In
the Cretan tales incorporated into Greek mythology, Tálos (Greek
Τάλως; Latin Talus) or Tálon (Greek
Τάλων) was a giant man of bronze who protected Europa
in Crete, circling the island’s shores three times daily while guarding it.
In the Cretan dialect, talôs was the equivalent of the Greek hęlios, the sun: the lexicon of Hesychius of Alexandria notes simply, “Talos is the sun.” In Crete Zeus was worshipped as Zeus Tallaios, “Solar Zeus”, absorbing the earlier god as an epithet in the familiar sequence. The god was identified with the Tallaia, a spur of the Ida range in Crete. On the coin from Phaistos he is winged; in Greek vase-paintings and Etruscan bronze mirrors he is not. The ideas of Talos vary widely, with one consistent detail: in Greek
Talos
the Bronze Giant from “Jason
and the Argonauts”, Directed by Don Chaffey (1963)
imagery
outside Crete, Talos is always being vanquished: he seems to have been an
enigmatic figure to the Greeks themselves.
Talos
is described by Greeks as a gift, either a gift from Hephaestus to Minos, forged
with the aid of the Cyclopes in the form of a bull or a gift from Zeus to Europa.
Or he may have been the son of Kres, the personification of Crete; In
Argonautica Talos threw rocks at any approaching ship. In the Byzantine
encyclopia The Suda, Talos is said, when the Sardinians did not wish to release
him to Minos, to have heated himself red-hot by jumping into a fire and to have
clasped them in his embrace.
Talos
had one vein, which went from his neck to his ankle, bound shut by only one
bronze nail. The Argo, transporting Jason and the Argonauts, approached Crete
after obtaining the Golden Fleece. As guardian of the island, Talos kept the
Argo at bay by hurling great boulders at it. According to Apollodorus, Talos was
slain either when Medea the sorceress drove him mad with drugs, or deceived him
into believing that she would make him immortal by removing the nail. In
Argonautica, Medea hypnotized him from the Argo, driving him mad with the keres
she raised, so that he dislodged the nail, and “the ichor ran out of him like
molten lead”, exsanguinating and killing him. The story is somewhat
reminiscent of the story regarding the heel of Achilles.
Talos
is also the inventive young pupil of Daedalus at Athens, who copied a fishbone
for the first saw; Daedalus killed him in jealousy.