Over the next few days, father and son both practised with them until little Icarus was almost as good at flying as his father was. Icarus laughed with delight and could not wait to try out the smaller pair of wings. He fastened the larger pair to his arms, and began to flap them until his feet took off from the floor and he began to hover in mid air. He had made the feathers into two pairs of wings. When Daedalus had finished, he showed Icarus his work. While he was working, Icarus played with the wax, squashing it between his finger and thumb, and when the feathers blew away in the breeze he ran after them and caught them. He then began to stick the feathers together with thread in the middle and wax at the base. Here he arranged them into four lines, starting with the smallest feathers, and followed those with the longer ones so that they formed gentle curves. When these were brought to him, he took them up onto the roof of the tower. He told King Minos that he needed feathers and wax for a new invention that he was working on. He thought for a long time about the best way to escape, and finally he came up with a plan, and this is what he did. His son hardly remembered his home city, but he too wanted to leave because he longed to run and play in the open, rather than live in a tower all day.ĭaedalus looked out over the waves of the Mediterranean Sea, and he realised that even if they could manage to slip out of the tower and find a little boat, they wouldn’t be able to sail very far before they were spotted and caught by one of the ships of King Minos’ navy. Daedalus lived with his son Icarus in a tower of the palace, and King Minos made him invent weapons of war that would make his army and navy even more powerful than they already were.Īlthough Daedalus and Icarus had every comfort they could ask for, the father longed to return home to Athens. Well, you may remember that the Labyrinth was created by the cunning and ingenious mind of Daedalus.ĭaedalus was a brilliant architect and inventor – in fact, he was so brilliant that King Minos of Crete did not want to let him go back to his home in Athens. This strange and terrible beast lived in a deep, dark Labyrinth on the island of Crete. I’ve told you before about the half man-half half-bull called the Minotaur. Proofread by Claire Deakin, December 2013. Some of the touching details - such as Icarus playing with the feathers - come from the Latin poet, Ovid. We hear how he and his son Icarus tried to escape from Crete with wings made of feathers and wax. It continues the story of Daedalus, whom we first met in The Minotaur.

The myth from ancient Greece of the boy who flew too close to the sun.

Original story of icarus