Perdix

Nephew and apprentice of Daedalus at Athens. The boy, twelve years old when his mother gave him to his uncle to teach, invented the saw by imitating the spine of a fish (or the jawbone of a snake), and the compass by joining two iron rods at one end (Ovid *Metamorphoses* 8.236–259). The sources cannot agree on his name: Apollodorus 3.15.8 and Diodorus 4.76.4–5 both call the boy **Talos** (and the sister **Perdix**); Ovid keeps **Perdix** as the boy's name, so as to fix the partridge etymology onto the protagonist of the transformation; the Attic civic tradition preserved at Pausanias 1.21.4 alone calls him **Calos**. Daedalus, jealous of the boy's gifts, threw him from the roof of the Acropolis; Athena caught him in mid-fall and turned him into the partridge (πέρδιξ), a bird that ever after keeps low and never builds on heights, in memory of the fall (Ovid *Met.* 8.255–259; Pausanias 1.21.4 reports the tomb shown at Athens). For the murder Daedalus was tried by the Areopagus, banished from Athens, and went to Crete — the displacement that brought him into the service of Minos and so set in motion the whole arc that ended at Camicus.

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