TalosΤΑΛΩΣ

and self-bidden groaned upon their hinges the gates of heaven which the Hours had in their keeping, to whom are entrusted great heaven and Olympus, whether to throw open the thick cloud or shut it to.

Homer, Iliad 5.749-751 · trans. A. T. Murray (1924)

When Hera drives her chariot out of Olympus, the gates of heaven open by themselves, αὐτόμαται, and groan on their hinges; Homer’s verb, μύκον, is the one used for lowing cattle. The Horai keep the gates and open or close the thick cloud. This is the first time in Greek literature that automatos describes an object rather than a person, and the scene is repeated word for word in book 8.

An entrance that admits the right traveller with no hand on it. At the other end of Greek myth, Talos is the gate of an island.

for he was fashioning tripods, twenty in all, to stand around the wall of his well-builded hall, and golden wheels had he set beneath the base of each that of themselves they might enter the gathering of the gods at his wish and again return to his house, a wonder to behold.

Homer, Iliad 18.373-377 · trans. A. T. Murray (1925)

Thetis finds Hephaestus sweating at his bellows. He is making twenty tripods with golden wheels under their bases, so that they can roll by themselves into the assembly of the gods and come back home. Homer adds a workshop detail: the decorated handles are not attached yet, and the god is still forging the rivets. Some four centuries later Aristotle quoted this passage when he imagined tools that do their own work.

A fleet of identical units with an outward route and a return trip is the outline of a delivery robot. It is also the first machine in literature shown unfinished on the bench.

there moved swiftly to support their lord handmaidens wrought of gold in the semblance of living maids. In them is understanding in their hearts, and in them speech and strength, and they know cunning handiwork by gift of the immortal gods.

Homer, Iliad 18.417-420 · trans. A. T. Murray (1925)

When the lame smith-god gets up to greet Thetis, handmaidens made of gold hurry to hold him up. Homer lists what they have: understanding (νόος) in their hearts, a voice, strength, and skills learned from the immortal gods. They are assistants a disabled maker built for himself, and the list reads like a specification: cognition, language, movement, training.

Hesiod gives Pandora the same pair, voice and strength, also put in by Hephaestus. Genevieve Liveley and Sam Thomas, in AI Narratives (2020), read Homer’s machines as a graded scale from automaton to artificial mind, placed above a tool and below a person.

On either side of the door there stood gold and silver dogs, which Hephaestus had fashioned with cunning skill to guard the palace of great-hearted Alcinous; immortal were they and ageless all their days.

Homer, Odyssey 7.91-94 · trans. A. T. Murray (1919)

At the door of King Alcinous on Scheria stand dogs of gold and silver that Hephaestus made to guard the house, “immortal and ageless all their days”, the formula Homer uses for gods. Whether they move, he does not say. Inside the hall golden youths hold torches for the night’s banquet, and in the next line fifty slave women grind grain and weave: metal servants and human servants side by side.

The Argonauts pass through this court too. In the Library, Jason and Medea are married at Alcinous’ palace before the Argo reaches Crete and its bronze guardian.

For the Phaeacians have no pilots, nor steering-oars such as other ships have, but their ships of themselves understand the thoughts and minds of men, and they know the cities and rich fields of all peoples, and most swiftly do they cross over the gulf of the sea, hidden in mist and cloud.

Homer, Odyssey 8.557-562 · trans. A. T. Murray (1919)

The Phaeacians have no helmsmen and no steering oars. Their ships, Alcinous tells Odysseus, understand the thoughts and minds of men and know every city and field on earth; a passenger has only to name the destination. The service ends badly. Poseidon resents a people who carry everyone safely, and turns a returning ship to stone in sight of its harbour.

In 1948 Norbert Wiener named cybernetics after κυβερνήτης, the helmsman these ships do without. The red-sailed ship in the picture is waiting off Crete, where no ship was allowed to land.

And he bade famous Hephaestus make haste and mix earth with water and to put in it the voice and strength of human kind, and fashion a sweet, lovely maiden-shape, like to the immortal goddesses in face … And he charged Hermes the guide, the Slayer of Argus, to put in her a shameless mind and a deceitful nature.

Hesiod, Works and Days 60-68 · trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (1914)

In Hesiod the first woman is made, not born. Zeus orders Hephaestus to mix earth and water and put a human voice and strength into the mixture. Athena teaches her weaving, Aphrodite gives her charm, Hermes installs a shameless mind and a deceitful nature and then puts lies and wheedling words in her breast. She is named Pandora because every god of Olympus gave her a gift. In the Theogony Hephaestus also makes her a golden crown worked with creatures “like living beings with voices”: a made being wearing made beings.

Each maker adds one capability, and the one who commissioned her adds the hidden purpose. She is delivered as a present. When the jar is opened, diseases go among men “of themselves” (αὐτόματοι), silently, because Zeus took away their voice: the made woman has been given speech, the self-moving evils have had it removed. In the Latin handbook of Hyginus the work is divided in two: Vulcan shapes the body from clay and Minerva gives it a soul.

Zeus the Father made a third generation of mortal men, a brazen race, sprung from ash-trees; and it was in no way equal to the silver age, but was terrible and strong. They loved the lamentable works of Ares and deeds of violence; they ate no bread, but were hard of heart like adamant, fearful men.

Hesiod, Works and Days 143-147 · trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (1914)

Hesiod’s third generation of humans was made by Zeus from ash trees, and everything about them was bronze: armour, houses, tools. There was no black iron. They ate no bread, loved war, and were destroyed by their own hands, going down to Hades without a name. Apollonius makes Talos the last survivor of this race, still on duty in the age of heroes, like the last unit of a discontinued line.

Hesiod never mentions Talos; the link is Apollonius’ own. It has a grim symmetry: the bronze men died by their own hands, and in Apollonius Talos dies by grazing his own ankle.

But Odysseus avoided it with a quick turn of his head, and in his heart he smiled a right grim and bitter smile

Homer, Odyssey 20.301-302 · trans. A. T. Murray (1919)

The earliest stories about Talos survive because ancient scholars had to explain one strange adjective. When Odysseus dodges an ox’s hoof thrown at him, Homer says he smiled a σαρδάνιον smile. Later commentators traced the word to Talos. In Simonides’ version, as the scholia on Plato report it, the bronze guardian burned intruders to death; in the Suda he leapt into a fire and clasped the Sardinians to his breast; in Zenobius he had lived in Sardinia before coming to Crete.

The same entries mention another bronze figure: the statue of Cronos at Carthage, its hands held out over a fire, into which children were placed in sacrifice. A guardian, or a god, whose embrace is the weapon.

the Celedones in Pindar, who, in the same manner as the Sirens of old, caused those who listened to them to forget their food through delight, and so to waste away

Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 7.290e · trans. C. D. Yonge (1854)

Pindar describes one of the legendary early temples of Apollo at Delphi, made by Hephaestus and Athena, with bronze walls and bronze columns. Above the pediment golden Keledones, “Charmers”, sang; the papyrus of the poem says there were six. Visitors wasted away far from their wives and children, their hearts hung on the honeyed voice, until the sons of Cronos split the earth with a thunderbolt and buried the temple. The damaged lines that follow may say that the voice knew “the things that are and the things that were before”.

Six centuries later Pausanias refused to believe in the bronze temple or the golden singers. The story still describes synthetic voices so engaging that listeners neglect their lives, and an authority that shuts the place down.

Talos, unlike the other figures in this exceedingly skilful composition, is painted white, the modelling of his body being indicated in a thin brown varnish. The artist thus sought to mark him out from the rest as the man of bronze.

A. B. Cook, Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion I (1914), p. 721

On an Attic krater, a large bowl for mixing wine with water, found at Ruvo di Puglia and now in the Museo Nazionale Jatta (inv. 1501), the Dioskouroi, Castor and Polydeukes, catch Talos as he falls backwards while Medea looks on and the Argo waits with a ladder down to the shore. The vase is red-figure: the figures keep the colour of the clay against a black glaze. Talos is the only figure painted white, with his anatomy drawn in thin brown lines: the painter marked him as made of something else. No surviving text gives the Dioskouroi a part in his death.

On a krater from Montesarchio a kneeling youth works at Talos’ ankle while a small winged figure of Death points at it. Some scholars read the same picture as the care of the wounded Philoctetes: a doctor or a technician, depending on who is looking.

Beazley Archive 217518; M. Robertson, “The Death of Talos”, Journal of Hellenic Studies 97 (1977).

For Minos used him as guardian of the law in the city, and Talos as the same for the rest of Crete.

[Plato], Minos 320c · trans. W. R. M. Lamb (1927)

The Minos sets up a division of labour. A human judge, Rhadamanthys, keeps the laws in the city; Talos takes them round the villages three times a year. The dialogue explains the epithet “bronze” by the tablets he carries, not by his body. Greek and Roman communities did publish laws on bronze plaques, so the explanation would have sounded practical.

What Talos does when a village breaks the rules, the dialogue does not say. In 2016 the investors in the DAO, a fund run entirely by code on the Ethereum blockchain, watched about a third of its money drained through a flaw the contract allowed. The community reversed the loss by rewriting the chain, and argued for months about whether “code is law”.

they do not care to stay for long, and run away out of the human soul, and thus are of no great value until one makes them fast with causal reasoning.

Plato, Meno 98a · trans. W. R. M. Lamb (1924)

Daedalus, the craftsman of Minos’ Crete, was remembered for statues that moved. In the Meno, Socrates says they run away if they are not tied, so an untied one is worth little; true opinions are the same, and they become knowledge only when they are fastened by reasoning about causes. In the Euthyphro, when every definition the two speakers try refuses to stay where they put it, the definitions are compared to Daedalus’ works. Diodorus says Daedalus was the first to carve statues with open eyes, parted legs and outstretched arms, which is why people said his statues could see and walk.

A system that is often right but cannot say why is the case Socrates describes, and his remedy is to tie answers to reasons. The rocks of the cape stand for the island where Daedalus worked for Minos and built the labyrinth.

Archytas the Tarentine, being in other lines also a mechanician, made a flying dove out of wood. Whenever it lit, it did not rise again.

Aulus Gellius 10.12.10, quoting Favorinus · trans. J. C. Rolfe (1927)

Archytas of Tarentum, a Pythagorean mathematician who was elected general of his city seven years running, made a wooden dove that flew. Aulus Gellius, citing Favorinus and “many eminent Greeks”, says it was balanced with weights and moved by a current of air enclosed and hidden inside it. Then he quotes one line in Greek: once it came down, it did not rise again.

The first flying machine on record stops exactly where autonomy would begin. Its maker lived at Tarentum, in the far west of the Greek sea, beyond the horizon of the picture.

And he wrought for him bulls with feet of bronze, and their mouths were of bronze, and from them they breathed out a terrible flame of fire; moreover he forged a plough of unbending adamant, all in one piece, in payment of thanks to Helios, who had taken the god up in his chariot when faint from the Phlegraean fight.

Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 3.230-234 · trans. R. C. Seaton (1912)

Before Talos, the Argonauts meet another work of Hephaestus. King Aeetes of Colchis owns bronze-footed bulls with bronze mouths that breathe fire, the smith-god’s payment to Helios, who had carried him in his chariot when he was exhausted after the battle of Phlegra. Jason must yoke them. Protected by Medea’s drug, he brings one bull to its knees by kicking its bronze foot.

The bulls fall at the foot and Talos at the ankle, and Medea stands behind both defeats. Weapons handed over as payment between powers, and beaten with help from inside.

So she repaired to the palace of Pelias and persuaded his daughters to make mince meat of their father and boil him, promising to make him young again by her drugs; and to win their confidence she cut up a ram and made it into a lamb by boiling it.

Apollodorus, Library 1.9.27 · trans. J. G. Frazer (1921)

Medea defeats every machine in the story. She gives Jason the drug that protects him from the bronze bulls; she brings down Talos; and in the Library she sells the daughters of Pelias a rejuvenation by first boiling an old ram, cut in pieces, back into a lamb. The daughters trust the demonstration and boil their father, who does not come back.

A promise of youth to Pelias, a promise of immortality to Talos: each time she wins trust with a result and then asks for something that cannot be undone. Adrienne Mayor calls her a “techno-witch”, and writes that any advanced technology runs the risk of a Medea who hacks it through its weak points.

Both her arms and hands as well as her breasts were covered with iron nails concealed under her dress.

Polybius 13.7 · trans. W. R. Paton (1925)

Polybius reports that Nabis, tyrant of Sparta, had a richly dressed likeness made of his wife Apega, “a machine, if one can call such a thing a machine”. Citizens who refused to pay were told that perhaps Apega would persuade them. Nabis made the figure rise from its chair and drew the reluctant citizen into its arms; then, with his hands on its back, he worked hidden springs that pressed the victim against the iron spikes until he agreed to anything.

It is the historical double of Talos’ burning embrace: a figure in human form that offers persuasion first and force after, with the controls behind its back.

Sponge divers raised it in 1901 from an ancient shipwreck off Antikythera, the small island in the strait between Kythera and Crete, on the sea lanes Talos was supposed to watch. It survives in 82 fragments with 30 bronze gearwheels, about a third of the original. Turned by a handle, its dials followed the sun and the moon, predicted eclipses from Babylonian cycles and tracked the four-year cycle of the Panhellenic games; in the reconstruction published by Tony Freeth and colleagues in 2021 it also displayed the planets.

It stores astronomical models as gear ratios and gives predictions when cranked: an analogue computer, now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens (inv. X 15087).

T. Freeth et al., Nature 444 (2006); T. Freeth et al., Scientific Reports 11 (2021).

μιᾶς γὰρ αὐτῶν ἀλλαγείσης ἢ ἐπ᾽ ἀριστερὰ ἐπειληθείσης τὰ ὅλα στάσιν λήψεται

Hero, Automata 2.11: “if a single one of them is changed, or wound to the left, the whole will come to a stop” · translation for this page

Hero of Alexandria, writing after 62 CE, left the only ancient manual on automata that survives. His mobile automaton is a small shrine of Dionysus that rolls by itself to a set spot, lights its altar, pours wine and milk, sets bacchants dancing to drums and cymbals, turns, and rolls back. One falling weight drives it all. The route is stored in a cord wound round the axle: turns in one direction move it forward, a turn round a peg reverses it, slack loops stuck down with wax make it pause. Hero warns that a single cord wound the wrong way stops the whole performance.

In 2007 Noel Sharkey described the cart in New Scientist as a programmable robot. An older automaton theatre that Hero describes opened with a painted face that shut and opened its eyes. The small white tower on the horizon of the map points south, towards Alexandria.

The single vein running from his neck to his ankles and closed by a bronze nail thrust through it vividly recalls the cire perdue method of hollow-casting in bronze

A. B. Cook, Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion I (1914), p. 723

In 1914 the Cambridge scholar A. B. Cook proposed a technical origin for the myth. Large bronzes were cast hollow by the lost-wax method: bronze pins held the clay core in place inside the mould, molten metal was poured in through the feet, and the core was removed afterwards through the soles. The hollow from head to heel, pierced by pins, would be the fact behind the fiction of the vein and the nail; the fiery pit in which moulds were set would explain Talos leaping into the flames.

Read this way, the myth describes how the statue was made. The Cast view of the map, a drawing extracted from the picture, follows Cook’s idea: switch it on and the vein becomes a casting channel.

Crete’s coastline measures about 1,046 km, the figure given by the Greek National Tourism Organisation. Three circuits a day make 3,138 km in 24 hours: an average of about 130.75 km/h, roughly 70 knots, without a pause, three and a half times the average speed of the 100-metre world record. Each point of the shore is seen once every eight hours.

Herodotus reckons that a ship covers about 70,000 fathoms in a long day of sailing, some 130 km: Talos covers that in an hour. On the slower schedule of the Minos, three rounds a year, each village is visited every 122 days. Coastlines grow longer the more closely they are measured, so these figures give only an order of magnitude.