Talos: The Bronze Giant Who Guarded Crete

A bronze giant who circled Crete three times a day hurling rocks at ships, powered by a single vein sealed with a nail.

Talos was a giant bronze guardian of Crete who circled the island three times a day and threw rocks at ships, until Medea caused the divine fluid in his one vein to drain out.

Talos is a giant made of bronze who guarded the island of Crete. The fullest account is in the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, written around 250 BCE. When Jason and the Argonauts try to land, Talos breaks off rocks and throws them at the ship. Apollonius says he was "of the stock of bronze", a survivor of the bronze race of men sprung from ash trees, and that Zeus gave him to Europa "to stride round the island thrice a day with his feet of bronze."

His weakness was specific. "In all the rest of his body and limbs was he fashioned of bronze and invulnerable; but beneath the sinew by his ankle was a blood-red vein." The sorceress Medea defeats him by casting an evil eye and spells, and he grazes his ankle on a rock so the divine ichor pours out and he crashes to the ground.

The mythographer Apollodorus gives more versions: Talos was either a bronze man of the bronze race or a gift made by Hephaestus to Minos. He had one vein running from neck to ankles, closed by a bronze nail. Medea either drugged him or promised to make him immortal and pulled out the nail, and he bled to death. Other sources say he heated himself red-hot and crushed strangers against his chest.

Historians of technology, especially Adrienne Mayor in Gods and Robots (2018), treat Talos as one of the earliest imagined automatons: a manufactured guardian with a single fluid system and a maintenance plug. Coins from the Cretan city of Phaistos show a winged Talos. Whether he was imagined as a machine or as a living survivor of an older race depends on the version.