Icarus

Son of Daedalus, born to him in Crete by a slave-woman of Minos's household called Naucrate (Apollodorus *Epitome* 1.12). When Daedalus was imprisoned in the Labyrinth with his son after the betrayal that gave Theseus the way out, he made two pairs of wings of feathers fastened with wax and warned Icarus to keep the middle path between sea-spray that would clog the wings and the sun's heat that would melt them (Apollodorus *Epitome* 1.12–13; Diodorus 4.77.5–9; Ovid *Metamorphoses* 8.183–235). Icarus, exalted by the flight, climbed too near the sun; the wax softened, the feathers came loose, and he fell into the sea west and southwest of Samos that took its name from him — the Icarian Sea — and on whose neighbouring island Doliche, renamed Icaria after the same fall, Heracles is said by Apollodorus to have come upon the body washed ashore and to have buried it (*Epit.* 1.13). The fall is one of antiquity's two great emblems of the punishment of overreach, alongside Phaethon's of the chariot of the sun.

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