From the Vault: Talos

mine too. This one was a lot of fun. Uh. And you know who would have thought that the best traditions of thinking about robot life go all the way back to ancient Greece. It's true. Let's pull the plug out let that ecore drain. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey are 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 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 say, 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 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 the spinning blade hands that it utilizes to at one point murder Anthony Perkins and cold Blood No Anthony Perkins. Yeah, well after Psycho, I guess he had it. Well, you know, and this movie is great. In this movie, you felt sorry for him if he showed up showing up in Psycho. Other 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 a 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, it was a cheesy old movie with your You'll Brenner pulling guns on people. Yeah, yeah, he was. He was terrifying. He I mean, you Brenner 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 in not from malice or ill intent like 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 an efficient, emotionless killing machine. All it has is directive and it it absolutely will

not stop until it 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 twentieth century is 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 fabulous example of what is 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 eight. 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 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's 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 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 Jason, and in order to reclaim his rightful kingdom from a usurper king, Jason is on a quest to retrieve a sacred artifact, which is a golden fleece from a magic ram that saved the life of a Greek prints 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 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 and your crew, You're set but it

turns out he's easily distracted. Yes. Another trial is when Jason and the Argonauts have to battle with 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 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, so maybe they just put him off fit well, and 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. 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 Medeia and the rest of the crew of 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 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.

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 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 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 the sons of the gods, and the sons of Chronos gave him to Europa to be the warder of Crete and destride 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, was covered by a thin skin. Now, so you've got a bronze guy. You 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, his heel, right, because that's where he was held as he was dipped into into the river sticks. But we get a different explanation for the vulnerability in

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 in 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 Dragons random encounter and he's dispatched. The main story about him is his death right. And you can also say, well, Italy

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 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 Talus exactly the same. Sometimes his body he has different features or characteristics depending on who the author is, Yes, and is 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 when they are telling it.

And that's certainly the case with Greek mythology. 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 ichor, which in

Greek myth is the lifeblood of the gods. Sometimes it's described as golden instead of red, though, and most of the stories I've seen about tall Us. It is described as red in the Iliad. When the gods, for example Aphrodite, are cut or dabbed with spears. They can be harmed, their skin can be pierced, and they leak fluid. But

the fluid they leak is not blood but ecore. 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 echore that flows in the veins of the blessed gods came 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 is somehow more bound 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 Talus is a god. All all of counts

indicate that he is a manufactured thing. But of course the manufacturer changes depending on the different tales. But but still he is. He is like this artificial creation that has been filled with life because he's been filled with the core. So the ecre maybe for for the bronze men, 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 gollum, the 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 Files. I

think about it. There's a great scene in Fright Night where there's a guy who you just think 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 as 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 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, pink, white, or 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, that's an entirely different 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. And he stands on the island throwing rocks at any ship that

tries to dock. We saw in Apollonius Tail that he apparently runs around the island of crete three times a day, three times a day, and it is impossible. I was tempted to do the math on it, or I was actually kind of surprised that nobody else has a paper out there breaking down exactly how fast and how large Talos would have to be to pull this off. But that's not the only thing that Talous 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. 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's that's sick, 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 this death. This at least according to Simonides, who wrote, the Talis 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 of you know, of of the burnt gag. Yeah, the idea of the grimace And and this is a big question

actually in the etymology of this term. 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, 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. 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 historians told these stories that on the island of Sardinia, the pre Roman inhabitants had this ritual custom for dealing with criminals and for euthanizing elderly people who couldn't care for themselves. And what they 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 drugged out, they could be thrown off a cliff or beaten to death. It started offstounding reasonably humane for the ancient 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, if true, to an herb native to Sardinia called the hemlock water drop ward or Enanth crocata, also known commonly as water celery. But this is not a good candidate to stick in your bloody 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, a Sardinian shepherd committed suicide by eating water drop ward, and his corpse

was apparently found grinning. Now, the name en anth 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 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 or from the ancient stories, and thus the origin of the idea of the sardonic grin. Now back to Talos though. Okay, so I'm sorry to take a sup It's a fascinating diversion, but the bronze killer oasis is will explore. There are two key origin

stories for this mechanical marvel. So in some tales he had been Really most of the older tales he was created by Festus, the god of the forge, the later known as Vulcan, the blacksmith god of Olympus. Yeah, the deformed god who 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 pagan uh tourist stops in the American South. But in

later tellings, Uh the inventor Dadalists constructs this artificial being. Yeah, the master inventor, the creator of the Manoan Mayze, the Wings of Icarus and other marvels, the famed mythical inventor. Yeah, and it's but this is interesting as well because Talos, the the bronze automaton here curiously bears the same name as the inventor the Dadalists tried to murder out of jealousy earlier on, pushing him out of it out of a tower, although Athena saves this more total Talus by

turning him into a partridge so we can fly away. Yeah, and his paper Paris talks about the the number of stories along these lines. But it's like an Athenian tradition that Daedalus was in Athens and he had this pupil who was very talented, and he was a little too talented, so Dadalus 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, Deedal is the standing. There's like jeezus 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. No One. Last note about that Talus. That original human Talus was apparently also known as Callous in 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 Dia 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 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 b C. That illustrates this, and I'll make sure to include that image on the landing page for this episode'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 cars. 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 falling down, but he's the same size as all the other dudes are round him, which makes sense when you think about the the the the embrace, 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 Talus as this hundred 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 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 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

accounts of the Colossus of Rhodes. Oh yeah, you know, the the literally a giant statue that stood as a sort of a guardian of of the harbor. Yeah, so wait a minute, we got to go back to how tell Us gets defeated in those stories. So there are four different versions of his death that seemed to exist, but they all relate to draining the equal out of the ankle. So in one uh, the hero poets 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. So there's another one where Medea's tricks him into thinking she can make him immortal by pulling out the nail. Now this is a common trick up Medea'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 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 for Dad Happy birthday. And so they chop him up and 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 maragic heroine despite all of the killing she does. Yeah. The other two versions of this relate to magical efforts on Media's part, her hypnotic gaze spells, or even some sort of a magical potion of a drugging of Talus if you will that somehow make him stumble and rupture 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 in side note, this would be a good one to throw some drums over some good and the barbarian trumps exactly, so please sub them in here. So the Talus shows up on a cliff, he threatens to crush them with rocks, and Media tells Jason and his men to 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 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

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 low even from afar. Maybe it tortures us so Tallos for all his frame of bronze yielded the victory to 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 tower ring on the jutting cliff. But even as some huge pine high up on the mountains, which 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 Tallos 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. I love that. That is a robot death scene.

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 three film Jason and the Argonauts with those wonderful Ray Harry hoous In effects, because in that one, Jason kills Tallis rather than media sexist red con and it's boring too. Jason just runs up 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, that's a bummer. You gotta get the Hounds of Hades. You do the Hounds 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 Medeia is like, hold on, I got this. And that's actually possibly there in her name, because, as Adrian Mayor points out, the name Medeia seems to 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. Yeah, the other, of course, being the giant bronze robot. Yes, 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. All right, we're back.

So before we proceed here, I want to read this excellent quote from Merlin Paris in that Talos in Dentalist 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 within 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 s scientific possibilities of the present age, and even then belonging more with the bizarre imaginings of the new 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 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 of Revelation or other apocalyptic literature we read that now is featuring 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 that's a strong point. Yes. Now at this point where we want to just discuss some of the different versions of the tale relating where Talos 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. 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 ash trees, violent clad in bronze, destroyed in the flood of de Coulian, who is 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. Yeah, it's dank down there. So this would frame Talos as the last Bronze man, given by Zeus to Europa to protect 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 Hessia's bronze age of of creatures, these human creatures who are 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 explicitly 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, a machine of some sort, born from the forge, and in the earlier traditions, the creator is Hephaestus, a k 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 armors of Achilles. Simonides, among others, identified Talus 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, Paris reminds us that the association here might have been that Tallus 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 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 have fastest 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, and usually in the traditions, both or at least over time, Both and Paris makes a lot of this history of associations between Dadalus and statuary that he was a great innovator in lifelike 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 made were

like human beings. They could see, they said, and walk, and in a word, preserved so well the composition of the whole Boddy, 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 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 Menno. 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. But the idea of the innovation of lifelike poses and 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 Lowan Minch is like this, all the Venus figurines, the Lowan Minch. 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, like the striding figurines of ancient Egypt. Robert, I know you've seen these right where their legs are clearly like walking there like the walk sign on the street. Yes, walking like an Egypt And if you will and uh

so you add to this. Paris says the Athenian tradition about Dadalus that we talked about earlier, which to remind you is that he once had a young pupil named Talos or Kalos, who was so talented that Dadalust 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 talo ay the plural of Talus in places like Attica and Sardinia, which were not actual robots but braunze statues set up on rocky coastlines as figures of apotropaic magic, meaning warding off magically 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 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 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 odds, 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 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 the tradition towards Daedalus, and this idea of of quicksilver

as the really the animating echo. 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 ecore, the 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. G and tell us. All right, we're back. Now. We've already talked about the Bronze Age as defined as one of Hesiod's five ages in the mythological Bronze Age, But what about the technological Bronze Age. Yeah, 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 BC to tw BC, and we know that they used other medals during this time gold, silver, lad tim, electrom and even iron on 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 he's composed of bronze, which is an alloy, which is n cop and ten tin. 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 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 the 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 this was an age of peak bronze technology. Yeah, and

bronze was important. It was a major innovation in the history of technology 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, 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 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 seem based on the creation of blades and cutting materials. Well, well, I think there's there's an answer there that that relates to the basic nature of 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 a thing, you change its nature and 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 want to add it. In the 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 toward technology,

toward tool making and the use of tools. Joan are Martens 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 bull Dedalus makes for Pacife, as well as such a notable myths as Pandora and Pygmalion.

Quote 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. I mean, it's kind of impossible to resist that, but yeah,

I see exactly what's going on here. Uh. Marten's is drawing this connection between the creative power of human beings and the idea that you could actually create something animated, something that's alive. Uh. And we totally see that the blurring of that distinction in what we were talking about with Dadalus Daedalus creating lifelike statues and sculptures that 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 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 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. The symbolic well, this is basically bronze weaponry and bronze technology incarnate and it crumbled, it goes up against this new metal that is even more potent. Well, 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 you can't figure it out, so it is a power beyond your reach. Now there's 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

are Mardens 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 mention of a single vein running through Talos'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

whack 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, who lived through ninety two. But the idea here is that the functionality of Tallow's the thing that gives him live, 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, not one that walks around. First of all, you prepare a core of soil and clay to mold into 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 wax has then left exposed at two points at the base. Think again to the idea that there are two veins running down Tallis'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, 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 then you all you have to do is repair casting flaws, smooth and polish the surface. Rework the details is needed at additional embellishments as desired like silver inlays, etcetera, and you have perhaps a being of bronze. So this means that the Tallos figure as depicted 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 ng is is 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 kind of like, hey, you know what this robot's achilles heal was? What was his achilles heal? We 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

that is a wow. It has this long tail that'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, all of these various uh, you know, complex interpretations when it's really just a pluck. 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've talked about how myths change over time, but of course society changes as well, and there are changes in 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 one example is I wonder if you can draw broad parallels between the way technology is envisioned in free societies that value human

rights versus slave own societies, and so. For example, in his book Politics Aristotle were written around three fifty BC, Aristotle is writing about the idea of possessions versus instruments, and he 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 dead LUs or the tripods of Hephaestus, which says the poet quote of their own accord entered the assembly of the gods, if in like manner at the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touched the liar without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor

masters slaves. So Aristotle believed that that slavery, that that slavery and 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 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 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 age would make a complete, you know, a very hard line distinction between the labor of 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 necessary really 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 could you see this definite connection between even our

modern conception of a robot with slavey, 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 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 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 becomes something we would think of like a human is a self moved but artificial creature capable of feeling. Now, Paris says that according to Aristotle, Dadalus 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 tireless thoroughness with which 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 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 e coor 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 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. It seems like the lines are much blurrier all throughout, and certainly we see a lot of modern science fiction that re blurs those lines. I mean, there's a true in this amount of of of narrative fund

to be had there. Oh yeah, well, I mean earlier we brought up the obvious robot of you Ole Brenner in Westworld, but in the New West World, I think it spends a lot of times trying to 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 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 I believe it's a channel for 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

become conscious in complication to 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

deserve and how they should be treated. All right, Well, I think that pretty much wraps it up for Talos, 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 haven't seen Ray Harry has housinges Talus from Jason and the Argonauts in nineteen sixty three, I know we were hating on it because they take away media's role in it, but it's still a really cool stop motion animation. 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 look amazing in this. Yeah, it's like all the Harry

House and 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 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 the show. And of course you can find us at

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