Daedalus
Maker of the Labyrinth
DED-uh-lus
The engineer who built the maze, gave away the trick for solving it, and lost his son escaping the consequences.
Domains
InventionArchitectureCraftEscape
Symbols
Wax WingsLabyrinthPlumb LineSaw
The Story
An Athenian craftsman exiled for killing his nephew, a boy whose invention of the saw looked like outgrowing him, Daedalus took service with Minos on Crete. He built the labyrinth to hold the Minotaur, and then told Ariadne about the thread, which is the whole reason Theseus walks back out of it.
Minos shut him and Icarus in the maze for that. He made wings of feathers and wax, warned his son to fly neither low enough for the spray nor high enough for the sun, and watched him do exactly the second thing. Everything he builds works perfectly and costs him someone.
Did You Know?
- Daedal survives in English as an adjective for something intricately made, and Joyce named his alter ego Stephen Dedalus after him, the artificer, the maker of wings.
- The stretch of the Aegean where his son came down is still called the Icarian Sea, and the nearby island is Ikaria.
- The story does not end at the flight. He reached Sicily, and when Minos came hunting him with a riddle, thread this spiral shell, he solved it, which gave him away and got Minos killed in a bath by the local king's daughters.