Key Points

- Young boy who escaped imprisonment using wings created by his father

- Fell to his death when he flew too close to the sun after ignoring his father's directions 

Brief Bio

Icarus's father Daedalus, a very talented Athenian craftsman, built a 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. Minos imprisoned Daedalus himself in the labyrinth because he believed Daedalus gave Minos's daughter, Ariadne, a clew(or ball of string) in order to help Theseus escape the labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur.

Daedalus fashioned two pairs of wings for himself and his son, made of metal feathers held to a leather frame by beeswax. Before trying to escape the island, he warned his son to follow his flight path and not fly too close to the sun or the sea. Overcome by giddiness while flying, Icarus disobeyed his father and soared higher into the sky. Without warning, the heat from the sun softened and melted the wax. 

Icarus could feel melted wax dripping down his arms. The feathers then fell one by one. Icarus kept flapping his "wings", trying to stay aloft. But he realized that he had no feathers left. He was only flapping his bare arms. He also saw loose feathers falling like snowflakes. Finally, he fell into the sea, sank to the bottom, and drowned. Daedalus wept for his son and called the nearest land Icaria (an island southwest of Samos) in the memory of him.

Today, the supposed site of his burial on the island bears his name, and the sea near Icaria in which he drowned is called the Icarian Sea. With much grief, Daedalus went to the temple of Apollo in Sicily, hung up his own wings as an offering, and promised to never attempt to fly again. According to scholia on Euripides, Icarus thought himself greater than Helios, the Sun himself, and the god punished him by directing his powerful rays at him, melting the beeswax. Afterwards, it was Helios who named the Icarian Sea after Icarus.