Icarus on holiday # 8

I have been thinking about Ovid, Virgil, Apollodorus, Pausanias and Diodorus. Thinking about why they all did something with the Icarus myth and how it survived through and often despite them into the twenty-first century. Its odd, really, that such myth should do that, become a trope for artists, poets and the like and how they should keep it alive. But what interests me most is the constant misinterpretation of the Ovid story - the folly of the boy and all that, which persists stubbornly. Stories are like that, often masquerading as truth then they take on a life of their own, its how rubbish newspapers and indeed governments work. Did Blair and Bush lie about Iraq, did Obama lie about Guantanamo, is Putin lying about a Malaysian airline - tell me this, why is a government giving terrorists weapons that can shoot a plane out of the sky when it is flying at 35,000 feet? Daedalus was a liar, Ovid makes that clear (to me at least) but he wasn’t alone. These days its easier to find out so we are using increasing new ways to suppress it - but it was ever thus...