Stephen Dedalus Stephen Dedalus Stephen Dedalus is James Joyce's literary alter ego, appearing as the protagonist and antihero of his first, semi-autobiographical novel of artistic existence "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and an important character in Joyce's "Ulysses". In "Stephen Hero", an early version of what became "Portrait", Stephen's surname is spelled "Daedalus" in more precise allusion to Daedalus, the architect in Greek myth who was contracted by King Minos to build the Labyrinth in which he would imprison his wife's son the Minotaur. Buck Mulligan makes reference to the mythological namesake in "Ulysses", telling Stephen, "Your absurd
Labyrinth be walked. Unicursal patterns have been used historically both in group ritual and for private meditation, and are increasingly found for therapeutic use in hospitals and hospices. "Labyrinth" is a word of pre-Greek origin, which the Greeks associated with the palace of Knossos in Crete, excavated by Arthur Evans early in the 20th century. The word appears in a Linear B inscription as da-pu-ri-to. As early as 1892 Maximilian Mayer suggested that "labyrinthos" might derive from "labrys", a Lydian word for "double-bladed axe". Evans suggested that the palace at Knossos was the original labyrinth, and since the double axe motif