Caelum Ipsum Petimus: Daedalus and Icarus in Horace’s Odes
By Cynthia Hornbeck
Abstract: Horace uses the myth of Daedalus’ flight and Icarus’ fall to explore the risks inherent in
artistic creation, to interrogate the dichotomy between art and nature and to probe the difficulties
of poetic imitation. Each of the three programmatic poems (Odes 1.3, 2.20, and 4.2) presents a
different speaker with a distinct attitude towards the mythical father and son; all three
acknowledge the possibility of artistic failure. Read together in sequence, they show how a poet’s
ambitions, anxieties, and relationship to his predecessors evolve over the course of his career.
Source: The Classical Journal , Vol. 109, No. 2 (December 2013-January 2014), pp. 147-169