In Greek mythology, Icarus (/ˈɪkərəs/; Ancient Greek: Ἴκαρος, romanized: Íkaros, pronounced [ǐːkaros]) was the son of the master craftsmanDaedalus, the architect of the labyrinth of Crete. After Theseus, king of Athens and enemy of Minos, escaped from the labyrinth, King Minos suspected that Icarus and Daedalus had revealed the labyrinth's secrets and imprisoned them—either in a large tower overlooking the ocean or the labyrinth itself, depending upon the account.[1][2] Icarus and Daedalus escaped using wings Daedalus constructed from feathers, threads from blankets, clothes, and beeswax.[3] Daedalus warned Icarus first of complacency and then of hubris, instructing him to fly neither too low nor too high, lest the sea's dampness clog his wings or the sun's heat melt them.[3] Icarus ignored Daedalus’ instructions not to fly too close to the sun, causing the beeswax in his wings to melt. Icarus fell from the sky, plunged into the sea, and drowned. The myth gave rise to the idiom, "fly too close to the sun."
Icarus's father Daedalus, a very talented Athenian craftsman, built a labyrinth for King Minos of Crete near his palace at Knossos to imprison the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster born of his wife and the Cretan bull. Minos imprisoned Daedalus himself in the labyrinth because he gave Minos's daughter, Ariadne, a clew[5] (or ball of string) in order to help Theseus escape the labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur.
Daedalus fashioned two pairs of wings out of beeswax and feathers for himself and his son. Before trying to escape the island, he warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, nor too close to the sea, but to follow his path of flight. Overcome by giddiness while flying, Icarus disobeyed his father and soared into the sky. He came too close to the sun, and the heat melted the beeswax holding his feathers together. One by one, Icarus's feathers fell like snowflakes. Icarus was flapping his "wings". But he realized that he had no feathers left and that he was flapping his bare arms. Then he fell into the sea and drowned. Daedalus wept for his son and called the nearest land Icaria (an island southwest of Samos) in memory of him. Today, the supposed site of his burial on the island bears his name, and the sea near Icaria in which he drowned is called the Icarian Sea.[6][7][8] With much grief, Daedalus went to the temple of Apollo in Sicily, and hung up his own wings as an offering to never attempt to fly again.[9] According to scholia on Euripides, Icarus fashioned himself greater than Helios, the Sun himself, and the god punished him by directing his powerful rays at him, melting the beeswax. Afterwards, it was Helios who named the Icarian Sea after Icarus.[10]
A fresco in Pompeii depicting Daedalus and Icarus, 1st century
Hellenistic writers give euhemerising variants in which the escape from Crete was actually by boat, provided by Pasiphaë, for which Daedalus invented the first sails, to outstrip Minos' pursuing galleys, that Icarus fell overboard en route to Sicily and drowned, and that Heracles erected a tomb for him.[11][12]
Icarus' flight was often alluded to by Greek poets in passing and was told briefly in Pseudo-Apollodorus.[13]Augustan writers who wrote about it in Latin include Hyginus, who tells in Fabula of the bovine love affair of Pasiphaë, daughter of the Sun, that resulted in the birth of the Minotaur, as well as Ovid, who tells the story of Icarus at some length in the Metamorphoses (viii.183–235), and refers to it elsewhere.[14]
Medieval, Renaissance, and modern literature
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In Renaissance iconography, the significance of Icarus depends on context: in the Orion Fountain at Messina, he is one of many figures associated with water; but he is also shown on the Bankruptcy Court of the Amsterdam Town Hall – where he symbolizes high-flying ambition.[21] The 16th-century painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,[22][23]) attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, was the inspiration for two of the 20th century's most notable ekphrastic English-language poems, "Musée des Beaux Arts" by W. H. Auden and "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" by William Carlos Williams.[24] Other English-language poems referencing the Icarus myth are "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph" by Anne Sexton; "Icarus Again" by Alan Devenish; "Mrs Icarus" by Carol Ann Duffy; "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert; "It Should Have Been Winter" by Nancy Chen Long, and "Up like Icarus" by syllabic poet Mark Antony Owen. The Norwegian Axel Jensen used Icarus as a metaphor for troubled modern young men, in the 1957 novel Icarus: A Young Man in Sahara.
Literary interpretation has considered the myth of Icarus as a consequence of excessive ambition.[26] An Icarus-related study of the Daedalus myth was published by the French hellenist Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux.[27] In psychology, there have been synthetic studies of the Icarus complex with respect to the alleged relationship between fascination for fire, enuresis, high ambition, and Ascensionism.[28] The term Icarus complex is defined by NGHIALAGI.net as, "A form of overcompensation wherein an individual, due to feelings of inferiority, formulates grandiose aspirations for future achievement despite lacking proper talent, experience, and/or personal connections. Such a person often exhibits elitism fueled by hubris and detachment from social reality."[29] In the psychiatric mind, features of disease were perceived in the shape of the pendulous emotional ecstatic-high and depressive-low of bipolar disorder. Henry Murray having proposed the term Icarus complex, apparently found symptoms particularly in mania where a person is fond of heights, fascinated by both fire and water, narcissistic and observed with fantastical or far-fetched imaginary cognition.[30][31]Seth Godin's 2012 The Icarus Deception, points to the historical change in how Western culture both propagated and interpreted the Icarus myth arguing that "We tend to forget that Icarus was also warned not to fly too low, because seawater would ruin the lift in his wings. Flying too low is even more dangerous than flying too high, because it feels deceptively safe."[32] Each study and analysis of the myth agrees Icarus was too ambitious for his own good.
Kua Fu, a Chinese myth about a giant who chased the sun and died while getting too close
Sampati, an Indian myth about a bird which lost its wings while trying to save its younger brother from the sun
References
^ abMarch, Jennifer R. (2014). Dictionary of Classical Mythology (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxbow Books. p. 260. ISBN9781782976356.
^"Metamorphoses (Kline) 8, the Ovid Collection, Univ. of Virginia E-Text Center". ovid.lib.virginia.edu. Retrieved 17 November 2022.
^ ab"CommonLit | The Myth of Daedalus and Icarus by Ovid". CommonLit. Retrieved 17 October 2022.
^Elder, Pliny the (21 May 2015). Pliny the Elder: The Natural History Book VII (with Book VIII 1-34). Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 236. ISBN978-1-4725-2101-9.
^clew – a ball of yarn or thread. The etymology of the word "clue" is a direct reference to this story of the Labyrinth.
^Thomas Bullfinch - The Age of Fable Stories of Gods and Heroes KundaliniAwakeningSystem.com 24 January 2013 at the Wayback Machine & The Internet Classics Archive by Daniel C. Stevenson : Ovid - Metamorphoses - Book VIII + Translated by Rolfe Humphries - KET Distance Learning 14 June 2012 at the Wayback Machine 2012-01-24.
^"Icarus and Daedalus.Pdf". Docslib. Retrieved 28 November 2022.
^Mastronarde, Donald J. (2017). Preliminary Studies On the Scholia to Euripides(PDF). Berkeley, California: California Classical Studies. pp. 149–150. ISBN9781939926104.
^Smith, William, ed. (1867). A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology.
^Pinsent, J. (1982). Greek Mythology. New York: Peter Bedrick Books. ISBN0-600-55023-0.
^Gareth D. Williams, Banished voices: readings in Ovid's Exile Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 132 online.
^Peter Knox, A Companion to Ovid (Blackwell, 2009), p. 424 online.
^Jane Chance, The Mythographic Chaucer (University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 65 online.
^Troni Y. Grande, Marlovian Tragedy (Associated University Presses, 1990), pp. 14 online, 40–42 et passim; Frederic B. Tromly, Playing with Desire: Christopher Tantalization (University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 181.
^Coppélia Kahn, Man's estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (University of California Press, 1981), p. 53 online.
^Su Fang Nu, Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 154 online; R.J. Zwi Werblowsky, Lucifer and Prometheus (Routledge, 2001, reprinted from 1952), p. 32 online.
^R. J. Schork, Latin and Roman Culture in Joyce (University Press of Florida, 1997), p. 160 online.
^E. H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images; Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London, 1972); p. 8.
^"On doute que l'exécution soit de Pieter I Bruegel mais la conception Lui est par contre attribuée avec certitude", Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. (in French). Archived from the original on 27 March 2012. Retrieved 3 September 2011.
^de Vries, Lyckle (2003). "Bruegel's "Fall of Icarus": Ovid or Solomon?". Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art. Stichting voor Nederlandse Kunsthistorische Publicaties. 30 (1/2): 4–18. JSTOR 3780948.
^"Ten of the best: examples of ekphrasis". the Guardian. 14 November 2009. Retrieved 17 November 2022.
^"De val van Icarus". lib.ugent.be. Retrieved 2 October 2020.
^Jacob E. Nyenhuis - Myth and the creative process: Michael Ayrton and the myth of Daedalus, the maze maker - 345 pages Wayne State University Press, 2003 Retrieved 2012-01-24 ISBN0-8143-3002-9 See also Harry Levin, The Overreacher, Harvard University Press, 1952 [1]
^Frontisi-Ducroux, Françoise (1975). Dédale: Mythologie de l'artisan en Grèce Ancienne. Paris: François Maspero. p. 227.
^Wiklund, Nils (1978). The icarus complex. Lund: Doxa. ISBN91-578-0064-2.
^"Icarus Complex meaning and definition". nghialagi.net. Retrieved 28 November 2022.
^Michael Sperber 2010 - Dostoyevsky's Stalker and Other Essays on Psychopathology and the Arts, University Press of America, 2010, p. 166 ff, [2]ISBN0-7618-4993-9
^Pendulum - The BiPolar Organisation's quarterly journal Bipolar UK Retrieved 2012-01-24.
^Godin, Seth (2012). The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly? (1st ed.). Portfolio.
^Comparison noted by W.H.Ph. Römer, "Religion of Ancient Mesopotamia," in Historia Religionum: Religions of the Past (Brill, 1969), vol. 1, p. 163.
Further reading
Graves, Robert, (1955) 1960. The Greek Myths, section 92 passim
Pinsent, J. (1982). Greek Mythology. New York: Peter Bedrick Books
Smith, William, ed. A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology
icarus, other, uses, disambiguation, greek, mythology, ancient, greek, Ἴκαρος, romanized, Íkaros, pronounced, ǐːkaros, master, craftsman, daedalus, architect, labyrinth, crete, after, theseus, king, athens, enemy, minos, escaped, from, labyrinth, king, minos, . For other uses see Icarus disambiguation In Greek mythology Icarus ˈ ɪ k e r e s Ancient Greek Ἴkaros romanized Ikaros pronounced ǐːkaros was the son of the master craftsman Daedalus the architect of the labyrinth of Crete After Theseus king of Athens and enemy of Minos escaped from the labyrinth King Minos suspected that Icarus and Daedalus had revealed the labyrinth s secrets and imprisoned them either in a large tower overlooking the ocean or the labyrinth itself depending upon the account 1 2 Icarus and Daedalus escaped using wings Daedalus constructed from feathers threads from blankets clothes and beeswax 3 Daedalus warned Icarus first of complacency and then of hubris instructing him to fly neither too low nor too high lest the sea s dampness clog his wings or the sun s heat melt them 3 Icarus ignored Daedalus instructions not to fly too close to the sun causing the beeswax in his wings to melt Icarus fell from the sky plunged into the sea and drowned The myth gave rise to the idiom fly too close to the sun Jacob Peter Gowy s The Flight of Icarus 1635 1637 The Fall of Icarus Antique fresco from Pompeii 40 79 AD In some versions of the tale Daedalus and Icarus escape by ship 1 4 Contents 1 The legend 2 Classical literature 3 Medieval Renaissance and modern literature 4 Interpretation 5 See also 6 References 7 Further readingThe legend Edit Daedalus Icarus Queen Pasiphae and two of her attendants in a Roman mosaic from Zeugma Commagene The Lament for Icarus 1898 by H J Draper Icarus s father Daedalus a very talented Athenian craftsman built a labyrinth for King Minos of Crete near his palace at Knossos to imprison the Minotaur a half man half bull monster born of his wife and the Cretan bull Minos imprisoned Daedalus himself in the labyrinth because he gave Minos s daughter Ariadne a clew 5 or ball of string in order to help Theseus escape the labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur Daedalus fashioned two pairs of wings out of beeswax and feathers for himself and his son Before trying to escape the island he warned his son not to fly too close to the sun nor too close to the sea but to follow his path of flight Overcome by giddiness while flying Icarus disobeyed his father and soared into the sky He came too close to the sun and the heat melted the beeswax holding his feathers together One by one Icarus s feathers fell like snowflakes Icarus was flapping his wings But he realized that he had no feathers left and that he was flapping his bare arms Then he fell into the sea and drowned Daedalus wept for his son and called the nearest land Icaria an island southwest of Samos in memory of him Today the supposed site of his burial on the island bears his name and the sea near Icaria in which he drowned is called the Icarian Sea 6 7 8 With much grief Daedalus went to the temple of Apollo in Sicily and hung up his own wings as an offering to never attempt to fly again 9 According to scholia on Euripides Icarus fashioned himself greater than Helios the Sun himself and the god punished him by directing his powerful rays at him melting the beeswax Afterwards it was Helios who named the Icarian Sea after Icarus 10 A fresco in Pompeii depicting Daedalus and Icarus 1st century Hellenistic writers give euhemerising variants in which the escape from Crete was actually by boat provided by Pasiphae for which Daedalus invented the first sails to outstrip Minos pursuing galleys that Icarus fell overboard en route to Sicily and drowned and that Heracles erected a tomb for him 11 12 Classical literature Edit The Sun or the Fall of Icarus 1819 by Merry Joseph Blondel in the Rotunda of Apollo at the Louvre Icarus flight was often alluded to by Greek poets in passing and was told briefly in Pseudo Apollodorus 13 Augustan writers who wrote about it in Latin include Hyginus who tells in Fabula of the bovine love affair of Pasiphae daughter of the Sun that resulted in the birth of the Minotaur as well as Ovid who tells the story of Icarus at some length in the Metamorphoses viii 183 235 and refers to it elsewhere 14 Medieval Renaissance and modern literature EditThis section needs expansion You can help by adding to it January 2011 Ovid s version of the Icarus myth and its connection to Phaethon influenced the mythological tradition in English literature 15 reflected in the writings of Chaucer 16 Marlowe 17 Shakespeare 18 Milton 19 and Joyce 20 In Renaissance iconography the significance of Icarus depends on context in the Orion Fountain at Messina he is one of many figures associated with water but he is also shown on the Bankruptcy Court of the Amsterdam Town Hall where he symbolizes high flying ambition 21 The 16th century painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus 22 23 attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder was the inspiration for two of the 20th century s most notable ekphrastic English language poems Musee des Beaux Arts by W H Auden and Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by William Carlos Williams 24 Other English language poems referencing the Icarus myth are To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph by Anne Sexton Icarus Again by Alan Devenish Mrs Icarus by Carol Ann Duffy Failing and Flying by Jack Gilbert It Should Have Been Winter by Nancy Chen Long and Up like Icarus by syllabic poet Mark Antony Owen The Norwegian Axel Jensen used Icarus as a metaphor for troubled modern young men in the 1957 novel Icarus A Young Man in Sahara A 16th century print of Icarus falling 25 In Bruegel s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus c 1558 the fallen Icarus is a small detail at lower right Modern street art of Icaria island and falling Icarus just outside the village of Evdilos on Icaria GreeceInterpretation Edit 17th century relief with a Cretan labyrinth bottom right Musee Antoine Vivenel Literary interpretation has considered the myth of Icarus as a consequence of excessive ambition 26 An Icarus related study of the Daedalus myth was published by the French hellenist Francoise Frontisi Ducroux 27 In psychology there have been synthetic studies of the Icarus complex with respect to the alleged relationship between fascination for fire enuresis high ambition and Ascensionism 28 The term Icarus complex is defined by NGHIALAGI net as A form of overcompensation wherein an individual due to feelings of inferiority formulates grandiose aspirations for future achievement despite lacking proper talent experience and or personal connections Such a person often exhibits elitism fueled by hubris and detachment from social reality 29 In the psychiatric mind features of disease were perceived in the shape of the pendulous emotional ecstatic high and depressive low of bipolar disorder Henry Murray having proposed the term Icarus complex apparently found symptoms particularly in mania where a person is fond of heights fascinated by both fire and water narcissistic and observed with fantastical or far fetched imaginary cognition 30 31 Seth Godin s 2012 The Icarus Deception points to the historical change in how Western culture both propagated and interpreted the Icarus myth arguing that We tend to forget that Icarus was also warned not to fly too low because seawater would ruin the lift in his wings Flying too low is even more dangerous than flying too high because it feels deceptively safe 32 Each study and analysis of the myth agrees Icarus was too ambitious for his own good See also Edit Ancient Greece portal Myths portalBladud a legendary king of the Britons purported to have met his death when his constructed wings failed Etana a sort of Babylonian Icarus 33 Kua Fu a Chinese myth about a giant who chased the sun and died while getting too close Sampati an Indian myth about a bird which lost its wings while trying to save its younger brother from the sunReferences Edit a b March Jennifer R 2014 Dictionary of Classical Mythology 2nd ed Oxford Oxbow Books p 260 ISBN 9781782976356 Metamorphoses Kline 8 the Ovid Collection Univ of Virginia E Text Center ovid lib virginia edu Retrieved 17 November 2022 a b CommonLit The Myth of Daedalus and Icarus by Ovid CommonLit Retrieved 17 October 2022 Elder Pliny the 21 May 2015 Pliny the Elder The Natural History Book VII with Book VIII 1 34 Bloomsbury Publishing p 236 ISBN 978 1 4725 2101 9 clew a ball of yarn or thread The etymology of the word clue is a direct reference to this story of the Labyrinth Graves Robert 1955 92 Daedalus and Talus The Greek Myths ISBN 0 14 007602 6 Thomas Bullfinch The Age of Fable Stories of Gods and Heroes KundaliniAwakeningSystem com Archived 24 January 2013 at the Wayback Machine amp The Internet Classics Archive by Daniel C Stevenson Ovid Metamorphoses Book VIII Translated by Rolfe Humphries KET Distance Learning Archived 14 June 2012 at the Wayback Machine 2012 01 24 Translated by A S Kline University of Virginia Library edu Retrieved 2005 07 03 Icarus and Daedalus Pdf Docslib Retrieved 28 November 2022 Mastronarde Donald J 2017 Preliminary Studies On the Scholia to Euripides PDF Berkeley California California Classical Studies pp 149 150 ISBN 9781939926104 Smith William ed 1867 A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology Pinsent J 1982 Greek Mythology New York Peter Bedrick Books ISBN 0 600 55023 0 Epitomeof theBiblioteca i 11 and ii 6 3 Gareth D Williams Banished voices readings in Ovid s Exile Poetry Cambridge University Press 1994 p 132 online Peter Knox A Companion to Ovid Blackwell 2009 p 424 online Jane Chance The Mythographic Chaucer University of Michigan Press 1995 p 65 online Troni Y Grande Marlovian Tragedy Associated University Presses 1990 pp 14 online 40 42 et passim Frederic B Tromly Playing with Desire Christopher Tantalization University of Toronto Press 1998 p 181 Coppelia Kahn Man s estate Masculine Identity in Shakespeare University of California Press 1981 p 53 online Su Fang Nu Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth Century England Cambridge University Press 2007 p 154 online R J Zwi Werblowsky Lucifer and Prometheus Routledge 2001 reprinted from 1952 p 32 online R J Schork Latin and Roman Culture in Joyce University Press of Florida 1997 p 160 online E H Gombrich Symbolic Images Studies in the Art of the Renaissance London 1972 p 8 On doute que l execution soit de Pieter I Bruegel mais la conception Lui est par contre attribuee avec certitude Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium Description detaillee in French Archived from the original on 27 March 2012 Retrieved 3 September 2011 de Vries Lyckle 2003 Bruegel s Fall of Icarus Ovid or Solomon Simiolus Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art Stichting voor Nederlandse Kunsthistorische Publicaties 30 1 2 4 18 JSTOR 3780948 Ten of the best examples of ekphrasis the Guardian 14 November 2009 Retrieved 17 November 2022 De val van Icarus lib ugent be Retrieved 2 October 2020 Jacob E Nyenhuis Myth and the creative process Michael Ayrton and the myth of Daedalus the maze maker 345 pages Wayne State University Press 2003 Retrieved 2012 01 24 ISBN 0 8143 3002 9 See also Harry Levin The Overreacher Harvard University Press 1952 1 Frontisi Ducroux Francoise 1975 Dedale Mythologie de l artisan en Grece Ancienne Paris Francois Maspero p 227 Wiklund Nils 1978 The icarus complex Lund Doxa ISBN 91 578 0064 2 Icarus Complex meaning and definition nghialagi net Retrieved 28 November 2022 Michael Sperber 2010 Dostoyevsky s Stalker and Other Essays on Psychopathology and the Arts University Press of America 2010 p 166 ff 2 ISBN 0 7618 4993 9 Pendulum The BiPolar Organisation s quarterly journal Bipolar UK Retrieved 2012 01 24 Godin Seth 2012 The Icarus Deception How High Will You Fly 1st ed Portfolio Comparison noted by W H Ph Romer Religion of Ancient Mesopotamia in Historia Religionum Religions of the Past Brill 1969 vol 1 p 163 Further reading EditGraves Robert 1955 1960 The Greek Myths section 92 passim Pinsent J 1982 Greek Mythology New York Peter Bedrick Books Smith William ed A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and MythologyIcarus at Wikipedia s sister projects Media from Commons Texts from Wikisource Data from Wikidata Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Icarus amp oldid 1140057050, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,
