Talos: The Bronze Automaton

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 and Joe explore in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey 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

(00:24):
have to go to the slightly related, actually very related
topic of what's your favorite killer robot movie? Robert? Oh, well,
you know, outside of some of the obvious choices from
saying 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

(00:47):
Maximilian from the Disney 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 these spinning blade hands
that it utilizes to at one point murder Anthony Perkins

(01:07):
in Cold Blood. No Anthony Perkins. Yeah, well, after Psycho,
I guess he had it coming. Well, you know, and
this movie was great. In this movie, you felt sorry
for him. If he showed up showing up in Psycho
were 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 the

(01:29):
shopping mall at night where security 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 a thoughtful HBO series,

(01:53):
it was a cheesy old movie with You'll You'll Brenner
pulling guns on people. Yeah, yeah, he was. He was terrifying.
He I mean, you Brennan 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 not from malice or ill intent, like

(02:16):
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
a an efficient, emotionless killing machine. All it has is
directive and it it absolutely will not stop until it

(02:38):
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 twentie centuries when
you really start getting your killer robots everywhere. But today
we're going to go back. Oh yes, we're gonna go
back to a fat be list example of what is

(03:01):
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 it is from the ancient
Greek world, and its name is Talos. Talos, yes, the
man of Bronze, the bronze automaton. I want to quote

(03:23):
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 was just wonderful to leave through. Every personal library
needs a copy of this. But so she does a
really good job of taking disparate elements of story traditions

(03:46):
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 j Son, and in order to
reclaim his rightful kingdom from a usurper king, Jason is
on a quest to retrieve a sacred artifact, which is

(04:08):
a golden fleece from a magic ram that saved the
life of a Greek prince 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 trials with his companions. One of the trials
that Hamilton's talks about is how Hercules is on the

(04:29):
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 in your career, you're set,
but it turns out he's easily distracted. Yes. Another trial
is when Jason and the Argonauts have to battle with

(04:51):
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
him he goes to eat some food, harpies zoomed down
down out of the sky and they terrorize him, and
they foul the food he's eating. I'm not sure exactly
what they do to it. It's they're described as foul smelling,

(05:12):
so maybe they just put him off it. Well, 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 able to capture the artifacts the Golden Fleece,
but only with the help of the powerful witch, Princess Medea,

(05:36):
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
intervened on his behalf. So after they get the fleece,
Jason and Medea and the rest of the crew of

(05:57):
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,
the last man left of the ancient Bronze race, a

(06:18):
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,
prayed to the hounds of Hades to come and destroy him.

(06:39):
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
is only one telling of the story of Talos, the

(07:00):
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 this story I've just been talking about. Yes,
Apollonius rights he was of the stock of bronze, of
the men's spring from ash trees, the last left among

(07:21):
the sons of the gods, and the sons of Chronos
gave him to Europa to be the warder of crete,
and destroyed 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
red vein, and this, with its issue of life and death,

(07:45):
was covered by a thin skin. Now, so you've got
a bronze guy. You've 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 at his heel, right, because that's where
was held as he was dipped into into the river sticks.
But we get a different explanation for the vulnerability in

(08:06):
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 again 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 Dragon's random encounter,
and he's dispatched. The main story about him is his

(08:28):
death right. And you can also say, well, it 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 the author

(08:50):
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 Talus
story described tall Us exactly the same. Sometimes his body

(09:13):
has different features or characteristics depending on who the author is.
Yes and days 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 on
who's telling the tale and who and when they are
telling it. And that's certainly the case with Greek mythology.

(09:35):
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 both ankles. So that was Appolodorus, right, Yes,
So this vein is full of what's known as echor,

(09:58):
which in Greek myth is the life blood of the gods.
Sometimes it's described as golden instead of red, though in
most of the stories I've seen about Talus it is
described as red. In the Iliad, when the gods, for example, Aphrodite,
are cut or stabbed with spears, they can be harmed,
their skin can be pierced, and they leak fluid. But

(10:18):
the fluid they leak is not blood but ichor. 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
of her hand, so that the immortal blood or ichor,
that flows in the veins of the blessed gods came

(10:39):
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.
They have bodies, they can leak fluid, they can be hurt,
but the idea of immortality. He is somehow more bound

(11:01):
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 that tal Us is a god. All all
accounts indicate that he is a manufactured thing, but of
course the manufacturer changes depending on the different tails. But

(11:21):
but still he is. He is like this artificial creation
that has been filled with life because he's been filled
with core. So the ecre maybe for for the bronze man,
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
it's the gasoline for your large bronze death column, the

(11:44):
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 File
as I think about it. There's a great scene in
Fright Night where there's a guy who you just think

(12:05):
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. It's 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 we have of blood as like the

(12:28):
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 have a humanoid spouting green paint white or

(12:49):
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 of of colors in the works of Homer, right,

(13:11):
that's an entirely different topic, 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 has animated this bronze creature to some extent.

(13:33):
And he stands on the island throwing rocks at any
ship that tries to dock. We saw in apollonius tale
that he apparently runs around the island of crete three
times a day, three times a day, which is impossible.
I was tempted to do the math on it, or
I was actually kind of surprised that nobody else has
a paper oute there breaking down exactly how fast and

(13:53):
how large Talos would have to be to pull this off.
But that's not the only thing that tell Us 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
its body up, and then come out and embrace the enemy.

(14:16):
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, that's amazing. And it gets even better,
according to to Merlin paris Uh. Some argue that the
term sardonic grin may have originated with the victims of

(14:39):
this death. This at least according to Symonides, who wrote
the Talus 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 a of
a you know, of of the burnt dead. Yeah, the
idea of the grimace. And and this is a big
question actually in the the etymology you of this term.

(15:00):
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 crushing the Sardinians,

(15:20):
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 with his burning arms.

(15:42):
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 history told these
stories that on the island of Sardinia, the pre Roman

(16:04):
inhabitants had this ritual custom for dealing with criminals and
for euthanizing elderly people who couldn't care for themselves, and
what they would 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
sardonic grin of Sardinia. And then while the victims were

(16:27):
drugged out, they could be thrown off a cliff or
beaten to death. It started outstounding reasonably humane for the
ancient world 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 Eastern Piedmont in Italy claimed to trace this story,

(16:48):
if true, to an herb native to Sardinia called the
hemlock water drop ward or enanthe crocata, also known commonly
as water cellery. But this is not a good candidate
to stick in your you, mary, because the stem and
the root of this plant are apparently a significant threat
to fatal human poisonings. One example, sometime in the late nineties,

(17:08):
a Sardinian shepherd committed suicide by eating water dropwoard and
his corpse was apparently found grinning. Now the name ennth
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 plants in the same genus which are also poisonous

(17:31):
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 herb from the
ancient stories, and thus the origin of the idea of

(17:52):
the sardonic grin. Now back to Talus though, Okay, so
I'm sorry to take a sup it's a fascinating diversion,
But the bronze killer oasis, as will explore, there are
two key origin stories for this mechanical marvel, so in
some tales he really most of the older tales he

(18:12):
was created by Hephestus, the god of the forge, the
later known as Vulcan, the Blacksmith, God of Olympus. Yeah,
the deformed god when 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

(18:33):
pagan uh tourists stops in the American South. But in
later tellings, Uh, the inventor Daedalus constructs this artificial being. Yeah,
the master inventor, the creator of the Manoan Maize, the
Wings of Icarus and other marvels, the famed mythical inventor. Yeah,
and it's but this is interesting as well because Talos,

(18:57):
the the bronze atomic on here curiously bears the same
name as the inventor. The Dadalists tried to murder out
of jealousy earlier on pushing him out of out of
a tower, although Athena saves this mortal Talus by turning
him into a partridge so we can fly away. Yeah,
and his paper Paris talks about the the number of

(19:20):
stories along these lines. But it's like an Athenian tradition
that Dadalus was in Athens and he had this pupil
who was very talented, and he was a little too talented.
A dadalists 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,

(19:42):
Dedalist is standing. There's like Jeesus as 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 now. One last note about that tell Us, that
original human Talus was apparently also known as Callous in

(20:04):
some traditions, 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
Media 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

(20:26):
that ankle again, 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 BC that illustrates this,

(20:48):
and I'll make sure to include that image on the
landing page for this episode. It'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 ours. 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

(21:09):
falling down, but he's the same size as all the
other dudes around him, which makes sense when you think
about the the the the embrace that 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 tal Us as this hundred

(21:30):
foot 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,

(21:50):
he couldn't have been that much bigger than a man.
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

(22:13):
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

(22:37):
accounts of the Colossus of Rhodes. Oh yeah, you know,
they literally a giant statue that stood as a sort
of a guardian of of the harbor. Yeah, so wait
a minute, we gotta go back to how tal Us
gets defeated in those stories. So there there are four
different versions of his death that seemed to exist, but
they all relate to draining the equal out of the ankle.

(22:59):
So in one, uh, the hero Poeus 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, right. So there's
another one where Media's tricks him into thinking she can
make him immortal by pulling out the nail. Now, this

(23:20):
is a common trick up media'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 to

(23:41):
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. Her
dad Happy birthday. And so they chop him up and

(24:03):
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 tragic heroine, despite all of the killing she does.
The other two versions of this relate to magical efforts
on Media's part, her hypnotic gaze spells, or even some

(24:25):
sort of a magical potion of a drugging of talus
if you will, that somehow make him stumble and up
through 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 kills tell Us inside. Note this would be

(24:48):
a good one to throw some drums over something, and
the barbarian drums exactly, so please sub them in here.
So tell Us shows up on a cliff, he threatens
to crush them with rocks, and Media tells Jason and
his end 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 she
propitiate and invoke the death spirits, devourers of life, the

(25:12):
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
bewitched the eyes of Talus, the man of bronze, and
her teeth gnashed bitter wrath against him, and she sent

(25:35):
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
lo even from afar, maybe it tortures us. So Tallows,
for all his frame of bronze, yielded the victory to

(25:57):
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 towering on the jutting cliff. But even
as some huge pine high up on the mountains, which

(26:19):
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 Tallows for a while stood
on his tireless feet, swaying to and fro, when at last,
all strengthless fell with a mighty thud. Oh that's beautiful.

(26:42):
I love that. That is a robot death, soone, 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 sixty three film Jason and the Argonauts,
with those wonderful Ray Harry House in effects because in
that one, Jason kills tawe Us rather than Media sexist
red con and it's boring too. Jason just runs up

(27:05):
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 she
shows up after the Talus encounter and they encounter Talus
not on crete but on some island of bronze or something. Well,

(27:28):
that's a bummer. You gotta get the Hounds of Hades
dons 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 to rush in there and slash
him up with swords. But Medea is like, hold on,
I got this. And that's actually possibly there in her name, because,
as Adrian Mayor points out, the name Media seems to

(27:51):
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 cunning and she can think it out.
So she's definitely one of the really cool aspects of
this story, the other, of course, being the giant Bronze robot. Yeah,

(28:13):
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. Thank alright, we're back.
So before we proceed here, I want to read this
excellent quote from Merlin Paris in that Talos in Dentalist

(28:34):
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,
we have in him a robot, perhaps man's first conception
of such, not only in the outer form, but replete

(28:56):
with 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,
anticipating the scientific possibilities of the present age, and even
then belonging more with the bizarre imaginings of the new

(29:20):
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 the
difference between what was to them sort of magic fantasy
and what was to them their equivalent of science fiction

(29:43):
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 world that
could quite well be characterized as sort of like science fiction.
I think sometimes when you read, for example, the Book

(30:04):
of Revelation or other apocalyptic literature we read that now
is featuring is 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 been
more like our ideas, like dystopian future sci fi. I
think it's a strong point. Yes. Now at this point

(30:27):
where we want to just discuss some of the different
versions of the tale relating where Tallos came from, because
they're important in breaking down what this tale says about technology.
So the first one that we've been talking 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.

(30:48):
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 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

(31:09):
ash trees, violent clad in bronze, destroyed in the flood
of de Coulian, who was the son of Prometheus and
who is now confined to the quote dank house of Hades.
Hades house. I didn't even know it was dank. It's
dank down there. So this would frame Talos as the
last bronze man, given by Zeus to Europa to protect

(31:30):
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 of different ideas here. You've got Hessiad's
bronze age of of creatures, these human creatures who are

(31:51):
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 explicit is made
of bronze. Again, myths evolved, and myths are retold and
retold and changed. 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,

(32:13):
a machine of some sort, born from the forge, and
in the earlier traditions, the creator is Hephaestus a k
a 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 of the gods. And
he's also the one who forged the armor or the

(32:33):
armors of Achilles. Simonides, among others, identified Talos 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 by the gods,
it seems like it's nature is essentially magical, right. Yeah. Now,

(32:55):
Paris reminds us that the association here might have been
that Talus 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,
we see this growth of association with Daedalus, and I

(33:17):
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 Hephaestus 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.
He was a master of at least art, if not technology. Yeah,

(33:42):
and usually in the traditions, both or at least over
time both and Paris makes a lot of this history
of associations between Daedalus and statutory that he was a
great innovator in life life sculptures. For example, Paris points
out the Diadorus writes quote in the sculptor's art, He
Dadalus so far excelled all other men. The statues he

(34:04):
made were like human beings. They could see, they said,
and walk and in a word, preserved so well. The
composition of the whole body, 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 life life like sculptures. Right. But this does

(34:25):
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 Meno,
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. It's like, don't let this thing get
away from you, like Dadalus's statues walking off from the workshop.

(34:48):
But the idea of the innovation of life like poses
in 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 to be posed with arms at
their sides, almost like corpses. They don't seem to be
an action. Even the lowand Minch is like this, all

(35:11):
the Venus figurines, the Lowan Mench. 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 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,

(35:33):
like the striding figurines of ancient Egypt. Robert, I know
you've seen these right where the their legs are clearly
like walking there like the walk sign on the street. Yes,
walking like an Egypt if you will, and uh so
you add to this, Paris says, the Athenian tradition about
Dadalists that we talked about earlier, which to remind you,
is that he once had a young pupil named Talos

(35:56):
or Kalos, who was so talented that Dadalists 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 suggesting
that the ancient Greeks knew of historical Taloi the plural
of Talus in places like Attica and Sardinia, which were

(36:18):
not actual robots, but bronze statues set up on rocky
coastlines as figures of apotropaic magic, meaning warding off magic
like gargoyles driving away evil forces and beings. And Paris
mentions the idea that there could have been such a
figure once posed on the acropolis which fell off. And

(36:38):
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. And I
have to say, this is the version of the tale
I like the most. I like the idea that that

(37:01):
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 gods, because if it's created by the gods, like
we said, it's magic. If it's created by humans, this
is sci fi. Now, of course, if it's sci fi,
one thing we know from sci fi's you've got to

(37:21):
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
suspects that Sophocles was the one who managed to steer

(37:42):
the tradition towards Daedalus, and this idea of of quicksilver
as the the really the animating equor. 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 substitute to the mythological magical concept of ecor the

(38:06):
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 and tell us than alright,
we're back. Now, we've already talked about the Bronze Age,
as defined as one of Hesiod's five ages, the mythological
Bronze Age, But what about the technological Bronze Age. Yeah,

(38:28):
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 b C to b C.
And we know that they used other medals during this
time gold, silver, lead, tim electrom and even iron on

(38:49):
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,
it means that that he's composed of bronze, which is

(39:10):
an alloy which is copper and ten percent pin. 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 is just gonna bend or break. So the

(39:31):
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 for preparation because that and
we're talking to casting and the hammering of bronze. All
of this was fully mastered at the time. This was

(39:53):
this was an age of peak bronze technology. Yeah, and
bronze was important. It was a major innovation in the
history of techno oology, 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,
and could hold a sharp edge after heavy use. Iron,

(40:15):
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
very rare and it often had to be imported to

(40:35):
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 seemed
based on the creation of blades and cutting materials. Well, well,

(40:55):
I think there's there's an answer there that that relates
to the basic nature 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 cutting

(41:19):
a thing, you change its nature, 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. But I

(41:41):
want to add it into 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 to war technology,
toward tool making and the use of tools. Joan are

(42:03):
Mertens 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 bold Daedalus makes for Pacife, as
well as such a notable myths as Pandora and Pygmalion quote.

(42:24):
In the hands of an inspired craftsman, the proper 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,

(42:44):
I mean, it's kind of impossible to resist that, but yeah,
I see exactly what's going on here. Uh. Martens is
drawing this connection between the creative power of human beings
and the idea that you could actually create something animated,
something that's all five. Uh, and we totally see that
the blurring of that distinction and what we were talking
about with Dedalus. Dedalus creating lifelike statues and sculptures that

(43:09):
at some point are seen to be literally alive. Now,
one 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

(43:32):
this Knox points out that 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

(43:55):
around twelve b c. Used 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 is symbolic we this is basically bronze
weaponry and bronze technology incarnate, and it crumbles if it
goes up against this new metal that is even more potent. Well,

(44:18):
all the more reason that 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

(44:38):
can't figure it out, so it is a power beyond
your reach. Now there's a 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 our Merdens 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

(45:01):
mention of a single vein running through Talis'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 wax 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,

(45:23):
who lived through two But the idea here is that
the functionality of Tallos, the thing that gives him life,
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,
you's not one that walks around. First of all, you
prepare a core of soil and clay to mold into

(45:46):
a figure. Then you layer that in wax. 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

(46:07):
wax is then left exposed at two points at the base.
Think again to the idea that there are two veins
running down Tallus'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,

(46:27):
you heat it up and the wax drains out of
those holes. So then you've got 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 you're then you All you have to do is
repair casting flaws, smooth and polish the surface, rework the
details is needed, add additional embellishments as desired, like silver inlays, etcetera,

(46:52):
and you have perhaps a being of bronze. So this
means that the tallos figure as to pick To 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 thing is is

(47:14):
mirroring technology in more than one way, 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

(47:35):
kind of like, hey, you know what this robot's achilles
heal was? What was his achilles heal? Well, you 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

(47:57):
that is a wow. It has this long tailed, it'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

(48:18):
all of these various uh, you know, complex interpretations when
it's really just a plug. 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 talked about how myths change over time, but of
course society changes as well, and there are changes in

(48:38):
like the moral and social dimension of how we treat
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 what one example

(49:01):
is I wonder if you can draw broad parallels between
the way technology is envisioned in free societies that value
human rights versus slave owning societies and so. For example,
in his book Politics Aristotle, written around three Aristotle is
writing about the idea of possessions versus instruments, and he

(49:26):
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 Deadalus or
the tripods of Hephaestus, which says the poet quote of

(49:46):
their own accord entered the assembly of the gods. If
in like manner the shuttle would weave and the plectrum
touched the liar without a hand to guide them, chief
workmen would not want servants, nor mass or as slaves.
So Aristotle believed that that slavery, that that slavery and

(50:07):
being masters were a state of nature. Some people, 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

(50:28):
about how perfect perhaps a defender of a 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

(50:50):
and inanimate labor, or at least as they'd imagine sort
of robot labor in their fantasies, to be sort of
similar things. So we in the modern a would make
a complete, you know, a very hard line distinction between
the labor of a 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 necessarily

(51:13):
make that distinction. How did it inform their 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

(51:35):
could you see this definite connection between even our modern
conception of a robot with slaved 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,

(51:56):
Like if you are in a society that just 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

(52:18):
modern technology? Well, for one thing, it connects to 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
become something we would think of like a human is

(52:41):
a self moved but artificial creature capable of feeling. Now,
Paris says that according to Aristotle, Dadalus's 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 iireless thoroughness with which

(53:01):
he executed his gory tasks mark him out as a
machine without a speck of thought or feeling. And on
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

(53:24):
does as its programmed, but that it can't achieve a
will of its own basically, But then at the same time,
Talos is animated with ichor 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

(53:45):
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 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.

(54:05):
It seems like the lines are much blurrier all throughout,
and certainly we see a lot of modern science fiction
that reblurs those lines. I mean, there's a tremendous amount
of of narrative of fun to be had there. Oh yeah, well,
I mean earlier we brought up the obvious robot of
you old Brenner in Westworld, But in the New West World,
I think it spends a lot of times trying to

(54:26):
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 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

(54:50):
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 ah Believe. It's
a Channel four 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

(55:11):
become conscious and complications 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,
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

(55:33):
deserve and how they should be treated. All right, Well,
I think that pretty much wraps it up for Talus,
the Man of Bronze. However, I would be I would
be remiss if I did not mention the giant warriors
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

(55:53):
haven't seen Ray Harry has Houses Talous from Jason and
the Argonauts in nineteen sixty three, I know we were
in on it because they take away Medea's role in it,
but it's still a really cool stop motion in emotion. Yeah. All,
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

(56:14):
look amazing in this. Yeah, it's like all the Hairy
Housing 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
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

(56:36):
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,
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

(56:56):
the show. And of course you can find us at
stuff to bule your mind dot com. That's the other
ship will you'll find all of our podcast episodes are
blog post videos, and links out to all those various
social media accounts that will maintain. Big shout out 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,

(57:18):
you can do so on email at blow the Mind
at how stuff works dot com. Well more on this
and thousands of other topics does it how stuff works
dot com