In Greek myth, who flew too close to the sun?

Icarus, whose father Daedalus built wings of feathers and wax to escape Crete, and warned him to fly neither too low, where the sea spray would soak the feathers, nor too high, where the sun would melt the wax. The half of the instruction everyone forgets is the first one.

That is the more interesting reading of the story. It is usually told as a warning against ambition, but Daedalus gave a warning against both extremes, and the moral of the middle way is at least as available as the moral of hubris. Icarus dies of not listening rather than of aiming high.

Daedalus is the darker figure. He was already in Crete because he had fled Athens after murdering his nephew Perdix, who had invented the saw after studying a fish's spine and was showing signs of surpassing him. He built the labyrinth that held the Minotaur, and then had to escape the king who had commissioned it. The father in the story is a man whose ingenuity has repeatedly cost other people their lives, and it ends by costing him his son.