Icarus

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Icarus is recalled by Dante in Inferno XVII, 109, within the comparison with the descent of Geryon over the eighth ditch. The poet, feeling the tail of the monster move in the air and gather it like a swimmer, fears falling back into the abyss and compares his own fear to that experienced by Phaethon and by Icarus. According to the note to verse 109, Icarus is the famous son of Daedalus, for whom his father had built two great wings to escape from the Labyrinth; the youth, having heedlessly approached the Sun, feels the wax melting on his shoulders. The note to verse 111 points out that the cry "Mala via tieni!" ("You take the wrong way!") is a vivid invention of Dante, a recreation of the Ovidian scene (Metamorphoses VIII 183-235) from the helpless gaze of Daedalus watching his son fall. The figure is thus called upon as a mythical image of the great fear of flight and of falling from on high, not as a character placed in a precise circle of Hell.