Daidalon

Daedalus, the legendary craftsman of Crete who built the Labyrinth for King Minos and wings for himself and his son Icarus, was said to have made statues so lifelike that they moved. Greek writers treat it as common knowledge. Aristotle repeats a comic poet's claim that Daedalus made a wooden Aphrodite move by pouring quicksilver into it, and in the Politics he pairs the statues of Daedalus with Hephaestus's tripods as tools that could work on their own.

Plato turned the joke into philosophy. In the Meno, Socrates explains why knowledge is worth more than true opinion. True opinions are like the statues of Daedalus: unless you tie them down, they run away. While they stay they are beautiful and useful, but they slip out of the mind, and they are not worth much until you fasten them with “the tie of the cause”, by reasoning out why they are true. Then they become knowledge, and they stay.

In the Euthyphro, Socrates, who claimed Daedalus as an ancestor, complains that every definition he and Euthyphro set up keeps walking off. He would give the wisdom of Daedalus and the wealth of Tantalus, he says, to make them stand still. The Greek daidalon means a cunningly wrought thing, and Homer uses the word for the intricate works of Hephaestus's forge.