Talos

The bronze guard of Crete

Talos is a giant made of bronze who guards the island of Crete. Bronze covers almost all of his body. He circles the island three times each day to keep strangers out. When a ship comes near, he tears rocks from the shore and throws them at it.

The fullest surviving story of Talos comes from Apollonius Rhodius, the poet whose epic, the Argonautica, tells of the voyage of the ship Argo. As the Argo nears Crete, Talos hurls rocks at it before its crew, the Argonauts, can land. No ordinary weapon can stop him. Medea, who sails with them and uses magic, has to find the one small part of him that can fail.

This Talos is a different figure from the Talos who was the apprentice of Daedalus. That Talos was thrown from the Acropolis, the citadel of Athens, by Daedalus, his uncle, and in one account changed into a partridge. The two share only a name. The Cretan guard is bronze from the start.

Where Talos came from

The Cretan Talos was known long before Apollonius wrote. A fragment of the sixth-century BC poet Ibycus, kept by the later writer Athenaeus, already calls him a favourite of Rhadamanthus the just.

Ancient writers gave him several origins and did not settle on one. Apollonius gives two in lines that follow each other and joins neither. In one, Talos is the last survivor of the bronze race of men, who sprang from the nymphs of the ash trees. In the other, he is the guard that the god Zeus gave to Europa for her new island.

Apollodorus, an ancient writer whose Library retells the Greek myths, keeps the bronze race. He sets beside it a different choice: that the god Hephaestus gave Talos to Minos. He adds that some called Talos a bull.

A third version survives because the travel writer Pausanias quotes it to show how Greek family trees disagree. The epic poet Cinaethon made Talos a son of Cres, with Hephaestus as his grandson and Rhadamanthus, the favourite in Ibycus, as his great-grandson.

The Sardinians and the burning embrace

Before Talos is killed, he kills. The Suda, a later Greek reference work, keeps a fragment of the poet Simonides, who wrote earlier than Apollonius and closer to the time of Ibycus. In it, the Sardinians refuse to hand Talos over to Minos. Talos, being made of bronze, leaps into a fire. Then he kills them by clasping them to his chest as they gape.

The Greek of the Suda calls him ho Hephaistoteukton, “the one Hephaestus made.” Later ages gave this story as the origin of the proverb “sardonic laughter”, meaning laughter at one’s own death. An ancient commentator on Apollonius, known as a scholiast, traces the same trick of heating himself to a lost play by the playwright Sophocles.

How Medea brings him down

The sources disagree as sharply about his death. In Apollonius, Medea calls on the Keres, the spirits of death. She fixes Talos with a hostile stare and puts him under a spell. Still bewitched, he goes on levering up boulders to block the harbour from the Argo. He grazes his heel on a sharp rock. Ichor, the fluid of his body, drains out like melting lead. He sways on his tireless feet, like a pine half cut through, and then falls.

Apollodorus does not choose one cause. He gives three. Medea may drive Talos mad with drugs. She may trick him into giving up the nail that seals his vein, with a false promise of immortality. Or she may leave Poeas to shoot him in the ankle with an arrow.

The single vein

Every later telling of his death repeats the body Apollodorus gives him. Talos has a single vein that runs from his neck to his ankles. At its end, a bronze nail closes it. Apollodorus adds that he “kept guard, running round the island thrice every day.”

Apollonius, who wrote earlier, gives the same weak point a different shape. Under the tendon at his ankle runs a vessel full of blood. A thin skin covers it, and that skin alone keeps life and death apart. The rest of his body is bronze and cannot be broken. In this version, too, he circles Crete three times, on bronze feet.

Apollonius often calls him ho chalkeios, “the bronze one”. He repeats it across the episode as a fixed title, or epithet, and not as a passing description.

Talos on the coins of Phaistos

Talos lasted beyond his story on the coins of Phaistos. This Cretan city claimed him as part of its own founding. The Archaeological Museum of Heraklion holds two coins struck there. One is a silver stater from about 360 to 330 BC. The other is a bronze tetrachalkon from about 250 to 200 BC.

On the stater, a winged Talos stands ready to throw the stones in his hands. A golden hound stands between his legs, and a bull’s head is on the other side of the coin.

Phaistos made Talos, and not Heracles, the father of Phaestus, the founder of the city. Neither Apollonius nor Apollodorus mentions this local claim.