Greek to Me: Icarus
Icarus never got near the sun. The air gets colder as you climb, and the Greeks had a version with no wings at all.
Icarus never got near the sun.
Air cools about three and a half degrees for every thousand feet you climb, beeswax holds until about a hundred and forty, and the Sun is ninety-three million miles away, so the boy would have frozen long before anything melted. Around 300 BC the Greek writer Palaephatus told it without wings: Daedalus slipped out of a prison window, took his son in a small boat, caught a strong south wind ("it seemed as if they were flying"), and the boat capsized. The island where the story puts Icarus ashore is still Ikaria, famous today for its ninety-year-olds.
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Greek to Me
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