Figure 2 Roman cast bronze figurine of Icarus flying, first to third century CE, height 11.5 cm, found in Crete.Īs both character and image, Icarus continues to turn up in unexpected places, from scientific papers to advertising. The right leg is broken at the mid-point of the calf, and the bronze of the whole figurine shows some slight weathering. His left leg is straight while his right is slightly bent, as if to indicate walking or flying. The muscles on his torso are clearly visible, and so are his genitalia. His hair is arranged in wavy clumps, and his face is unsmiling, with eyes fixed straight in front of him. His hands reach approximately three-quarters of the way along the wings. Two wings made of overlaying feathers sprout from his back, and these are positioned directly behind his arms. He stands with his arms outstretched, and his palms are both open. The figurine is shown naked apart from four bracelets, one at the top of each arm just below the shoulder, and one on each wrist. The photograph shows a bronze figurine of a man, displayed against a black background. ![]() Aphrodite punished Helios for his exposure of her affair with Ares by decreeing that the female descendants of the sun would select and pursue inappropriate and disastrous partners. These strange sexual couplings (or attempts at them – Phaedra is scorned and takes her revenge) stem from a curse on the descendants of the sun god, Helios. Another connected myth is that of the Cretan princess Phaedra, who later married Theseus (even though he had abandoned her sister, Ariadne, his guide through the Labyrinth), and developed a destructive and tragic passion for her stepson Hippolytus. The Cretan labyrinth also featured in the exploits of the Athenian hero, Theseus, who slew the Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull offspring of queen Pasiphaë, with the help of Ariadne, daughter of King Minos. Daedalus was himself effectively imprisoned on the island (the king barred his exit by sea) and so was unable to return with his son, Icarus, to Athens or find sanctuary away from the harsh regime at Crete. Icarus’ story connects up with a number of narrative passageways centred on the island of Crete (where Daedalus, the legendary artificer and craftsman, constructed a maze, the Labyrinth, to conceal and control the Minotaur). Icarus has become the more familiar of the two characters as the ancient high-flyer who fell from the sky when the wax that secured his wings was melted by the sun. ![]() And as William Empson pointed out about the myth of Oedipus, whatever Oedipus’ problem was, it wasn’t an ‘Oedipus complex’ in the Freudian sense of that phrase, because the mythical Oedipus was unaware that he had married his own mother (rather than being attracted to her in full knowledge of who she was).The myth of Daedalus and Icarus, the father and son who escaped from the island of Crete on wings, is told in Book 8 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Similarly, Narcissus, in another famous Greek myth, actually shunned other people before he fell in love with his own reflection, and yet we still talk of someone who is obsessed with their own importance and appearance as being narcissistic. (Or, as the Bible bluntly puts it, the love of money is the root of all evil.) The moral of King Midas, of course, was not that he was famed for his wealth and success, but that his greed for gold was his undoing: the story, if anything, is a warning about the dangers of corruption that money and riches can bring. However, as this last example shows, we often employ these myths in ways which run quite contrary to the moral messages the original myths impart. We describe a challenging undertaking as a Herculean task, and speak of somebody who enjoys great success as having the Midas touch. So we describe somebody’s weakness as their Achilles heel, or we talk about the dangers of opening up Pandora’s box. ![]() The Greek myths are over two thousand years old – and perhaps, in their earliest forms, much older – and yet many stories from Greek mythology, and phrases derived from those stories, are part of our everyday speech.
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