Talos

Also Known As: Talus; Greek Ταλώς, Talōs, meaning “sun” in the Cretan dialect and “cut down” or “hewn” in mainland Greek
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A giant of living bronze, invulnerable everywhere except at a single vein sealed with a nail at his ankle.
Role in Mythos: He is the guardian of Crete, circling the island three times a day and driving off approaching ships with hurled rocks.
Relation to Humans: To Crete under Minos he functions as a border, a patrol and, in Plato’s rationalised version, a carrier of the island’s written laws. To anyone arriving uninvited by sea he is lethal, killing by thrown stone or by heating his own bronze until his embrace burns.

Three times between one dawn and the next, the same sound went round the coast of Crete: a heavy metal tread coming over the headland, growing louder, passing, thinning away south along the cliffs. Sailors who knew the island timed their approach by it. Sailors who did not learned about it when the first rock came down.

The thing making the noise was a man of bronze. Talos kept watch over the whole island, walking its circuit three times a day, tall enough that his shadow crossed a beach before he did. Zeus had given him to Europa after carrying her across the sea to Crete, a gift shaped like a bodyguard and functioning as a border. Other accounts hand him instead to Minos, and make the smith god Hephaestus his maker rather than his descendant. The disagreement is old and unsettled, and it was already old when Apollodorus set it down.

There are two stories about where he came from and they do not fit together. In one he is manufactured, hammered out by Hephaestus the way a cauldron or a tripod is hammered out, divine metalwork with a purpose built into it. In the other he is the last survivor of the bronze race of men, the generation sprung from ash trees that beat itself to nothing, left over into the age of heroes like a coin from a currency no longer in use. Apollodorus records both, then adds, without much comment, that some people said Talos was not a man at all but a bull.

Greek painters gave him the body of a young athlete cast in metal, smooth and heavy and unnervingly handsome, and a fourth-century vase now at Ruvo shows him at the end of it, sagging into the arms of the twins while Medea watches from the side. The silver coins of Phaistos show him differently: winged, facing straight out, one arm cocked back with a stone in the fist. Under all that bronze ran a single vessel. It began at his neck, ended at his ankle, carried ichor instead of blood, and was stoppered at the bottom by a bronze nail driven through the thin skin that covered it.

A ship would come in towards the shelter at Dicte with its crew tired and its water gone, and the men would see a figure standing above the anchorage, motionless, and then not motionless. He worked without hurry. He broke a lump off the cliff face, weighed it, threw, and the sea opened white where the rock went in. The Argonauts backed water at the sight of him and would have left Crete in a bad state, thirsty and beaten off, if Medea had not stopped them turning the ship.

When he wanted to be worse than that, he heated himself. The oldest surviving trace of Talos in Greek poetry is a fragment of Simonides preserved in a Byzantine lexicon, and it has nothing to do with the Argo. The Sardinians refused to surrender him to Minos. Talos stepped into fire, took the heat into his bronze until he glowed, and gathered them against his chest one at a time. The faces of the dead were left pulled back off the teeth, and the Greeks named that expression after the island. The sardonic laugh comes from a man made of metal deciding to become an oven.

Medea told the crew to hold the ship out of range and leave him to her. She came up on deck with one fold of her purple mantle across her cheeks and Jason steadying her by the hand, and called three times in song and three times in speech on the Keres, the death spirits that hunt the lower air for living men. Then she looked at him and put everything she had into it. High on the jutting cliff, hoisting stones to keep the Argo off the anchorage, Talos scraped his ankle against a sharp edge of rock. The ichor came out of him the way molten lead comes out of a crucible. He stood a moment, swayed, and went down like a pine left half cut through by a woodman, still standing at dusk and snapping off in the night wind.

That is Apollonius. The other endings are plainer. In one, Medea drives him mad with drugs and nothing more is needed. In another she promises to make him immortal, and he lets her come close enough to draw the nail out, and stands there while the ichor runs away into the ground. In a third she has no part in it and the archer Poeas puts an arrow through the ankle from the deck. What survives across every version is the ankle. The defence of an entire island came down to one fastening.

Plato found the story embarrassing and repaired it. In the Minos, Talos is no automaton but a man making a circuit of the Cretan villages three times a year, carrying the laws of Minos engraved on bronze tablets and seeing that they are kept. The bronze survives the rationalising; only the metal body is gone. Something similar happens in the family trees. Cinaethon, a Spartan poet of the eighth century, made Talos the son of Cres, which is to say the son of the island itself, and the father of Hephaestus, which reverses the more familiar relation completely. Pausanias reports it and notes drily that Greek legends vary, and genealogies most of all.

The name pulls the same way. In the Cretan dialect talōs meant the sun; in mainland Greek the same sound meant cut down, or hewn. A bronze figure that circles the island in a fixed number of daily passes, glows when it means to kill, and dies of a wound at its lowest extremity reads easily enough as a sun that goes round and is finally felled. Whether Crete started with a solar god and finished with a machine, or the other way about, no source says.

His strengths follow from what he is. He does not tire, sleep, eat or take payment, and there is nothing in him to reason with. Stone does not mark him and bronze weapons slide off him. He throws further and harder than any crew can row, and he can raise his own temperature until touching him is fatal. He never has to board a ship, only stand above one.

His limits follow just as directly. Everything he is depends on the ichor staying inside him, and the ichor is held there by a single nail at the lowest point on his body, which happens to be the part of a walking machine most likely to strike rock. He can be persuaded to pull that nail himself if the offer is large enough, and immortality is a large offer. He has no defence against a mind. Medea never lays a hand on him, and the stones he is lifting when she reaches him are the stones that cost him his balance. A guard who patrols on a fixed schedule can be waited out, and a guard with one seam can be found by anyone willing to look for it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Talos in Greek mythology?

Talos is a giant made entirely of bronze who guarded the island of Crete. He circled the island on foot three times a day and drove off approaching ships by hurling broken rocks at them. Ancient sources describe him either as a creation of the smith god Hephaestus or as the last survivor of the bronze race of men.

How did Talos die?

Talos was killed during the return voyage of the Argonauts, when the sorceress Medea worked on him from the deck of the Argo. In the fullest account, she bewitched him so that he grazed his ankle on a sharp rock while lifting stones, and the ichor ran out of him like molten lead until he collapsed. Other versions say Medea drove him mad with drugs, or tricked him into letting her remove the nail that sealed his vein, or that the archer Poeas shot him through the ankle.

Who made Talos and who did he belong to?

The most common account has Talos forged by Hephaestus, the smith of the gods. Zeus then gave him to Europa as a guardian after bringing her to Crete, though other sources say he was given to King Minos instead. A competing tradition drops the workshop entirely and makes him the last of the bronze generation of humans, and the poet Cinaethon went further still, calling him the son of Cres and the father of Hephaestus.

What was Talos’s weakness?

Talos had one blood vessel running from his neck down to his ankle, carrying ichor rather than blood, sealed at the lower end by a bronze nail. Everything else about him was invulnerable. Puncturing or unstoppering that vein at the ankle drained him and killed him, which is exactly what happened in every surviving version of his death.