From the Vault: Talos

Among the many humanoid gods and bestial monsters of Greek mythology, one finds a peculiar outlier: Talos the bronze automaton. Said to stalk the shores of Crete, Talos pelted suspicious ships with rocks and immolated enemy soldiers with its smoldering embrace. Does this myth reveal Greek attitudes toward technology? What existing technologies can we decode in its description? Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore in this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. (Originally published Jan. 2, 2018)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
I think we're supposed to venture into the vault, but
I'm hearing some odd creaking and squealing of metal in
there that is giving me pause. Ah. Yes, we're going
to be talking about Talos, the the automaton of of

(00:26):
Greek myth in this episode. This, I have to say,
Uh an episode that air January two, two thousand eighteen.
One of my favorite episodes of I think one of
mine too. This one was a lot of fun. Uh.
And you know who would have thought that the best
traditions of thinking about robot life go all the way
back to ancient Greece. It's true. Let's pull the plug
out let that ecore drain. Welcome to Stuff to Blow

(00:51):
your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey are
you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind? My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're
gonna be talking about themes of technology in ancient Greek literature.
But before we get there, we have to go to
the slightly related, actually very related topic of what's your

(01:15):
favorite killer robot movie, Robert? Oh, well, you know, outside
of some of the obvious choices from say, you know,
the Terminator movies, can't say Terminator or even the RoboCop movies,
you get into a weird territory. Is that a robot?
Is it a cyborg? Right? I would say my easy
pick is the killer red robot Maximilian from the Disney

(01:35):
movie The Black Hole. Oh yeah, I've never seen it.
Oh he's terrifying because he just he floats around feet
do not touch the surface of the ship and has
his menacing red visor that just peers into your soul
and has the spinning blade hands that it utilizes to
at one point murder Anthony Perkins and cold Blood No

(01:55):
Anthony Perkins. Yeah, well after Psycho, I guess he had it. Well,
you know, and this movie is great. In this movie,
you felt sorry for him if he showed up showing
up in Psycho. Other than that would that would be
a different matter altogether. Now I have probably got to
go to the movie. Chopping Mall is a eighties robots
slasher set in a shopping mall at night where security

(02:17):
robots go haywire. I think their computer gets struck by
lightning or something, and then they decide, well, they've got
to kill all the people who are hanging out overnight
in the in the mall. That is a delicious movie. Yeah.
But also, how about You'll Brenner in the original West World.
Oh yeah, he's super menacing and I'm up until his
face falls off, I guess. But before Westworld was like

(02:38):
a thoughtful HBO series, it was a cheesy old movie
with your You'll Brenner pulling guns on people. Yeah, yeah,
he was. He was terrifying. He I mean, you Brenner
was always entertaining, but he was kind of made to
play a killer, emotionless robot. I would say some of
the best killer robots stuff in movies. When killer robots
are scary, the fact that they're scary comes in not

(03:00):
from malice or ill intent like it might in a
monster or in a human villain or something like that.
The great thing about a killer robot in a scary
movie is that it's terror is derived from the fact
that it has no will of its own or no intention.
It's just sort of like an efficient, emotionless killing machine.

(03:20):
All it has is directive and it it absolutely will
not stop until it achieves it. Now, we obviously think
of themes like this emerging in the fiction primarily of
the twentieth century. Right, that's when we think science fiction
in earnest really shows up the way we know it now.
I know you have Jules Verned before that, but the
twentieth century is when you really start getting your killer
robots everywhere. But today we're going to go back. Oh yes,

(03:44):
we're gonna go back to a fabulous example of what
is perhaps the very first killer robot that humans ever
dreamt up. And it it's not from the twentieth century.
It's not from the nineteenth or even eight. It is
from the ancient Greek world. And its name is Talos. Talos, yes,

(04:05):
the man of Bronze, the bronze automaton. I want to
quote from Edith Hamilton's version of the Classic story of
the Quest for the Golden Fleece, now Edith Hamilton's Classic Mythology,
that this is a great old textbook on Greek mythology.
If you haven't had a chance to check it out,
it's just wonderful to leave through. Every personal library needs

(04:26):
a copy of this. But so she does a really
good job of taking disparate elements of story traditions and
sort of pasting them together into composite, synthetic versions of
the stories. So I want to sort of summarize the
Quest for the Golden Fleece. You can't hit all the
great points, but here's how it goes. So you've got
this young hero Jason, and in order to reclaim his

(04:49):
rightful kingdom from a usurper king, Jason is on a
quest to retrieve a sacred artifact, which is a golden
fleece from a magic ram that saved the life of
a Greek prints long ago. And he's accompanied by a
crew of other heroes known as the Argonauts. This is
where we get Jason and the Argonauts, and on the
way to retrieve the artifact, he has to face many

(05:10):
trials with his companions. One of the trials that Hamilton's
talks about is how Hercules is on the on the
ship with him and hercules friend gets yanked down into
a spring by this nymph type creature and Hercules is
roaming around the woods trying to find him and eventually
gets lost and wanders off. So you would think, you know,
you got Hercules and your crew, You're set but it

(05:31):
turns out he's easily distracted. Yes. Another trial is when
Jason and the Argonauts have to battle with evil harpies
on behalf of this wretched old man who has the
gift of future site. So the old man is a prophet,
but he's been cursed so that anytime he goes to
eat some food, harpies zoomed down down out of the
sky and they terrorize him, and they foul the food

(05:54):
he's eating. I'm not sure exactly what they do to it.
It's they're described as foul smelling, so maybe they just
put him off fit well, and I'm just imagining just
a tussle of harpy feathers and and harpy excrement and
just all manner of nastiness. Yeah, And so they have
to sail their ship through some crashing rocks and all
all kinds of stuff like that. But eventually Jason is

(06:15):
able to capture the artifacts the Golden Fleece, but only
with the help of the powerful witch Princess Medea. Uh,
one of the greatest sorceresses in all of fiction media.
Is awesome. So she has fallen in love with him,
but not entirely of her own volition, because she was
compelled into love by an arrow of Cupid, because Aphrodite

(06:38):
intervened on his behalf. So after they get the fleece,
Jason and Medeia and the rest of the crew of
the Argo or sailing towards Jason's home. And on the
journey they passed by the island of Crete, and here
I want to read a direct quote from Hamilton's telling
of the story. Next came Crete, where they would have
landed but for Medea. She told them that Talus lived there,

(07:01):
the last man left of the ancient Bronze race, a
creature made all of bronze except one ankle, where alone
he was vulnerable. Even as she spoke, he appeared terrible
to behold, and threatened to crush the ship with rocks
if they drew nearer. They rested on their oars, and Medea, kneeling,

(07:22):
prayed to the hounds of Hades to come and destroy him.
The dread powers of evil heard her, as the bronze
man lifted a pointed crag to hurl it at the Argo.
He grazed his ankle and the blood gushed forth until
he sank and died. Then the heroes could land and
refresh themselves for the voyage still before them. Now, this

(07:44):
is only one telling of the story of Talos, the
mighty Man of Bronze, And to get a little bit
more detail, I think we should look at a translation
of the text of the story as told by Apollonius
of Rhodes in his work the Argonautica, which is one
version of of this story I've just been talking about. Yes,
Apollonius rights he was of the stock of bronze, of

(08:04):
the men's spring from ash trees, the last left among
the sons of the gods, and the sons of Chronos
gave him to Europa to be the warder of Crete
and destride around the island thrice a day with his
feet of bronze. Now, in all the rest of his
body and limbs he was fashioned of bronze and invulnerable.
But beneath the sinew of his ankle was a blood

(08:27):
red vein, and this, with its issue of life and death,
was covered by a thin skin. Now, so you've got
a bronze guy. You got a bronze guy, and he
has this weak point in his his his ankle, very
much like Achilles. The legend of Achilles also weak only
in his ankle, his heel, right, because that's where he
was held as he was dipped into into the river sticks.

(08:50):
But we get a different explanation for the vulnerability in
this story. Now it's a technological vulnerability. Yeah, And I
think this is this is the key, and this is
something we're going to discuss over and over in in
this episode. Is that it's easy to just dismiss this
tale because Talus does not have other adventures. He basically
shows up kind of like a Dungeon and Dragons random

(09:11):
encounter and he's dispatched. The main story about him is
his death right. And you can also say, well, Italy
sounds a lot like Achilles. It's kind of like a
bronze It's like a robot knockoff of Achilles to a
certain extent. But when you really start digging into it,
the technological aspect of this is absolutely phenomenal. Now, one
great source on the tradition of the Talus character is

(09:36):
the author Merlin Paris, who wrote the article Talos and Dadalus,
a Review of the authorship of the Abominable Bronze Man
in the Ceylon Journal of Humanities from nineteen seventy one
and this is a fantastic article, so we will bring
him up several times throughout this episode. Now, one thing
Paris points out is that not all versions of the

(09:56):
Talus story described Talus exactly the same. Sometimes his body
he has different features or characteristics depending on who the
author is, Yes, and is we'll discuss. Even the size fluctuates.
One thing we always have to remember with Greek myths
in particular is that they evolve. I mean, all myths
are subject to change over time and over place, depending

(10:17):
on who's telling the tale and when they are telling it.
And that's certainly the case with Greek mythology. So for example,
Apollonius of Rhodes, who was writing in the third century,
had said that this this vein, this vein inside him,
was only apparent under the sinew of his ankle, right,
the one ankle. Yeah, But then there are other accounts
that say that it's stretched from the neck down to

(10:38):
both ankles. So that was Appolodorus, right, Yes, So this
vein is full of what's known as ichor, which in
Greek myth is the lifeblood of the gods. Sometimes it's
described as golden instead of red, though, and most of
the stories I've seen about tall Us. It is described
as red in the Iliad. When the gods, for example Aphrodite,

(10:58):
are cut or dabbed with spears. They can be harmed,
their skin can be pierced, and they leak fluid. But
the fluid they leak is not blood but ecore. So
to quote from the Iliad, quote the point tore through
the ambrosial robe which the graces had woven for Aphrodite,
and pierce the skin between her wrist and the palm

(11:19):
of her hand, so that the immortal blood or echore
that flows in the veins of the blessed gods came
pouring from the wound. For the gods do not eat
bread nor drink wine, hence they have no blood such
as ours and our immortal. I love the conflicting ideas here,
like the idea that the god can be injured and
the god can bleed, but they are in some sense immortal.

(11:41):
They have bodies, they can leak fluid, they can be hurt,
but the idea of immortality is somehow more bound up
in what goes into their body and what comes out
of it than what can be done to it. Yes,
and it's it's important to note here that this does
not mean Talus is a god. All all of counts
indicate that he is a manufactured thing. But of course

(12:04):
the manufacturer changes depending on the different tales. But but
still he is. He is like this artificial creation that
has been filled with life because he's been filled with
the core. So the ecre maybe for for the bronze men,
Talus is not essential to his nature, but is something
that has been used to give him the properties he has,
maybe the properties of life for animation. Right, yeah, this

(12:27):
it's the gasoline for your large bronze death gollum, the
oil in the car. Now this makes me think about
how both monsters and robots and fiction are often identified
by the different color of their blood. I think about
like the Aliens and the X Files that have green blood,
or you know, it's not just the X Files. I
think about it. There's a great scene in Fright Night

(12:50):
where there's a guy who you just think is like
a normal vampire, is familiar, but then he starts bleeding
and I think his blood is green? Is that right?
I believe so? Yeah. But anyway, it's it's all all
all over the place in fiction. But it's not just
monsters as robots too. I think about ash spraying the
milk white blood everywhere an alien when he gets bashed up,
and I think this goes to the deep metaphorical understanding

(13:12):
we have of blood as like the essence of a person,
in the sense that close family members, which in material
terms are those animals with which you share the most
essential genetic similarity, are quote your blood indeed, And of
course it's also worth noting that I believe film ratings
sometimes come into play. I've I've read that if you

(13:33):
have a humanoid spouting green, pink, white, or say amber blood,
you can still earn yourself with PG. Thirteen. But if
it's if the if the stuff is red, then you're
probably gonna get an r. Oh wow, you know I
was gonna say, well, I wonder if that played a
role in it's in its use in the Iliad, But no,
the iliots full of blood. They didn't shy away from
blood there. Oh well, without getting into the whole issue

(13:55):
of of colors in the works of Homer, right, that's
an entirely different maybe for a different day. So Talos,
so we've got him as this bronze man made of
bronze he's got this vein of ecore somewhere in his body,
going down to his ankle or both ankles, that contains
this lifeblood or essential ethereal liquid inside the gods that

(14:17):
has animated this bronze creature to some extent. And he
stands on the island throwing rocks at any ship that
tries to dock. We saw in Apollonius Tail that he
apparently runs around the island of crete three times a day,
three times a day, and it is impossible. I was
tempted to do the math on it, or I was
actually kind of surprised that nobody else has a paper

(14:37):
out there breaking down exactly how fast and how large
Talos would have to be to pull this off. But
that's not the only thing that Talous can do. So
he can curl rocks at your ship, But what if
you come ashore? Does he still pose a risk? Then? Oh?
Does he? Ever? He has this this beautifully grotesque superpower
of being able to apparently jump into the fire, heat

(14:59):
its body up, and then come out and embrace the enemy.
So here, so the enemy soldiers say they've landed. Here
comes Talis leaping out of the fire, applies a huge
bear hug and just immolates you in his embrace. And
according to that's that's sick, that's amazing. And it gets
even better according to to Merlin Paris. Uh. Some argue

(15:21):
that the term sardonic grin may have originated with the
victims of this death. This at least according to Simonides,
who wrote, the Talis resided in Sardinia before coming to Crete,
and he had already destroyed many of the Sardinians, presumably
leaving them with peeled back, appealed back grin of of
you know, of of the burnt gag. Yeah, the idea

(15:42):
of the grimace And and this is a big question
actually in the etymology of this term. Where does the
idea of the sardonic grin come from? Or the resist sardonicus,
which I think actually literally means sardonic laughter, not sardonic grin,
But the ideas get conflated in the history of the terms. Um,
so yeah, yeah, where does this idea come from? Now?
Another version I've heard, so one is that he is

(16:05):
crushing the Sardinians, and he's crushing them and burning them
with his red hot embrace, and that in their death
their grimaces turned into grins. But then also I Paris
talks about the idea that the grin goes to the
robot itself, right that this that Talos would grin have
this creepy grin when he was hugging people to death

(16:27):
with his burning arms. Another version of the explanation for this,
which is kind of a side note from Talis. But
I thought it was interesting, so I should bring it up.
No one knows for sure where it came from, but
the idea of the sardonic grin has also been potentially
traced to a totally different Sardinian threat. So ancient historians

(16:47):
told these stories that on the island of Sardinia, the
pre Roman inhabitants had this ritual custom for dealing with
criminals and for euthanizing elderly people who couldn't care for themselves.
And what they do is they would drug them with
an intoxicating poison that caused the victim's facial muscles to
contract into a creepy grin and become paralyzed, hence the

(17:10):
sardonic grin of Sardinia. And then while the victims were
drugged out, they could be thrown off a cliff or
beaten to death. It started offstounding reasonably humane for the
ancient world, and maybe it still is, depending on how
you look at it. There's just not much that's reasonably
humane in the ancient world. But anyway, so in two
thousand nine, a study by scientists at the University of

(17:31):
Eastern Piedmont in Italy claimed to trace this story, if true,
to an herb native to Sardinia called the hemlock water
drop ward or Enanth crocata, also known commonly as water celery.
But this is not a good candidate to stick in
your bloody mary, because the stem and the root of
this plant are apparently a significant threat to fatal human poisonings.

(17:53):
One example, sometime in the late nineties, a Sardinian shepherd
committed suicide by eating water drop ward, and his corpse
was apparently found grinning. Now, the name en anth means
wine flower, and Crocata in particular has apparently a quote
paradoxical Swedish and pleasant taste and odor, and this makes
it more dangerous than a lot of other plants, especially

(18:15):
plants in the same genus, which are also poisonous but
have a bitter taste which kind of keeps you from
eating too much of it, and because of its ability
to cause the facial muscles to contract into the risus sardonicus,
and because Sardinia is the only place in the Mediterranean
where this plant commonly grows, the researchers think that it
is probably the Sardinian death or from the ancient stories,

(18:36):
and thus the origin of the idea of the sardonic grin.
Now back to Talos though. Okay, so I'm sorry to
take a sup It's a fascinating diversion, but the bronze
killer oasis is will explore. There are two key origin
stories for this mechanical marvel. So in some tales he
had been Really most of the older tales he was

(18:59):
created by Festus, the god of the forge, the later
known as Vulcan, the blacksmith god of Olympus. Yeah, the
deformed god who and who. If you visit Birmingham, Alabama,
you get to see his likeness on the horizon because
they have the statue of Vulcan. I didn't know that. Yeah,
it's it's interesting. It's one of the few I guess

(19:20):
pagan uh tourist stops in the American South. But in
later tellings, Uh the inventor Dadalists constructs this artificial being. Yeah,
the master inventor, the creator of the Manoan Mayze, the
Wings of Icarus and other marvels, the famed mythical inventor. Yeah,
and it's but this is interesting as well because Talos,

(19:44):
the the bronze automaton here curiously bears the same name
as the inventor the Dadalists tried to murder out of
jealousy earlier on, pushing him out of it out of
a tower, although Athena saves this more total Talus by
turning him into a partridge so we can fly away. Yeah,
and his paper Paris talks about the the number of

(20:07):
stories along these lines. But it's like an Athenian tradition
that Daedalus was in Athens and he had this pupil
who was very talented, and he was a little too talented,
so Dadalus got a little territorial, got a little jealous,
and pushed him off the acropolis. Yeah. That the original Talus,
if we want to call him that, the mortal Talus.
He's attributed with with inventing the saw really things, So yeah,

(20:29):
Deedal is the standing. There's like jeezus saw that's genius.
Why didn't I think of that? I just want to
push you out of a towel, and he does. This
is a great argument for not showing up your boss
in a meeting or being too clever. You're gonna get
pushed out of a tower. You just know it's coming exactly.
No One. Last note about that Talus. That original human
Talus was apparently also known as Callous in some traditions,

(20:52):
so there's some differences in the name. But anyway, so
back to tell Us in the story of the Golden Fleet.
So you've got Jason and the Argonauts and Dia especially
now in most of the good versions of the story,
Media is the one who takes him down right right
and it and most of them, and has to do
with the removing of a bronze nail from that ankle again,

(21:13):
that weak point that's that's connected to the vein that
runs all the way through Talus's body. Uh, she unplugs it.
She unplugs the bronze nail, which causes uh the echer
to pour out of his body, draining him of all
life and movement. And there's actually a wonderful vase and
Athenian vase from four hundred b C. That illustrates this,

(21:35):
and I'll make sure to include that image on the
landing page for this episode's Stuff to Blow your Mind
dot Com, you should take a look at this because
it's awesome. Talus has ripped. His pecks are like the
size of cars. But actually, one thing that you might
notice in this vase is that, so, okay, you've got
a bronze man and he seems to be stumbling and

(21:56):
falling down, but he's the same size as all the
other dudes are round him, which makes sense when you
think about the the the the embrace, the deadly burning
bear hug of the giant exactly. So when I read
this story in the say the version told by Apollonius
of Rhodes, I think of Talus as this hundred foot

(22:17):
tall giant, and it seems that most modern commentators have
just assumed him to be towering, to be a giant,
like in the Ray Harry House in movies, where when
you see tal Us he's this huge godzilla like figure.
But Paris points out that most of the ancient authors
didn't describe him this way, and that logically, like you're
saying he couldn't have been that much bigger than a man.

(22:39):
How else could he do this, this heating embrace, heating,
the scalding, burning, roasting embrace. Now, one exception to this
seems to be the author of the Orphic Argonautica, which
is a different telling of the Argonautica, who called him
quote a bronze thrice giant or tree giganta. The line

(23:00):
from there is we suffered a great enemy on crete
when we observed a bronze giant who allowed no one
to go into the harbor. So at least some ancient
authors picked up on this idea that he was a giant,
but it's not there in most of the stories, and
most he's more like the tin man or something that's
very strong, powerful metal figure, but basically human sized. Yeah,
and and I believe there's also sometimes some crossover from

(23:24):
accounts of the Colossus of Rhodes. Oh yeah, you know,
the the literally a giant statue that stood as a
sort of a guardian of of the harbor. Yeah, so
wait a minute, we got to go back to how
tell Us gets defeated in those stories. So there are
four different versions of his death that seemed to exist,
but they all relate to draining the equal out of

(23:45):
the ankle. So in one uh, the hero poets shoots
him in the ankle, which is is one I reject.
That's no fun, don't don't give this guy a chance
to do it. It's this is a media's role, right.
So there's another one where Medea's tricks him into thinking
she can make him immortal by pulling out the nail.

(24:06):
Now this is a common trick up Medea's sleeve because
later in the same story, Media also kills the usurper
king by tricking him into thinking he can be immortal.
Actually not by tricking him, but she plays this wonderfully
fatal and devious hoax on the daughters of the pretender
king that Jason is trying to get his throne back from.
I believe his name is Pelias, right, So she goes

(24:28):
to Pelias's daughters and says, hey, look, I can make
an old lamb young again. Or not not not a lamb,
I guess an old ram And so she chops it up,
puts it in boiling water, and does a spell to
make a young lamb jump out. And then so Pelias's
daughters are like, well, great, we're gonna do that for
Dad Happy birthday. And so they chop him up and

(24:49):
they boil him, and they try to do the spell
and it doesn't work. She's something of an anti hero,
isn't she. Yeah? Well, no, I mean Media, you gotta
feel for her like she's she's the I would say
she's the maragic heroine despite all of the killing she does. Yeah.
The other two versions of this relate to magical efforts
on Media's part, her hypnotic gaze spells, or even some

(25:12):
sort of a magical potion of a drugging of Talus
if you will that somehow make him stumble and rupture
his ankle on a rock, or or at least open
him up for attack, allow her to move in and
pull that nail from the membrane. I would say the
actual text of the Argonautica is too good not to read,
so I think we should read the section where Media

(25:32):
kills tell Us in side note, this would be a
good one to throw some drums over some good and
the barbarian trumps exactly, so please sub them in here.
So the Talus shows up on a cliff, he threatens
to crush them with rocks, and Media tells Jason and
his men to back away from the shore and let
her take care of it. And then the translation of
what follows is by RC. Seaton. And with songs did

(25:54):
she propitiate and invoke the death spirits, devourers of life,
the swift hounds of Hades, who, hovering through all the air,
swooped down on the living, kneeling in supplication. Thrice she
called on them with songs, and thrice with prayers, and
shaping her soul to mischief. With her hostile glance, she

(26:15):
bewitched the eyes of Talus, the man of bronze, and
her teeth gnashed bitter wrath against him, and she sent
forth baneful phantoms in the frenzy of her rage. Father Zeus,
surely great wonder rises in my mind, seeing that dire
destruction meets us not from disease and wounds alone, but
low even from afar. Maybe it tortures us so Tallos

(26:41):
for all his frame of bronze yielded the victory to
the might of Medea the Sorceress. And as he was
heaving massy rocks to stay them from reaching the haven,
he grazed his ankle on a pointed crag, and the
ecre gushed forth like melted lead, and not long thereafter
did he stand tower ring on the jutting cliff. But

(27:02):
even as some huge pine high up on the mountains,
which woodmen have left half hewn through their sharp axes
when they returned from the forest. At first it shivers
in the wind by night, then at last snaps at
the stump and crashes down. So Tallos for a while
stood on his tireless feet, swaying to and fro, when

(27:23):
at last, all strengthless fell with a mighty thud. Oh
that's beautiful. I love that. That is a robot death scene.
If ever, I have read one that's better than the
T one thousand melting. That's better than any of it.
And I should also note it's better than what we
see in the nineteen three film Jason and the Argonauts
with those wonderful Ray Harry hoous In effects, because in

(27:44):
that one, Jason kills Tallis rather than media sexist red
con and it's boring too. Jason just runs up to
his foot and pulls the thing out, and then all
the fluid gushes out of him and he falls over.
Why I mean, you gotta give media some spells to
do I agree, she's in the movie, you might as
well use her for that purpose. Is she not in
the movie at that point? I don't remember. I believe

(28:06):
she shows up after the Talus encounter, and they encounter
Talus not on crete but on some island of bronze
or something. Well, that's a bummer. You gotta get the
Hounds of Hades. You do the Hounds eighties. That's a
great line. Now. I love the way Media does this
because she's like, of course, you got Jason and all
his meathead buddies that I guess they probably just want

(28:27):
to rush in there and slash him up with swords.
But Medeia is like, hold on, I got this. And
that's actually possibly there in her name, because, as Adrian
Mayor points out, the name Medeia seems to be derived
from a Greek word that means to plan or to devise.
Whereas she's surrounded by these heroes who are who are
powerful because they're strong and brave. She's powerful because she's

(28:50):
cunning and she can think it out. So she's definitely
one of the really cool aspects of this story. Yeah,
the other, of course, being the giant bronze robot. Yes,
so where does Talus come from in the literary tradition,
like where where whence this Bronze Sentinel. We're gonna answer
that question when we come back. All right, we're back.

(29:13):
So before we proceed here, I want to read this
excellent quote from Merlin Paris in that Talos in Dentalist
article that we've been discussing, that really drives home why
we're doing an episode about this myth. To begin with quote,
Talus was not a mortal creature like the rest of them,
but a product of the Bronze founder's art. In other words,

(29:37):
we have in him a robot, perhaps man's first conception
of such, not only in the outer form, but replete
within an imaginary mechanical device which was thought to activate him.
And in this capacity he does not draw his plausibility,
as the other monsters did, from the wild and fantastic
natures that belong to prehistory. Rather, he is remarkably futuristic,

(29:58):
anticipating the s scientific possibilities of the present age, and
even then belonging more with the bizarre imaginings of the
new mythology of science fiction than with the mechanisms created
and used in real life. I think something that's interesting
about looking at the fantastical literature of the ancient world
is that a lot of times we have trouble discerning

(30:20):
the difference between what was to them sort of magic
fantasy and what was to them their equivalent of science
fiction as we would imagine it today, because to us
it all looks ancient, it's all, you know, because they're
forward looking. Is still sort of backward to us. But
I think there's a lot of literature in the ancient

(30:42):
world that could quite well be characterized as sort of
like science fiction. I think sometimes when you read, for example,
the Book of Revelation or other apocalyptic literature we read
that now is featuring is kind of like, uh, epic
fantasy or something like that. But I think from the
time it was created, the attitude toward it would have

(31:05):
been more like our ideas, like dystopian future sci fi.
I think that's a strong point. Yes. Now at this
point where we want to just discuss some of the
different versions of the tale relating where Talos came from,
because they're important in breaking down what this tale says
about technology. So the first one that we've been talking

(31:26):
about a good bit has been the story told by
Apollonius of Rhodes and the Argonautica. Right, Yeah, this is
the idea that he was a survivor of the Age
of Bronze. And this is something that Merlin Paris viewed
as a quote dubious tradition. So that the Bronze Age
we're discussing here, this is not an historical time period.
This is not the technological Bronze Age that we will

(31:47):
talk about that later. Yeah, what we're discussing here is
one of the poet Hesiods five races, a race of
humans created by Zeus from ash trees, violent clad in bronze,
destroyed in the flood of de Coulian, who is the
son of Prometheus and who is now confined to the
quote dank house of Hades. Hades house. I didn't even

(32:09):
know it was dank. Yeah, it's dank down there. So
this would frame Talos as the last Bronze man, given
by Zeus to Europa to protect her children, and then
given to Minos to guard Crete. However, there seems little
to suggest that anyone else viewed the Bronze Men as
actual men of Bronze, and Paris suspects that this was
Apollonius's invention. Okay, so we're seeing sort of a mishmash

(32:32):
of different ideas here. You've got Hessia's bronze age of
of creatures, these human creatures who are not literally made
of bronze. But but it seems like Apollonius is sort
of taking that idea and applying it to a creature
that he does say explicitly is made of bronze. Again,
myths evolved, and myths are retold and retold and changed.

(32:52):
So if he's made of bronze, who made him? Well.
In the most popular version of the tale, as we've discussed,
Talos is the create is a creation, a machine of
some sort, born from the forge, and in the earlier traditions,
the creator is Hephaestus, a k Vulcan god of the forge.
In Homer's the Iliad were told that Hephaestus creates golden
females and wheel driven tripod stools to serve the table

(33:16):
of the gods, and he's also the one who forged
the armor or the armors of Achilles. Simonides, among others,
identified Talus as a creature of Hephaestus. Okay, so created
by the gods, that sort of takes away to some
extent for me, the sci fi nature of the creature. Right.
If it's an animated statue of bronze, but it's created

(33:37):
by the gods, it seems like it's nature is essentially magical. Right. Yeah. Now,
Paris reminds us that the association here might have been
that Tallus was a creation in the art of Hephestus,
perhaps by another. And I suppose this would be like
using satanic magic to make a monster, right, who is
who is the master of the monster. Who's the true
monster maker? Here? Is the wizard or the devil? Over time, though,

(34:01):
we see this growth of association with Daedalus, and I
think this is where we really can get into some
fun questions about technology. So in time, Daedalus comes to
serve as a human representative, representative of the skills and
crafts that have fastest rules. Over so, the mythological inventor. Again,
he said to have had walking statues of his own.
He created the Minoan maze and crafted the wings of Icarus.

(34:23):
He was a master of at least art, if not technology. Yeah,
and usually in the traditions, both or at least over time,
Both and Paris makes a lot of this history of
associations between Dadalus and statuary that he was a great
innovator in lifelike sculptures. For example, Paris points out the
Diadorus writes quote in the sculptor's art, he Dadalus so

(34:47):
far excelled all other men. The statues he made were
like human beings. They could see, they said, and walk,
and in a word, preserved so well the composition of
the whole Boddy, that is handiwork seemed to be a
living creature. So what have you the Skeptically, it just
sounds like he's he's an accomplished sculpture and can make

(35:09):
life life like sculptures. Right. But this does seem to
be taken literally all over the place, Like there are
Platonic dialogues where Socrates and it's there in the Youth
of Row, and it's there in the Menno. I think
they're Platonic dialogues where Socrates talks about Dadalus's statues literally
walking away, so he'll use them as a metaphor for something.

(35:29):
It's like, don't let this thing get away from you,
like Dadalus's statues walking off from the workshop. But the
idea of the innovation of lifelike poses and artistic sculpture
does make me think about how when you look at
Stone Age figurines. Maybe I just haven't seen enough of them,
but almost all the ones I can think of seem

(35:49):
to be posed with arms at their sides, almost like corpses.
They don't seem to be an action. Even the Lowan
Minch is like this, all the Venus figurines, the Lowan Minch.
I'm just racking my brain for Stone Age statues that
really have much much action or stuff going on, as
if they're alive. But once you get closer to the

(36:10):
modern Age, once you get the empires of Egypt and elsewhere,
I guess later in the Stone Age and into the
Bronze Age, you start to see more figurines of humans
animated with action, like the striding figurines of ancient Egypt. Robert,
I know you've seen these right where their legs are
clearly like walking there like the walk sign on the street. Yes,
walking like an Egypt And if you will and uh

(36:34):
so you add to this. Paris says the Athenian tradition
about Dadalus that we talked about earlier, which to remind
you is that he once had a young pupil named
Talos or Kalos, who was so talented that Dadalust got
really jealous pushed him off the acropolis to his death.
And then for this crime, Dadalus was banished to crete.
And then meanwhile Paris notes that there are these traditions

(36:56):
suggesting that the ancient Greeks knew of historical talo ay
the plural of Talus in places like Attica and Sardinia,
which were not actual robots but braunze statues set up
on rocky coastlines as figures of apotropaic magic, meaning warding
off magically gargoyles, driving away evil forces and beings, and

(37:18):
Paris mentions the idea that there could have been such
a figure once posed on the acropolis which fell off.
And so for Paris, it seems like these disparate narrative
traditions and historical memories sort of get blended together into
the idea that Dadalus created Talos not just as a
bronze statue, but as an animated, living, walking bronze robot.

(37:42):
And I have to say, this is the version of
the tale I like the most. I like the idea
that that Dadalus is perhaps using the craft and the
power of Hephaestus, but he's creating a thing himself. Yeah. Oh,
it's much better if it's created by humans instead of
created by the odds, because if it's created by the gods,
like we said, it's magic. If it's created by humans,

(38:03):
this is sci fi. Now, of course, if it's sci fi.
One thing we know from sci fi's you've got to
give a plausible, pseudo scientific explanation for why things work. Right,
you can't just invoke magic. You've got to give some
kind of chemical or material explanation for the technology. Well, yeah,
and we have this idea that perhaps the inventions of
Daedalus are powered by quicksilver. And this Paris says. He

(38:25):
suspects that Sophocles was the one who managed to steer
the tradition towards Daedalus, and this idea of of quicksilver
as the really the animating echo. Now you can see
why that would be the case, because if you've ever
seen quicksilver, it's got this kind of dancing, dancing, jiggling
quality that makes it look as if it's quick, as
if it's alive. And so this provides an interesting chemical

(38:48):
substitute to the mythological magical concept of ecore, the lifeblood
of the gods. Alright, on that note, we're going to
take one more break, and when we come back we
are going to discuss technology. G and tell us. All right,
we're back. Now. We've already talked about the Bronze Age
as defined as one of Hesiod's five ages in the

(39:11):
mythological Bronze Age, But what about the technological Bronze Age. Yeah,
this this is where we get into some really interesting
technological explanations here. So the Bronze Age generally covers the
period of Greek history from thirty BC to tw BC,
and we know that they used other medals during this

(39:32):
time gold, silver, lad tim, electrom and even iron on
rare occasions. Bronze, however, it was the predominant metal of
choice for weapons, tools, vessels, and statuettes. Right, So, what
exactly did it mean for this robot to be composed
of bronze as opposed to any other thing that he
could have been composed of in the story. Well, for starters,

(39:54):
it means that he's composed of bronze, which is an alloy,
which is n cop and ten tin. Yeah, So for
thousands of years before the Bronze Age, people had been
making crafts out of copper. Copper was a metal you
could find in the rocks, but copper was soft and
easily deformed. You can't make a sword out of copper
because you know, you clash against a shield or something

(40:15):
is just gonna bend or break. So the alloy with
tin changed all that and left us with bronze, which
is a metal that changed the world. Yeah. It was
the hardest and strongest metal at their disposal and could
they could form complex shapes with it. Plus there were
no production obstacles for the for preparation because that and
we're talking to casting and the hammering of bronze. All

(40:37):
of this was fully mastered at the time. This was
this was an age of peak bronze technology. Yeah, and
bronze was important. It was a major innovation in the
history of technology because it meant we suddenly had access
to hard objects that could be formed into blades and
pre cast shapes that wouldn't chip or shatter under impact

(40:58):
and could hold a sharp edge after heavy use. Iron,
of course, later would be even stronger, but before people
figured out the process for drawing iron out of its
or at scale, bronze was the best human kind had,
and I've even read I know in the past that
bronze working may have been one of the first real
drivers of long distance trade because sources of tin were

(41:19):
very rare and it often had to be imported to
the Mediterranean or the Mesopotamian empires from somewhere far away,
So you might have you might think, did bronze create
the foundations of globalism? Also, just a side question, I
wonder why it is that so many technological revolutions seem
based on the creation of blades and cutting materials. Well, well,

(41:42):
I think there's there's an answer there that that relates
to the basic nature of humanity. Well, yeah, obviously one
of them is the idea of weapons. But I think
it actually goes deeper than that, because I think it's
almost as if blades, by being able to cleave naturally
adhering materials, represent the very essence of technological power in
the natural world, which is the transformation of things. By

(42:05):
cutting a thing, you change its nature and you shape
it to what you want. Now, that could be changing
the nature of a live person into a dead person,
but it could also be changing the nature of a
piece of wood into a building material that you can
easily work with, or any number of things like that.
Now some of you might be saying, all right, Robert
and Joe, you're you're chewing more than you bid off here,

(42:27):
But I want to add it. In the book The Robot,
The Life Story of a Technology by Lisa Knox, the
author points out that despite the imaginative and symbolic nature
of tales such as this, we shouldn't dismiss connections between
myths and the history of technology, because we if we
look closely, we can derive clues about people's attitudes toward technology,
toward tool making and the use of tools. Joan are

(42:50):
Martens in Greek Bronzes in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
writes that Talos illustrates a recurring trope in Greek myth,
the endowment of works of art with animate being. We
see it in the bull Dedalus makes for Pacife, as
well as such a notable myths as Pandora and Pygmalion.
Quote in the hands of an inspired craftsman, the proper

(43:14):
combination of imitation and imagination could result in a creation
of extraordinary potential the Talos Smith reminds us also that
these creations were always made to serve a purpose, in
the case of the giant, to guard the island of crete.
Here again we've got an author assuming it's a giant. Yeah.
I mean, it's kind of impossible to resist that, but yeah,
I see exactly what's going on here. Uh. Marten's is

(43:38):
drawing this connection between the creative power of human beings
and the idea that you could actually create something animated,
something that's alive. Uh. And we totally see that the
blurring of that distinction in what we were talking about
with Dadalus Daedalus creating lifelike statues and sculptures that at
some point are seen to be literally alive. Now, one

(43:59):
of the cool ways to look at the Talos Smith
is to see it as a metaphor for bronze versus Iron,
of the Bronze age essentially ending and the Iron Age dawning. Uh.
So we've already discussed how in some versions of the myth,
Talos is a gift given to King Minos or another
person of power, and in this Knox points out that

(44:21):
it quote reflects the way that bronze objects were reserved
for the elite classes by the time the Iliad was
first told. So the idea here's that the things size
and power may imply the important civil and military applications
of practical metallurgy. And historians believe that the invaders who
attacked Greece from the north around twelve b c. Used

(44:44):
iron weapons. So it's possible that this tale, this is
a tale of the transition from bronze to iron. It's
a it's showing that here's this marvelous weapon. The symbolic well,
this is basically bronze weaponry and bronze technology incarnate and
it crumbled, it goes up against this new metal that
is even more potent. Well, all the more reason that

(45:06):
you should always show talos being destroyed by magic, the
magic of media and the spells, rather than by just
somebody shooting an arrow. Really good, because if it's magic
that implies, you know, this higher advanced level level of technology,
the iron working of some of their culture is in
fact magic to you. You you can't figure it out,
so it is a power beyond your reach. Now there's

(45:29):
there's one more fascinating technological angle on all of this,
and it it relates to that vein of Talos that
we see. So here's a quote once more from Joan
are Mardens in Greek bronzes. Quote. The myth also relates
in an interesting way to the production of bronze objects.
One's attention is drawn to the mention of a single

(45:49):
vein running through Talos's body and plugged at the ankle,
a detail that may possibly have been taken from the
molds for casting by the lost wax technique, the lost
whack technique. Yes, now tell me about this, Robert, all right, So,
first of all, I do want to mention that this
is an interpretation that seems to originate with British classical
scholar Arthur Bernard Cook, who lived through ninety two. But

(46:13):
the idea here is that the functionality of Tallow's the
thing that gives him live, closely resembles the way you
would make a bronze statue, or at least a statue
at So here's the basic process of creating a bronze work,
an inanimate one, mind, not one that walks around. First
of all, you prepare a core of soil and clay
to mold into a figure. Then you layer that in wax.

(46:36):
Then you add a third layer of fine clay baked
with Courser clay, and this is where you'd sculpt in
the details. Okay, so you've got like a clay mold
and then you put wax around the shape of it,
and then another clay mold on top right, and when
you sculpt in the details, that's of course affecting the
wax underneath. The wax has then left exposed at two
points at the base. Think again to the idea that

(46:58):
there are two veins running down Tallis's body. So this
leaves us with a three layer construction core at the center,
wax representation around it, and a clay mold over the
wax with metal pins holding everything in alignment. And then
once the clay dries, you heat it up and the
wax drains out of those holes, so then you've got

(47:18):
a gap, right, and then that's where you pour molten bronze.
You pour that into the void, and then once it cools,
you remove the clay and the former wax details are
now in bronze. So then you all you have to
do is repair casting flaws, smooth and polish the surface.
Rework the details is needed at additional embellishments as desired
like silver inlays, etcetera, and you have perhaps a being

(47:41):
of bronze. So this means that the Tallos figure as
depicted in myth could be a direct metaphor for how
bronze figures and figurines are created, because it's got this
vein for the wax to drain out. Uh yeah, that
that's really interesting. It is this idea that this this
ng is is mirroring technology in more than one way,

(48:02):
and perhaps this is in doing so in a way
that would have been more obvious I guess to people
hearing the tale, like it might have been kind of
a joke one can imagine at the time. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean I think very often the humor of ancient
myths is lost on us because we don't get the context.
I mean, you can you can even imagine it being
kind of like, hey, you know what this robot's achilles

(48:23):
heal was? What was his achilles heal? We just pulled
the plug out and then everything drained out and he
lost his his life force and then Greek laughter ensus.
It would be almost like if you in you know,
thousands of years, we're looking back on some modern sci
fi story where somebody undoes the killer robot by unplugging
it from the wall. Yes, and they think that, like

(48:44):
that is a wow. It has this long tail that's
attached to the building it's in, and like, what a
strange mythological feature. But in fact it's just a joke
about how easy it is to kill this thing by
unplugging it. Yeah, they might think, well, this is a
metaphor for how shackled to electricity and technology that people
of the time felt, and that and and you know,

(49:05):
all of these various uh, you know, complex interpretations when
it's really just a pluck. Now, speaking of modern times,
what evenything can we draw from tallos about modern technology? Now?
One thing to keep in mind and all of this,
we've talked about how myths change over time, but of
course society changes as well, and there are changes in
like the moral and social dimension of how we treat

(49:29):
our technology. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean there's definitely a sense
in which technology influences the development of human ideology and culture,
but it also goes the other way. Our ideas about
technology come from our values and are the way our
society is ordered in our beliefs. And one example is
I wonder if you can draw broad parallels between the

(49:52):
way technology is envisioned in free societies that value human
rights versus slave own societies, and so. For example, in
his book Politics Aristotle were written around three fifty BC,
Aristotle is writing about the idea of possessions versus instruments,

(50:12):
and he sort of characterizes slaves, who are human beings,
as a type of instrument or tool. He says, quote
for if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying
or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of
dead LUs or the tripods of Hephaestus, which says the
poet quote of their own accord entered the assembly of

(50:35):
the gods, if in like manner at the shuttle would
weave and the plectrum touched the liar without a hand
to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor
masters slaves. So Aristotle believed that that slavery, that that
slavery and being masters were a state of nature. Some people,

(50:56):
for him, were born to be masters, and other people
were born to be slaves, and this was a basic
feature of the character of each person. Now, obviously this
goes completely in the face of our modern ideas about
individual rights and equality and freedoms. This is the worst
part of Aristotle to read, and yet I wonder if
it's illuminating about how perfect perhaps a defender of a

(51:18):
slave owning culture like Aristotle and other Greek elites would
have had to blur the line between human labor and
inanimate technology in order to justify their enslavement of other
humans like but by being pro slavery, they think of
human labor and inanimate labor, or at least as they'd

(51:39):
imagine sort of robot labor in their fantasies, to be
sort of similar things. So we in the modern age
would make a complete, you know, a very hard line
distinction between the labor of human being and the workings
of a mechanical robot. I'm not sure that Aristotle and
many of the Greeks always would. So if they didn't
necessary really make that distinction, how did it inform their

(52:02):
myths and their ideas of automata and and robots and
artificial beings. But this is interesting too when when you consider,
if I remember correctly, our word robot even derives from
an old Slavic word robota, which means a servitude. So
you could you see this definite connection between even our

(52:25):
modern conception of a robot with slavey, slavery or servitude. Yeah,
I think maybe this very firm distinction we make between
human beings and humanoid robots, thinking of them as very different,
fundamentally different things might come from our idea of human rights,
right Like, if you are in a society that just

(52:45):
does not really have the idea of human rights, you
may may very well not have such a clear idea
of the distinction between a human and a robot. Indeed,
and I think we see this line blurred very much
in the different traditions of how the talos is represented.
But what can I wonder what talos can tell us
about modern technology? Well, for one thing, it connects to

(53:07):
ideas about the nature of a robot, like what is
a robot or an android? And could a robot or
an android ever attain the human kind of status we
you know, we've just been talking about the distinction between
humans and robots can but can a robot ascend the
ladder and becomes something we would think of like a
human is a self moved but artificial creature capable of feeling. Now,

(53:31):
Paris says that according to Aristotle, Dadalus statues were able
to quote carry out tasks which they had been instructed
to do or had learned beforehand. So Paris says, the
deadly silence, the impersonal efficiency, the tireless thoroughness with which
he executed his gory tasks mark him out as a
machine without a speck of thought or feeling. And on

(53:56):
Aristotle's idea that a statue, especially a robot, could carry
out tasks which they had been instructed to do or
had learned beforehand, this seems to imply that creative or
novel behaviors are not possible for it that the robot
does as its programmed, but that it can't achieve a
will of its own basically. But then at the same time,

(54:19):
Talos is animated with e coor for the ability to
be self moved like the gods uh and the stories
of Talos several times say he was quote alive, and
that he was quote faded to die, and that when
he fell he was not only deactivated or destroyed, but
he died. Yet again, we're seeing the sort of blurring
of the distinction between a human and a robot. We

(54:41):
would talk about humans and robots much more differently, I think,
in modern science fiction than the ancient Greeks did when
they talked about their their humans and their gods and
their robots. It seems like the lines are much blurrier
all throughout, and certainly we see a lot of modern
science fiction that re blurs those lines. I mean, there's
a true in this amount of of of narrative fund

(55:03):
to be had there. Oh yeah, well, I mean earlier
we brought up the obvious robot of you Ole Brenner
in Westworld, but in the New West World, I think
it spends a lot of times trying to reblur these
lines we were talking about being blurrier in the ancient
literature but becoming more distinct in the twentieth century. If
you've if you've got a West World where these characters
are robots, but you're wondering, like, do they feel is

(55:26):
their labor more like human labor? Can they be exploited?
Should they have some kind of rights of their own?
It's almost like they're like, we're reverting to this this
miasma of confusion about the nature of beings that can
move and act. That's a that's a good point. Another
great show that comes to mind is I believe it's

(55:47):
a channel for AMC co production. But Humans explores a
lot of this. They have these humanoid robots that are created,
uh to serve us, and then they some of them
become conscious in complication to arise. Yeah, and one thing
we can definitely see being dealt with in these new
versions of science fiction that are blurring the lines between
humankind and robots is that, unlike many of these Greek myths,

(56:10):
they are much more informed by the idea of human rights. Uh.
And so what happens if you reblur the lines, but
suddenly you've got a much higher standard for what humans
deserve and how they should be treated. All right, Well,
I think that pretty much wraps it up for Talos,
the Man of Bronze. However, I would be I would
be remiss if I did not mention the giant warriors

(56:31):
in Miyazaki's Nasaka The Valley of the Wind. Those are
some amazing giant robots that play an important role in
that film. Yeah, and now I would say, if you
haven't seen Ray Harry has housinges Talus from Jason and
the Argonauts in nineteen sixty three, I know we were
hating on it because they take away media's role in it,
but it's still a really cool stop motion animation. Yeah all.

(56:53):
I mean it's the same way with all of Ray
harry House and stuff. Right, If nothing else, seek out
the Hairy Housing sequences and watch them, because Talos does
look amazing in this. Yeah, it's like all the Harry
House and sin Bad movies. Usually the story is just garbage,
but it's got some great monsters in it. Indeed, now
I know we have some some listener thoughts on this

(57:13):
you'd like to share about Talos, about the nature of
robots and machines. I'm sure that anyone out there who
was really inspired by the Bicameral Mind episodes, I'm sure
you have some bicameral uh thoughts on this particular topic.
Because we're talking about statues coming to life, share those
with us. We'd love to talk with you about them,

(57:34):
either an email or hey over at the discussion module.
That's our Facebook group that you can join and interact
not only with us, but plenty of other listeners to
the show. And of course you can find us at
stuff to Buy your Mind dot com. That's the mother
ship where you'll find all of our podcast episodes are
blog post videos, and links out to all those various
social media accounts that we may pay big shout out

(57:55):
to Alex Williams and Taria Harrison are excellent audio producers
for for making us sound better than we are as always,
and of course if you want to reach out to us,
you can do so on email at blow the Mind
at how stuff works dot com For more on this

(58:20):
and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works
dot com. Love Love,