Icarus Icarus In Greek mythology, Icarus (the Latin spelling, conventionally adopted in English; , "Íkaros", Etruscan: "Vikare") is the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, the creator of the Labyrinth. Icarus and his father attempt to escape from Crete by means of wings that his father constructed from feathers and wax. Icarus' father warns him first of complacency and then of hubris, asking that he fly neither too low nor too high, so the sea's dampness would not clog his wings nor the sun's heat melt them. Icarus ignored his father's instructions not to fly too close to the sun; when
The North Wind and the Sun wrapped his cloak tighter to keep warm, but when the Sun shone, the traveler was overcome with heat and soon took his cloak off. The fable was well known in Ancient Greece; Athenaeus records that Hieronymus of Rhodes, in his "Historical Notes", quoted an epigram of Sophocles against Euripides that parodied the story of Helios and Boreas. It related how Sophocles had his cloak stolen by a boy to whom he had made love. Euripides joked that he had had that boy too, and it did not cost him anything. Sophocles' reply satirises the adulteries of Euripides: "It was the