celestial journey. The steeds were too vigorous for his adolescent arms. Thus, first they galloped so high that the world shivered with cold. Phaethon barely managed to steer the horses down. However, this time the chariot passed too close to the ground, so that it scorched the fields.
Angered by the danger the boy’s actions were posing to the cosmos, Zeus struck him down with lightning. Poor Phaethon, struck down, fell dead into the River Po.
This text is part of an article published in number 467 of the Historia y Vida magazine. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
