Apollonius of Rhodes’s epic poem Argonautica (3rd century BCE) is a retelling of the myth of Jason and his band of 50 heroes, and their quest to retrieve a mythical Golden Fleece. The Argonauts, so named after Argo the ship on which they voyage, together with their ally Medea, the princess of Colchis, are on the last leg of their homeward journey when they sail towards the island of Crete. The island is guarded by Talos, a being with an invulnerable body made out of bronze. Talos is said to make a circuit of the island three times a day and, on spotting an approaching vessel, would hurl boulders at them.The figure of Talos appears in the writings of authors from different eras in ancient Greek history, including Simonides of Ceos (6th century BCE) and Pseudo-Apollodorus’s Library (1–2nd century CE). Simonides and Apollodorus claim that Talos was a gift from the god Hephaestus to Minos, king of Crete. Hephaestus is known for creating automata such as the Moving Tripods and the Golden Maidens, sentient figures made out of gold, to serve him. Their accounts favour classifying Talos too as an artificial being. (Automata, in the sense of self-moving objects, were not purely mythical; for example, the first cuckoo clock was made by Ctesibius of Alexandria in the 3rd century BCE.1)Of these accounts, Apollonius’s Argonautica contains the most expansive narrative of Talos. The first thing we learn about Talos is that he is made of bronze. Although the phrase τοὺς δὲ Τάλως χάλκειος2 is sometimes translated as ‘Talos, the man of bronze’ the noun ‘man’ does not exist in the phrase, only the adjective ‘bronze’ (χάλκειος), hence it is better translated as ‘Talos, who is made out of bronze.’ Apollonius then clarifies that Talos is ‘the last of the bronze race of men born from ash trees still living in the time of the demigods’.3 Despite his apparent human origins, Talos is invulnerable (cannot be harmed) as his body and limbs are made out of bronze; his only vulnerability is a thin membrane that covers a vein running through an ankle. This vein is filled with ichor rather than blood, the liquid that runs in the veins of gods.Even as we witness the Argonauts’ confrontation to the end, Apollonius does not provide a clear explanation of how we should interpret the species that is Talos by continuing to contradict hints of his humanity with references to his non-human traits. Then Medea with her magical powers mounts the deck of the Argo and calling upon the Fates of Death and the swift hounds of Hades ‘bewitch[es] bronze Talos’s eyes’.4 When Talos next picks up a boulder, he grazes his ankle and the ichor flows out ‘like molten lead’.5 At last he falls with a great crash, like a tree left half hewn by an axe.The demise of Talos is related by the narrator himself:Truly, Father Zeus, great astonishment confounds my mind, if in fact death comes not only through disease and wounds, but even from afar someone can harm us, just as he, though made of bronze, yielded in defeat to the power of Medea the sorceress.6The fear in the narrator’s voice is apparent, of the possibility of death ‘from afar’. We also finally gain an insight into the position that Talos occupies on the spectrum of humanity. The narrator’s fear of a remote power that could harm ‘us’ (ἄμμε)7 suggests that he views Talos as a fellow human, as one of us, in this instance. His death causes concern and fear among fellow humans who are confronted with the reality and inevitability of their own mortality. Apollonius reinforces this shift by drawing parallels between the death of Talos and that of Greek heroes in the Trojan War, who despite their half-divine parentage are portrayed largely as human. Talos’s vulnerability residing in his ankle is similar to that of Achilles; furthermore, the simile of a falling tree is one that is often used to describe the death of heroes in the Iliad.8 In the modern world, this many centuries later, as the field of artificial intelligence and robotics rapidly advances, we as a society are concerned at the prospect of creating machines that are indistinguishable from humans. Visions of this futuristic world are often first portrayed in science fiction; the films Blade Runner (1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) feature ‘replicants’, bioengineered humanoids; and the television series Humans (2015–2018) similarly features ‘synths’, anthropomorphic robots (robots possessing human characteristics). It would be anachronistic to view Talos in the same light as a replicant or synth — given the term ‘robot’ itself was only coined in 1920 by Karel Čapek in his play Rossum’s Universal Robots9. However, we can nevertheless use the story to understand and broaden our ideas about what it means to be human in this modern world. When Apollonius suggested that Talos was one of us at the point of death, we are acutely reminded that it is death that separates us from artificial beings. Despite his metallic body, when Talos died he was very human.