Smithsonian Magazine Asks if Talos Was an Ancient A.I.-Powered Robot

​Ancient myths and legends have a protean quality that makes them applicable to almost any current event, but that same quality has a downside: From the time of the euhemerists down to this very morning, there is a tendency to try to find the “real” story behind the myth by projecting today’s world back into the past. Earlier today, Smithsonian Magazine asked whether Talos, the bronze giant of the Argonautica, is in fact an early example of artificial intelligence. This question is, of course, patently absurd because Talos did not exist.

It might also sound familiar because an earlier version of the claim—arguing that Talos was a robot—appeared in Erich von Däniken’s Odyssey of the Gods (1999) and David Childress’s Technology of the Gods (2000) before serving as one of the set-pieces in Adrienne Mayor’s book about Greeks and mythological robots. Mayor later expanded her claim to include artificial intelligence when it A.I. became popular two years ago.
 
“There are many definitions of a robot, but a commonly accepted one is that a robot can move on its own, interact with its environment, and has some sort of inner workings and power source,” Mayor told Smithsonian magazine. “Talos has all of those things.” But did he? Well, not really.
 
I’ve covered this claim three separate times going back to 2012 (here, here, and here), so I won’t belabor the point by rehashing the entire argument. The short version is that the Greek sources about Talos do not generally describe him as a robot but as a living being with parents and offspring. While Apollonius’ Argonautica (4.1639-1693) is the primary source for the Talos myth, even Apollonius describes Talos as a descendant of the men of the Bronze Age (“of the stock of bronze, of the men sprung from ash trees”), someone who was born—i.e., not as an automaton. Pausanias (8.53.5) goes further and tells us that Talos was the son of Kres, the eponymous god of Crete, and the father (!) of Hephaestus. 
 
The idea of Talos as a bronze robot is a much later development. It originates with Apollonius’ description of Talos having a nail in his single vein which served as a stopper to keep his ichor (the blood of the gods) in his body. Apollodorus (1.9.26), in summarizing Apollonius, gives a variant that links Talos to other mechanical men of mythology: “Some say that he was a man of the Brazen Race, others that he was given to Minos by Hephaestus; he was a brazen man, but some say that he was a bull. He had a single vein extending from his neck to his ankles, and a bronze nail was rammed home at the end of the vein” (trans. Frazer).
 
The idea that Talos was given to Minos by Hephaestus suggests that he was an automaton, like the others Hephaestus made in the Odyssey. The story traces back to Simonides, according to a late source (Suda, s.v. “Sardinians”), who describes Talos as a bronze automaton who stood in flame and held victims tight until they burned to death in order to escape King Minos—a description reminiscent of the Carthaginian statue of Kronos (Moloch) on which children were burned to death, as Diodorus Siculus, Dionysus of Halicarnassus, and others reported. As A. B. Cook argued in 1914, the Greeks considered this Kronos, particularly among the Sardinians formerly of Carthage, to be the same as Talos.
 
In short, as Cook explained, Talos was originally a Cretan sun-god. His very name talôs means “the sun” in the Cretan language, and the island’s “solar Zeus” was “Zeus Tallaios,” which identified Zeus with the sun. (Inscriptions on Crete call Talos “Zeus in Crete,” further identifying the two.) Only later, as the old Cretan practices were remodeled to conform to the broader Greek world did Talos become a demigod from the Age of Bronze, later literalized as a man of bronze or identified with his own bronze statue. In the case of Talos, as I explained in 2018, the transition to bronze automaton seems to have occurred in order to absolve the Argonauts of an impious act that likely occurred in the older, oral Argonautica whose existence can be inferred from Homeric references: they attacked the sun god on Crete (cf. the Odyssey, where Odysseus’ men ate the sun-god’s cattle).
 
When Mayor tries to take one (late) version of the Talos story—actually, she picks and chooses details from Apollonius and Apollodorus without following either fully—and turn it into a Greek treatise on A.I., she stretches the evidence beyond its scope. The Talos story, in one version, can help us think about A.I. and robots, but we cannot say that it originated as a robot story of that the most of the Greeks across ancient history would have conceptualized it as one.