Icarus and Daedalus
In this section, we are going to talk about the myth of Icarus and Daedalus, which is one of the oldest stories that show Man’s dream of flying. Indeed, Men have felt the desire to fly and to rise in the air since the dawn of time, and that’s why we had to talk about the Greek mythology in which this dream was already present.
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Minos, king of Crete, had decided to hide the Minotaur, a half-human half-bull creature. Indeed, Minos was humiliated and betrayed since this monster was the son his wife Pasiphae had from an affair with a bull. In order to hide the frightful beast, he call out Daedalus, a famous Greek engineer and architect and asked him to design a labyrinth to lock the Minotaur in it.
The monster was closed in the labyrinth, but he had fits of rage and he pushed horrific roars. Minos couldn’t sacrifice his own citizens so he ordered to the people of Athens – against whom he had recently won a fight – to send him seven young boys and seven young ladies every month to feed the Minotaur. A few years later, Theseus, a Greek hero, decided to end this slaughter and went to Crete to kill the Minotaur. Ariane, the wonderful daughter of the king, who had fell in love with Theseus, went to see Daedalus and begged him to help her. The architect gave him the solution: tie a thread around the boy’s wrist so that he could find the way out of the labyrinth after having killed the beast. (That’s how the thread of Ariane became a legend.) Theseus killed the Minotaur and brought peace to Crete.
But Minos felt once again humiliated and restive. To take revenge, he locked Daedalus and his son Icarus in the labyrinth. The architect who had more than one trick up his sleeve took feathers from the birds that flew above the labyrinth and glued them together with wax to design wings. Icarus and Daedalus flew out the labyrinth with the engineer’s wings. The father had warned his son that he couldn’t get too close to the sun or the wax would melt. Daedalus, indeed, flew far enough from the sun. Icarus, despite the recommendations of his father, got a little closer to the sun. What had to happen finally happened: the wax on Icarus’s wings melted, he fell in the sea and died. This sea is now named after him: the Icarian sea.
This story obviously has a symbolic dimension. In the Antiquity, the temerity of Man, and his pride too, were characterized by a longing to fly. Actually, the Greeks have a word to refer to Man's propension of always wanting more, his inability to stay put: hubris. This notion, that can be translated as "excessiveness", is a violent feeling that is inspired by passions and is particularly harmful. The Greeks opposed to it moderation, temperance. Hubris was then considered a crime. Actually, Icarus, by flying, claimed he was the equal of Gods and would be punished for his pride...
We see that mankind has not always looked on the will of Man to overstep his position with a favorable eye. In the Antiquity, it was simply an urge that was admittedly unnatural and unrealizable, but that had to be unthinkable as well!