DAEDALUS

A native of Athens, Daedalus first found fame as a brilliant inventor. One might have expected the gods to bestow great blessings on such a worthy mortal, yet Daedalus’s life was neither happy nor peaceful. He could never resist a challenge, and his downfall came when his attempts to help two desperate women, Pasiphae and Ariadne, invoked the wrath of a powerful king, Minos.

Daedalus’s fatal flaw was excessive pride in his work and his personal reputation. He believed that he could find the solution to any practical problem. In many ways this self-confidence was well founded because his inventions were beneficial and admired by gods and mortals. He designed natural poses for statues, where previously their arms had been fixed stiffly to their sides. Such innovations brought him great success, but all the time he feared competition and was sometimes consumed by jealousy, most famously of his nephew Perdix.

Perdix was sent by his mother to learn mechanical arts from Daedalus, her brother. The youth showed aptitude and was a fast learner. As he walked along the seashore, Perdix picked up a fish spine and immediately imitated it by notching a piece of iron; thus he invented the saw. In another legend he devised a drawing compass by riveting together two pieces of iron.

Daedalus should have been proud of his promising student, but instead he was envious and suspicious of him. In a mad effort to rid himself of his rival, he pushed Perdix from a high tower in one of Athena’s temples. Athena, who loved ingenuity, saw Perdix falling and changed him into a partridge. Partridges (Latin name Perdix perdix) build their nests in low hedges and do not fly high.

After killing Perdix, Daedalus fled to Crete, where he was welcomed by King Minos. Trouble soon followed, however, when Daedalus agreed to help Minos’s wife, Pasiphae. Minos owned a bull that was due to be sacrificed to Poseidon, but the king did not carry out the sacrifice because he thought the bull was too beautiful to kill.

In retribution, Poseidon made Pasiphae fall in love with the animal. She appealed to Daedalus for assistance, and he could not refuse. He built a fake cow, inside which Pasiphae hid. The hollow cow was secretly left in the bull’s pen. The bull mated with the fake cow and thus with Pasiphae. Nine months later Pasiphae gave birth to the fierce Minotaur, half human and half bull.

With the birth of the Minotaur, Minos grew outraged by Poseidon’s act of vengeance, Pasiphae’s behavior, and Daedalus’s role in the conception of the Minotaur. The king demanded that Daedalus build a means to contain the horrific monster. Daedalus responded by constructing the Labyrinth. This edifice was an enormous maze with innumerable winding passages and turnings that opened into each other and seemed to have neither a beginning nor an end. According to legend, the Labyrinth was built under the Cretan royal palace at Knossos.