![]() ![]() Desperate to flee the island, Daedalus uses wax to build some wings for himself and his son Icarus. Unfortunately, he angers King Minos, the ruler of the island Crete, and he has to hightail it out of there. And as William Empson pointed out about the myth of Oedipus, whatever Oedipus’ problem was, it wasn’t an ‘Oedipus complex’ in the Freudian sense of that phrase, because the mythical Oedipus was unaware that he had married his own mother (rather than being attracted to her in full knowledge of who she was). The Story of Daedulus and Icarus Daedalus is a brilliant inventorthe Thomas Edison of his day. Similarly, Narcissus, in another famous Greek myth, actually shunned other people before he fell in love with his own reflection, and yet we still talk of someone who is obsessed with their own importance and appearance as being narcissistic. (Or, as the Bible bluntly puts it, the love of money is the root of all evil.) ![]() The moral of King Midas, of course, was not that he was famed for his wealth and success, but that his greed for gold was his undoing: the story, if anything, is a warning about the dangers of corruption that money and riches can bring. However, as this last example shows, we often employ these myths in ways which run quite contrary to the moral messages the original myths impart. School subject: English as a Second Language (ESL) (1061958) Main content: Past simple and past continuous (2013123) Complete the story of Daedalus and Icarus with the verbs in the correct past form. Despite Daedalus’ warning, Icarus soared higher and higher. The father and son took off from the tower and began flying over the sea towards Sicily in their man-made wings. Unfortunately, Icarus became a model for this character flaw. We describe a challenging undertaking as a Herculean task, and speak of somebody who enjoys great success as having the Midas touch. The ancient Greeks called foolish arrogance or overconfidence hubris. So we describe somebody’s weakness as their Achilles heel, or we talk about the dangers of opening up Pandora’s box. The Greek myths are over two thousand years old – and perhaps, in their earliest forms, much older – and yet many stories from Greek mythology, and phrases derived from those stories, are part of our everyday speech. ![]()
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