# Who was Talos, the bronze giant of Greek myth?

Date: 2019-01-07 · Author: Robert Scales · https://guidetoartificialintelligence.com/en/learn/who-was-talos-the-bronze-giant/

**Answer:** Talos was a giant man of bronze in Greek myth, set on the island of Crete to keep strangers away by hurling rocks at their ships. His best-known story is told in the Argonautica, an epic poem written by Apollonius of Rhodes in the 3rd century BCE, where the sorceress Medea brings him down through his one weak spot, a vein near his ankle.

Talos is one of the oldest made guardians in Western storytelling: a giant figure of bronze who walks around an island, watches the sea and attacks anyone who tries to land. He belongs to Greek myth, so no single author invented him, but the fullest written account comes from the *Argonautica*, a long poem in Greek by Apollonius of Rhodes.

People who think about artificial intelligence keep coming back to Talos because his story asks a question we still ask about machines in 2019: what happens when you build something to act on its own, follow one rule without pause, and protect a place without a human at its side?

## When and where the story was written

Apollonius was a poet and scholar of Alexandria, the great Greek city in Egypt, in the 3rd century BCE. His exact dates are uncertain. The translator R. C. Seaton notes that scholars place his birth anywhere between 296 and 260 BCE. According to two short ancient "lives" of the poet, he was a pupil of Callimachus, presented an early version of the *Argonautica* in Alexandria, moved to the island of Rhodes after it was poorly received, revised it there, and took the name "the Rhodian."

The myth itself is older than the poem. Painted vases showing the death of Talos date to around 400 BCE, roughly a century and a half before Apollonius, and a silver coin from Phaistos on Crete, from about 300 to 270 BCE, shows a winged Talos holding a stone. So the poet was retelling a figure his readers already knew.

## What happens in the Argonautica

The *Argonautica* follows Jason and his crew, the Argonauts, on their voyage to win the Golden Fleece. Talos appears in Book 4, on the way home. Here is the episode in order:

| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1. Arrival | The tired crew reach Crete and try to tie up in the harbor of Dicte. |
| 2. The guardian | Talos breaks rocks off the cliffs and throws them, stopping the ship from mooring. |
| 3. His nature | He is bronze from head to foot and cannot be wounded, except for one blood-red vein near his ankle, covered by thin skin. |
| 4. The plan | Medea, who sails with Jason, tells the crew to row out of range and leave Talos to her. |
| 5. The spell | She calls on the spirits of death with songs and prayers and fixes him with a hostile stare. |
| 6. The fall | Heaving another boulder, Talos scrapes his ankle on a sharp rock. Ichor, the fluid that serves gods as blood, gushes out like melted lead, and he sways and crashes down like a half-cut pine. |

Apollonius also gives Talos a past. In his version, Talos is the last survivor of a race of bronze men sprung from ash trees, and Zeus gave him to Europa to guard Crete by striding around the island three times a day.

## How the "machine" works

Ancient writers disagreed about where Talos came from. In one version reported by later sources, the smith god Hephaestus made him at the request of Zeus. In another, Hephaestus gave him to King Minos of Crete. Some writers describe a single vein running from his neck to his ankle, sealed by one bronze nail.

Read with a builder's eye, that detail is striking. Talos works like a closed system: one fluid, one channel, one plug. The scholar A. B. Cook suggested that the plugged vein might reflect the lost-wax method of casting bronze, in which molten metal is poured through a channel that is later sealed. Whether or not that is right, the story treats Talos less like a person and more like a device with a design flaw.

His behavior also follows a fixed routine. He patrols on a schedule, spots ships and throws rocks. Nothing in the poem suggests he talks, bargains or changes his mind. That is exactly how many people picture a simple automatic system: a set of rules that runs until something breaks.

> **Try it:** Write Talos's job as three "if… then…" rules, the way a programmer might (for example, "If a ship comes within range, then throw a rock"). Then ask yourself which situation your rules do not cover. Medea found one.

## Why the story matters for AI in 2019

Talos shows that the idea of a made, self-moving guardian is more than two thousand years old. Long before electricity, Greek storytellers imagined a figure built by a god, given a task, and sent to carry it out alone.

The story also carries three themes that sound familiar this year, as voice assistants answer questions in our kitchens and programs like AlphaGo beat champions at games once thought too subtle for computers:

- **Autonomy.** Talos acts without anyone giving him orders in the moment. Today's debates about self-driving cars and automated security systems turn on the same point.
- **A single point of failure.** One small weakness undoes an otherwise unbeatable system. Engineers still look for the "ankle vein" in what they build.
- **Being fooled.** Medea defeats Talos not by force but by working on his eyes and mind. Researchers today study how image-recognition systems can be tricked by carefully altered inputs, which is a modern cousin of her trick.

None of this means the ancient Greeks predicted computers. It means the questions we bring to AI have deep roots in how people have always imagined made things that move and act.

## Was Talos a robot, or a living creature?

The honest answer is that the ancient sources do not agree, and the question would have sounded odd to them. In the *Argonautica*, Talos is part of a bronze race of men, which makes him sound like a living being made of an unusual material. Other versions say a god forged him, which makes him sound like a manufactured object.

Modern readers often call him the first robot, and the comparison is useful as long as we hold it loosely. The word "robot" did not exist in antiquity. What Talos shares with a robot is the idea of a body built rather than born, given a task and powered by something inside it, here the ichor in his single vein.

For a beginner, that is the useful takeaway. When people say AI is a new idea, Talos is a good reminder that the dream of building a helper, or a guard, is ancient. What is new is that in 2019 we can actually build machines that follow rules, learn from data and act without a person at the controls, and we have to think carefully about where their weak spots are.

## Sources

- The Argonautica (translated by R. C. Seaton): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/830
- Talos: https://web.archive.org/web/20181220174011/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talos