Daedalus

Summary

Daedalus is the first craftsman of Greek myth, an Athenian credited with making the first statues, the builder of the labyrinth in Crete for King Minos, and the maker of the wings on which he and his son Icarus flew. The Library ascribed to Apollodorus calls him "an excellent architect and the first inventor of images". Accounts of his father differ; Plutarch makes him the son of Merope, daughter of Erechtheus, king of Athens, and so a kinsman of Theseus. Library 3.15.8; Plutarch, Theseus 19.

At Athens Daedalus had a pupil, his sister's son, called Talos in the Library and Perdix in Ovid. The boy found the jawbone of a snake, or the backbone of a fish as Ovid has it, sawed a thin stick with it and so invented the saw, and he made compasses, two iron arms one of which turns about the other. Daedalus, afraid the boy would surpass him in his craft, threw him from the Acropolis. When the body was found he was tried on the Areopagus and condemned, and he fled to Minos in Crete. Ovid says Athena did not let the boy die but turned him into a partridge, a bird that never flies high, because it remembers its fall.

In Crete he worked for the king and his household. Minos's wife Pasiphae fell in love with a bull Poseidon had sent up from the sea, and Daedalus made her a hollow wooden cow on wheels, sewn into a cowhide, and set it in the meadow where the bull grazed; she went inside it and bore the Minotaur. He built for Minos the labyrinth in which the Minotaur was shut, a building "that with its tangled windings perplexed the outward way". Ovid says its passages wind like the river Maeander in Phrygia, flowing back and forth until it meets itself, and that Daedalus himself could hardly find his way back through it. In the Iliad he made a dancing floor at Knossos for Minos's daughter Ariadne. When Theseus came with the young Athenians, Ariadne asked Daedalus to show her the way out of the labyrinth, and he told her to give Theseus a thread to tie to the door and draw behind him.

When Minos learned that Theseus and his companions had escaped, he shut Daedalus and his son Icarus in the labyrinth. Daedalus made wings for himself and his son; Ovid describes them as feathers laid in order from small to large, bound with thread in the middle and fixed with wax at the base. Daedalus said: Minos may rule land and sea, but the air is not his. He told his son not to fly high, or the sun would melt the wax, nor low, or the damp would weigh down the feathers, but to keep the middle way. Icarus soared until the wax melted and fell into the sea that was named the Icarian after him; his father buried him on an island named Icaria, and Daedalus came safely to Camicus in Sicily.

Minos pursued him. In every land he searched he carried a spiral shell and promised a great reward to anyone who could pass a thread through it, knowing that only Daedalus could. When he reached the court of Cocalus, king of Camicus, he showed the shell; Cocalus secretly gave it to Daedalus, who tied the thread to an ant, bored a hole in the shell and let the ant walk through. When Minos saw the threaded shell he knew Daedalus was with Cocalus and demanded him. Cocalus promised to hand him over and gave a feast for Minos, and after his bath Minos was killed by Cocalus's daughters; some say he died from boiling water poured over him.

The idea his story turns on is that a craftsman's work serves others and turns against him. He makes the queen her cow, the king his prison, the king's daughter the thread out of it, and himself the wings out of his own prison. Then his work kills his son, and in Sicily he is found out by a puzzle he could not resist solving, a thread through a shell. And his first crime came from the craft itself: he killed his pupil when he feared the boy would be more skilled than he.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the essays do not read his name. Δαίδαλος, Daidalos, ends in -os, the nominative ending, leaving Δαιδαλ-, which is two letters said twice: d-l, then d-l, as Arabic doubles the letters of a root in zalzala and ṣalṣala. In Lane, root d-l-l: daldala is to move about a thing that hangs, and daldala a man's head and limbs is to move them about in walking; tadaldala is to move about dangling. The root's base is dallahu ʿalā al-ṭarīq, "he directed him to the way", and dalīl is the guide to what is sought. The story has both: Daedalus is the one who showed Ariadne the way out of the labyrinth, and his statues, as Plato says, run away unless they are tied, as if they moved their limbs and walked.

Linguistic Root

Daedalus, daldala and dalla

In Greek the name is "the cunning worker", and LSJ calls it the traditional name of the first sculptor. Pausanias thinks people called wooden images daidala before Daedalus was born, and that he was not given the name at birth but took it later as a surname from these images.

Lane: dallahu ʿalā al-ṭarīq, he directed him to the way, or showed him it; dalīl, a director or guide to what is sought; daldala, to move about a thing suspended, and of a man, to move his head and limbs about in walking; tadaldala, to move about dangling, and of people, to waver between two courses.

The sounds: d is δ, l is λ, and the two letters are repeated in Greek as in Arabic; the δαι- at the start is the Greek form of reduplication found in many verbs. The limit of this reading is that it meets the story, the showing of the way and the statues that walk, but not the sense of the Greek word, which is skilled and ornamented work.

Key Mythic Narratives

The statues that run away

In Plato's dialogue Socrates tells Meno that the images of Daedalus run away like runaway slaves if they are not tied down, and stay if they are, so their worth is in being fastened. He uses them as a likeness for true opinion, which does not stay with its holder until it is tied down by knowledge.

The festival of the Daedala

Pausanias tells that Hera, angry with Zeus, withdrew to Euboea, and Cithaeron, then ruler of Plataea, advised Zeus to make a wooden image, wrap it up, carry it in an ox-wagon and say he was marrying Plataea, daughter of the river Asopus. Hera came, tore off the veil, found a wooden image and was reconciled. From this comes the Daedala festival at Plataea: they cut down a tree in an oak grove on which a crow carrying meat has settled, and make from it the image, which they also call a daidalon.

Daedalus and Theseus in Plutarch

In Cleidemus's version in Plutarch, Daedalus fled from Crete to Athens in a merchant ship, Minos pursued him with warships, and a storm drove Minos to Sicily, where he died. Then Deucalion, son of Minos, demanded that Athens hand over Daedalus; Theseus refused because Daedalus was his kinsman, sailed to Crete with Daedalus as his guide, and killed Deucalion at the gate of the labyrinth.

Symbolic Reading

The essay "Rereading Greek Myths", in its general table, reads the story of Icarus and Daedalus as a human attempt at flight and the melting of wax by the sun's heat, placing it among the stories in which it sees knowledge of nature encoded in a tale. In the text itself the father's advice carries this knowledge: the sun above melts the wax, the damp below weighs down the feathers, and the way is in the middle.

The Canaanite essay reads the craftsman of the gods at Ugarit, Kothar-wa-Khasis, as an image of the artisan class, and his home in Caphtor as an acknowledgement that some craft came from the Aegean. Daedalus, on this reading, is the image of the craftsman on the other side of the sea: a man who works for kings and does not rule, is tried and exiled, and is sought from king to king because his skill is found nowhere else.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The craftsman closest to him is Kothar-wa-Khasis at Ugarit, whose home is Caphtor, identified with Crete, Cyprus or a wider Aegean horizon. Each builds a house for a king: Kothar builds Baal a palace and proposes a window through which Baal's voice goes out, and Daedalus builds Minos a labyrinth from which no one who enters can find the way out. Each makes things whose fate he does not control: Kothar's bow brings about the killing of Aqhat, and Daedalus's wings kill his son.

Homer compares Daedalus's work with that of Hephaestus himself: on Achilles' shield Hephaestus made a dancing floor "like the one Daedalus made at Knossos for Ariadne". In the poems the lame god and the human craftsman share the craft.

The Sumerian essay sets Etana's ascent to heaven on an eagle's back beside Icarus. In both a human rises towards the sky on another's wings; they differ in who seeks and what is sought: Etana is a king seeking the plant of birth so that he may have an heir, and Icarus a boy escaping with his father from Minos's prison who rises higher than he was allowed.

His inventions, the labyrinth, the statues and the wings, and his pupil's saw and compasses, set him among the culture heroes. The wooden cow that deceived the bull, and the ant that carried the thread through the shell, set him beside the Trickster. And the Daedala festival, named after the images from which his own name came, celebrates the reconciliation of Zeus and Hera and is one of the witnesses to the sacred marriage.