A father builds a way out of prison through the air, and builds its limits in with it: fly too high and the sun will unmake the wings, fly too low and the sea will. The son is given both warnings and breaks the one that kills.

The Greek witness is Apollodorus's Library (a Greek mythography compiled in the 1st–2nd century CE), which tells it with a mythographer's economy. Minos, learning of the flight of Theseus, "shut up the guilty Daedalus in the labyrinth, along with his son Icarus", the boy the craftsman had by Naucrate, "a female slave of Minos". Daedalus makes wings for the pair and sets the flight path the way an artisan sets tolerances: not high, "lest the glue should melt in the sun and the wings should drop off"; not low, "lest the pinions should be detached by the damp". Then disaster arrives in a single clause: "the infatuated Icarus, disregarding his father’s injunctions, soared ever higher" till, the glue melting, "he fell into the sea called after him Icarian". The father flies on to Camicus in Sicily; the boy's whole afterlife is a name on the water.

The note of Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941), the Scottish scholar whose translation carries the passage, follows the story's later fortunes. One account has Daedalus land at Cumae, where he "dedicated his wings to Apollo"; and the flight was "rationalized" by later writers — Diodorus Siculus gives the fugitives a ship from Pasiphae, while in Pausanias "father and son sailed in separate ships", the newly invented sail doing the work of wings. Frazer adds that almost no one besides Apollodorus troubled to record the name of Icarus's mother.

Everything in the telling is engineering — glue, damp, a tested tolerance — except the one unengineered thing, a boy's exhilaration. Why is it always the upper limit the young break, never the lower?