Daedalus and the Labyrinth

Daedalus came to Crete as a fugitive, and the island made use of him. Apollodorus calls him an excellent architect and the first inventor of images. He had fled Athens after throwing his sister's son from the Acropolis. The Library names the nephew Talos and says Daedalus feared a pupil of such talent would surpass him. The boy had found a snake's jawbone and sawed a thin stick with it.

Ovid tells the same crime with different names. In Metamorphoses the nephew is Perdix, the partridge, whom his mother sent to Daedalus as a pupil. He copied the backbone of a fish into a toothed saw, and he made hinged arms of iron that drew a circle. Daedalus threw him from Minerva's temple and spread word of an accident. Pallas saved the boy and changed him into a partridge in the air. For Apollodorus, Perdix is instead the mother's name.

Diodorus adds how the crime came out. Talos, in his telling, had invented the potter's wheel and an iron saw modelled on the snake's teeth. When Daedalus was caught burying the body, he said he was burying a snake. The Areopagus convicted him, and he fled. Pausanias, for his part, saw the tomb of the murdered boy, whom he calls Calos, on the path from the theatre up to the Acropolis. All of this is the origin of the exile. It is not the Cretan story, and it does not change what came next.

On Crete, Daedalus's first job was the wooden cow. Apollodorus says Poseidon grew angry when Minos did not sacrifice a bull the god had sent, and made Pasiphae desire the animal. Daedalus built a hollow wooden cow on wheels, covered it with a cow's hide, and set it in the bull's meadow. Diodorus tells the same episode as a myth that has been handed down and gives a similar cause. In both accounts the result is the Minotaur, called Asterius by Apollodorus. The Cretan bull and the Minotaur each have their own page.

Minos then needed somewhere to keep the child. Apollodorus says he shut the Minotaur up in the Labyrinth in compliance with certain oracles, and that Daedalus built it. Ovid describes a work of winding, misleading passages that Daedalus made so intricate that he could barely retrace his own steps. Ovid also says Minos wished to hide his disgrace. The tribute of Athenian youths, sent in as food for the monster, is the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, and the word itself has its own entry in the Labyrinth glossary.

The maze had one weak point, and it was its maker. When Theseus arrived among the Athenian tribute, Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, offered to help him if he would take her away and marry her. Apollodorus's Epitome says Theseus swore to it, and that she then begged Daedalus to disclose the way out of the labyrinth. At his suggestion she gave Theseus a clue, which he fastened to the door and unwound as he went in. Frazer's note, citing the scholiasts on Homer and Eustathius, says the clue was a ball of thread that Ariadne had asked Daedalus for.

Ovid never gives Daedalus that part. In his version Theseus finds the path out by Ariadne's thread, and Daedalus's advice goes unmentioned. The Epitome is the only source used here that makes the craftsman the adviser. That is the detail that makes Minos's later anger make sense.

Minos learned what had happened after Theseus had gone. The Epitome says that, on being told of the flight of Theseus and his company, he shut up the guilty Daedalus in the labyrinth with his son Icarus, whose mother was Naucrate, a slave of Minos. So in Apollodorus the builder ends up as a prisoner in his own work. Other writers give different reasons. Diodorus has Minos threaten Daedalus over the cow, so that Daedalus, afraid, left Crete with help from Pasiphae. Pausanias says only that Minos condemned him on some charge and had him thrown into prison with his son.

Then comes the flight. Daedalus made wings, warned Icarus against flying too high or too low, and Icarus fell into the sea that still bears his name. The flight is a story of its own, told on the Fall of Icarus page. It matters here only because Daedalus, in Apollodorus, went on alone and safely to Camicus in Sicily, and Minos followed.

The sequel is a manhunt. Apollodorus says Minos pursued Daedalus and, in every country he searched, carried a spiral shell. He promised a great reward to whoever could pass a thread through it, believing that this would reveal where Daedalus was. At Camicus in Sicily he showed the shell at the court of King Cocalus, where Daedalus was hiding. Cocalus took it and promised to thread it. The Epitome's next lines are the trick itself, quoted below.

When Minos saw the threaded shell, he knew Daedalus was with Cocalus and demanded his surrender. Cocalus promised to hand him over and gave Minos a feast. After his bath, Apollodorus says, Minos was undone by the daughters of Cocalus. Some said boiling water was the cause. The Minos page follows the king's death.

The other accounts drop the shell and keep the ending. Diodorus has Minos sail to Sicily with a fleet, land in the territory of Acragas and demand Daedalus. Cocalus invited him to a conference and killed him by keeping him too long in the hot water. Pausanias says Cocalus refused to give Daedalus up, and that the daughters of Cocalus, delighted with the craftsman's skill, plotted against Minos. Herodotus knows only that Minos went to Sicania in search of Daedalus and died a violent death. So Sicily and a violent end for Minos recur in all four writers. The riddle of the shell rests on Apollodorus alone.