The Best Hands in Athens

Greek tradition makes Daedalus the craftsman other craftsmen are measured against, and gives him a name that means something close to cunningly wrought. Homer already knows him: the Iliad credits him with a dancing floor built at Knossos for Ariadne, which is a strange thing to be famous for and exactly the kind of thing he is famous for. Apollodorus supplies the reason he left Athens at all. He was tried before the Areopagus for killing his own apprentice, and the account has him go to Crete, where Minos had work for a man with his hands.