Icarus the wax in his wings melted he tumbled out of the sky and fell into the sea where he drowned, sparking the idiom ""don't fly too close to the sun"". This tragic theme of failure at the hands of hubris contains similarities to that of Phaëthon. Icarus' father Daedalus, a very talented and remarkable Athenian craftsman, built the Labyrinth for King Minos of Crete near his palace at Knossos to imprison the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster born of his wife and the Cretan bull. Minos imprisoned Daedalus himself in the labyrinth because he gave Minos's daughter, Ariadne, a clew
Labyrinth presents a search for meaning in a symbolic modern labyrinth. In Rick Riordan's series Percy Jackson & the Olympians, the events of the fourth novel "The Battle of the Labyrinth" predominantly take place within the labyrinth of Daedalus, which has followed the heart of the West to settle beneath the United States. Australian author Sara Douglass incorporated some labyrinthine ideas in her series The Troy Game, in which the Labyrinth on Crete is one of several in the ancient world, created with the cities as a source of magical power. Lawrence Durrell's "The Dark Labyrinth" depicts travelers trapped underground in