Between the two

Daedalus is stuck on Crete. The king has closed the land and the sea to him, and he says the thing the whole story turns on: the sky, at least, is open. So he lays feathers in rows, shortest to longest, binds them with thread and wax, and — in Ovid’s phrase — makes nature new. His son stands beside him the whole time, catching the feathers the breeze lifts, softening the wax with his thumb, playing; the boy does not know, the poet says, that he is handling his own death.

Then the father fits the wings on him and gives the counsel. It has two halves, and both matter. Fly the middle course, Icarus: too low, and the water will weigh down your feathers; too high, and the fire will burn them. Inter utrumque vola. Fly between the two. Keep your eyes off the stars; follow me. And as he says it his old cheeks are wet and his hands are shaking, and he kisses his son — kisses, Ovid writes, never to be repeated — and goes up first, like a bird leading a fledgling out of the nest, looking back, urging him on, teaching him the ruinous arts.

It works. Men look up from a fishing rod, a crook, a plough, and take them for gods. Then the boy begins to delight in the flight, and leaves his guide, and — caelique cupidine tractus, drawn by desire for the sky — goes higher. The wax softens. He beats bare arms on air that will not hold him, and the water that takes him takes his father’s name from his mouth, and his own name for itself. The father — nec iam pater, now no longer a father — calls for him, sees the feathers on the waves, curses his own arts, and buries the body.

And a partridge watches him do it, from a branch, clapping its wings.

— Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII.183–235 (Daedalus and Icarus) and VIII.236–259 (Perdix). The English here is this site’s own rendering from the Latin, not a published translation. Latin quoted by line: inter utrumque vola (206), damnosas… artes (215), credidit esse deos (220), caelique cupidine tractus (224), nec iam pater (231), devovitque suas artes (234), antiquique memor metuit sublimia casus (259). That the counsel is two-sided — sea as well as sun — is corroborated at Apollodorus, Epitome 1.12–13.