in Greek mythology, a famous Athenian architect and sculptor. According to the myth, Daedalus, banished from Athens for the murder of his nephew and pupil who had surpassed his teacher in creating various instruments, fled to Crete where he served King Minos. On orders from Minos he constructed a labyrinth in which the monster Minotaur was placed. Daedalus showed Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, how to help Theseus escape from the labyrinth after he had killed the Minotaur. Persecuted by Minos for this, Daedalus devised wings of feathers secured with wax for his son, Icarus, and himself, and with their help reached the coast of Asia Minor by air, from where he later went to Sicily. But Icarus, not heeding his father’s warning, rose too close to the sun (from whose rays the wax melted) and fell into the water near the island of Samos, in the eastern part of the Aegean Sea, which in ancient times was called the Icarian Sea (allegedly so named after Icarus but actually after the nearby island of Icarius). The myth has been told in the greatest detail in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (see Book 8, lines 157-162; Russian translation, Moscow, 1937).