The fall of Icarus is the most famous falling in Western mythology. The boy flies too close to the sun, the wax of his wings melts, and he tumbles into the sea. The story has been told in every age as a warning against hubris, against the dangerous pursuit of things too high, and against the heedless joy of breaking the rules of the father. The story is told most fully by Ovid in the Metamorphoses (Book VIII), drawing on earlier Greek sources.
The Flight
Icarus and his father Daedalus, the great Athenian craftsman, were imprisoned in the Labyrinth that Daedalus had himself designed for King Minos of Crete. The only way out, Daedalus realized, was into the air. He collected feathers, took wax from the honeycombs of wild bees, and set to work.
The wings he made were of feathers, in size from the smallest to the largest, joined with thread and at the bottom with wax — like a rustic’s fans of straw. Two pairs of wings were made: one for the father, one for the son. The two stood at the edge of the prison, the wings strapped to their arms, and prepared to fly.
The Warning
The warning is the central moral of the story. Ovid gives it in lines that have echoed across the centuries:
He kissed his son, and said: “Icarus, my son, I warn you to fly the middle way: if you go too low, the moisture of the sea will weigh down your wings; if you go too high, the heat of the sun will melt the wax. Fly between the two. And follow me; I will lead the way. Look up at me as you fly, and don’t be enchanted by the sky.”
The warning is precise. The sky has two kinds of danger — the danger from below (the sea, the damp) and the danger from above (the sun, the heat). The middle way is the only way. Icarus is told to follow his father, not the sky.
The warning is also a typical Greek moral lesson. The order of the cosmos, the mētron (the measure), the kairon (the right moment), is what keeps the mortal in safety. To step outside the measure — to overreach, to fail to keep the limit in mind — is to fall.
The Ascent
Icarus, when the wings were on, felt the joy of flight. He beat his arms, the feathers caught the wind, and he rose. The sea dropped away beneath him. The wind whistled in the feathers. The boy was a bird. He was a god.
He forgot the warning. He flew higher. The reason, in Ovid’s account, is simple: the joy of flight intoxicated him. The sensation of rising was so glorious that the boy, forgetting his father’s voice, flew straight upward, into the path of the blazing sun.
The ancient Greek word for this is hubris — overreaching, the overstepping of the limit set by the gods. Hubris is not pride in the modern sense; it is a kind of divine intoxication, a forgetfulness of one’s mortal place. The Greek gods punish hubris because the cosmos itself is founded on hierarchy, and the mortal who forgets his place is threatening the order of things.
The Melting of the Wax
The sun, which would warm the wax of a candle, began to melt the wax of the wings. The wax, the very thing that held the wing together, was softened. The threads gave way. The feathers, no longer joined, began to scatter, one by one, into the air. The wings fell apart. Icarus, beating the air, found nothing to support him. He was, in Ovid’s words, “flapping his bare arms.” The sky had been his; the sea was about to be his.
The Fall and the Cry
Ovid gives the fall a particular pathos:
The boy called out “Father, father, where are you?” But the dark water closed over his voice.
The cry of the son to the father, unanswered, is one of the great images in Western literature — the cry of the human being at the moment of death, calling for the one who cannot save him. Daedalus was in the air above, watching, unable to do anything. He had given the warning. He had given the wings. He had not given the wisdom.
The boy fell into the sea, which was thereafter called the Icarian Sea after him, and a small island nearby, Icaria, took his name. Heracles, passing that way, was said to have found his body and given it a proper burial.
The Symbolism of Wax and Feathers
The choice of materials in the myth is significant. Wax is the joining material, the symbol of the human art that holds the natural together. It is also the product of bees, of flowers, of the sun’s warmth. To melt is for the wax to lose its joining power; the human and the natural fall apart. Feathers are the symbol of the bird, the only naturally flying thing. The wings of Daedalus are the first human technology of flight, made of the very materials of the natural world. When the feathers scatter, the technology fails; the human falls back to earth, the bird remains.
The Ovidian Source and Afterlife
Ovid’s version of the story in the Metamorphoses is the source of most later treatments. The story is also alluded to by Diodorus Siculus, Hyginus, and the pseudo-Apollodorus. The ancient sources disagree on some details — in some versions, Icarus and Daedalus flew from Crete; in some, from a tower of the Labyrinth. The Ovidian version — wax, sun, melted, fall, sea — is the canonical one.
The story has been painted, above all, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder in Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1560s). Brueghel places the fall at the corner of the painting: a pale pair of legs, almost invisible, disappearing into the sea, while a ploughman turns his soil, a fisherman sits at his line, a shepherd leans on his staff — and the fall of Icarus, the most famous of all falls, is not noticed by anyone. W.H. Auden used the painting to anchor his meditation on human suffering. William Carlos Williams wrote the spare lines: “It took / Icarus / a long time / to fall.” The story has been the subject of poems by Anne Sexton, Edward Field, Muriel Rukeyser, Lisel Mueller, and countless others, and of paintings by Matisse and Picasso.
The Meaning for Us
The story of Icarus is a permanent fixture of Western moral vocabulary. To “fly too close to the sun” is to attempt something beyond one’s capacity; to “fall like Icarus” is to fail in a way that was foretold. The myth has had a particular force in the modern age, in which the human technology of flight — the very thing Daedalus imagined — has become a reality, and the question of the limits of human ambition has become a question of planetary survival. The story is also the story of a father and a son, in which the wisdom of one cannot be transmitted to the other. The wax of the wings can be made; the wax of wisdom cannot.
Last reviewed: June 2026.