Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Nearing the end of the return, the Argonauts attempted to land on Crete. The island was guarded by Talos, a bronze giant—last of the bronze race, or a gift of Hephaestus (or Zeus) to Minos—who ran the circuit of Crete three times a day and hurled rocks at approaching ships to keep strangers off. His single vulnerable point was a vein (or pipe) of ichor running from neck to ankle, closed by a bronze nail or thin skin at the ankle. Talos kept the Argo from beaching. Medea undertook to defeat him. In Apollonius she goes to the foredeck, invokes the Keres (spirits of death) with songs and drugs, and bewitches Talos’s sight; he scrapes his ankle against a rock (or the nail comes out), the ichor runs out like molten lead, and he collapses. In Apollodorus’s alternatives she drives him mad with drugs, or deceives him into removing the ankle nail, or Poeas (in some notices) shoots him in the ankle; the ichor drains and he dies. The heroes then land, take on water, and sail on toward Aegina and the Greek coast. Talos is the return’s last monstrous gatekeeper—craft and vulnerability instead of open battle—and Medea’s power, once used for Jason’s tasks and the fleece, here again saves the ship before the reckoning at Iolcus.