Icarus

Care to explain? I'm interested to hear your thoughts

He used his wife's son to make people who made fun of him being a cuck feel absolute terror. Pretty ingenious if you ask me

One of the few Greek myths that can't be summed up as Zeus fucked something

How is it selfish?

I always liked the story of Phaeton better, aspiring to something high, failing miserable and seeing your whole world burn is so relateable. Ikarus is tragic and all but he just got talked into it by his dad

Enjoying freedom too much means trespassing limits. Limits are set by the gods. Man acts against them out of his own will and more or less knowingly (or thinking he knows that nothing bad will happen to him) and his doom is of his own making. Man knows this too now, by virtue of his hindsight, yet presses on. This myth is one of the few, I think, where a physical mechanism is invoked as explanation of man's hubris: the poet could have said something like "Helios saw Icarus soar closer to his heavenly path and was enraged by the boy's foolishness. He sent his burning flames to etc."; instead the poet coldly explains how the sun's rays melted the wax--a way to solve the trespass that is more sympathetic to modern ears. Yet the insult to the gods and the way they set the world (though it is debatable in the case of Greek gods how much they had to do with making and tuning the world) is there and its consequences are predictable. That is, the consequences of enjoying one's freedom are an inevitable and unforeseen (by the actor) insult to the gods and its equally inevitable payback. This is what I meant in my first post. Daedalus played nice and wasn't hurt. He only did it to escape his dreadful life as prized bird in king Minos' golden cage, and nothing more (incidentally thus teaching the king a lesson--the poet says that Minos had blocked land and waterways, leaving the sky open in his arrogant conviction that no man could escape via aerial means). Icarus, on the other hand, took childish (i.e. ignorant and foolish) pleasure in his game and crossed that invisible--yet all too visible in retrospect--line.

Don't let the above lines fool you into thinking I'm any knowledgeable on the subject; these are just my thoughts having read and loved a bit of the Greeks and having found many parallels to my own life and the world around me. Who knows what the gods really think?

Icarus didnt listened to his father dedalus advice and instead did what he wanted to do, to fly close to the sun, forgetting the promise he made to his father just because his youthfull desire of excess.
This way Icaro fell.
Its a message from Apolo, the -later- god of the sun and moderation.

Phaeton's story reminds me of those liveleak videos where rich Arab kids from the Emirates race those huge, gleaming white SUVs in the desert and the next thing you know their limbs start flying out of the car.

Think the Sun felt what Daedalus felt, though? Is that why he isn't personified at all in the latter's story? He's just a cold (figuratively speaking) force of nature there, not caring anymore about what and whom it touches, having lost the light of his eyes? Can the gods even share that feeling?

>Phaeton's story reminds me of those liveleak videos where rich Arab kids from the Emirates race those huge, gleaming white SUVs in the desert and the next thing you know their limbs start flying out of the car.
could you perhaps, share a link with us user?

I think Dedalus is the inventor and Icarus is the dreamer. The dreamer must first understand nature in order to "conquer" it. Understanding of physis is tekhne. That's what Dedalus had and Icarus lacked. Physis and tekhne aren't in opposition - tekhne means understanding the ways of physis and then using them to invent. The dreamer, that is every man in his youth, but the inventor is only the experienced older man.

Is there an ancient text about Phaeton? Where can I find it?

How is it selfish?

Best book on Greek mythology?

it's the first story of book II in Ovid's Metamorphoses