Labyrinth
Daedalus
Icarus
Crystal
Earnest
Eccles. 7:7
"Surely oppression maketh a wise man mad; and a gift destroyeth the heart."
Solar Prominence Eruption
Icarus and Daedalus byLord Frederick Leighton
Chess: "Labyrinth" "Daedalus" "Icarus" "Crystal" "Earnest"
Daedalus
In
Greek mythology,
Daedalus (Latin, also Hellenized Latin
Daedalos, Greek
Daidalos (
Δαίδαλος) meaning "cunning worker", and Etruscan
Taitale) was a skillful craftsman and artisan.
[1] Daedalus had two sons:
Icarus and
Iapyx, along with a nephew, whose name is
Perdix. He is first mentioned by
Homer as the creator of a wide dancing-ground for
Ariadne.
[2] The
Labyrinth on
Crete, in which the
Minotaur (part man, part bull) was kept, was also created by the artificer Daedalus. In the story of the labyrinth Hellenes told, the Athenian hero
Theseus is challenged to kill the Minotaur, finding his way with the help of
Ariadne's thread. Daedalus' appearance in Homer is in an extended simile, "plainly not Homer's invention,"
Robin Lane Fox observes: "he is a point of comparison and so he belongs in stories which Homer's audience already recognized."
[3] In Bronze Age Crete, an inscription
da-da-re-jo-de has been read as referring to a place at Knossos,
[4] and a place of worship.
[5]
In Homer's language, objects which are
daidala are finely crafted. They are mostly objects of
armour, but fine bowls and furnishings are
daidala, and on one occasion so are the "bronze-working" of "clasps, twisted brooches, earrings and necklaces" made by
Hephaestus while cared for in secret by the goddesses of the sea.
[6]
Ignoring Homer, later writers envisaged the
labyrinth as an edifice rather than a single dancing path to the center and out again, and gave it numberless winding passages and turns that opened into one another, seeming to have neither beginning nor end.
[7] Ovid, in his
Metamorphoses, suggests that Daedalus constructed the
Labyrinth so cunningly that he himself could barely escape it after he built it.
[8] Daedalus built the labyrinth for King
Minos, who needed it to imprison his wife's son the
Minotaur. The story is told that
Poseidon had given a white bull to
Minos so that he might use it as a sacrifice. Instead, Minos kept it for himself; and in revenge, Poseidon made his wife
Pasiphaë lust for the bull.
[9] For Pasiphaë, as Greek mythologers interpreted it, Daedalus also built a wooden cow so she could mate with the bull, for the Greeks imagined the Minoan
bull of the sun to be an actual, earthly bull.
Athenians transferred Cretan Daedalus to make him Athenian-born, the grandson
[10] of the ancient king
Erechtheus, who fled to Crete, having killed his nephew. Over time, other stories were told of Daedalus. In the nineteenth century,
Thomas Bulfinch combined these into a single synoptic view of material which Andrew Stewart calls a "historically-intractable farrago of 'evidence', heavily tinged with Athenian cultural chauvinism".
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