Perdix (mythology)

The best-known version of the story of Perdix (Greek πέρδιξ " partridge " ), also known as Talos or Kalos, is found in Ovid's Metamorphoses, VIII 236-259. He is the nephew of the famous architect Daedalus and is given by his mother, his sister, with 12 years to his uncle apprenticed. He shows amazing talent and invents inter alia, the saw, the compass and the potter's wheel. Daedalus is jealous of him and finally plunges him by Athena's sacred castle down.

But Athena is very gifted people weighed, she catches the boy and turned him into a bird, specifically in a partridge ( Perdix perdix ). However, for fear of the height of this new bird always flies close to the ground.

This metamorphosis has therefore both an explanatory and cautionary function. Perdix, the partridge, then was in fact a constant reproach to the envious Daedalus, inter alia, it seems to express Schadenfreude by his lute as Daedalus 's son Icarus, who had flown too close to the sun, so that their heat the wax of his wings melted, must be buried in Ikaria.

In the older Greek literature Perdix is the sister of Daedalus; her son's name, however, Talos.

• Person of Greek mythology