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This at all events is suggested by the legend of
Talos, a bronze man who clutched people to his breast and leaped
with them into the fire, so that they were roasted alive. He is said
to have been given by Zeus to Europa, or by Hephaestus to Minos, to
guard the island of Crete, which he patrolled thrice daily.
According to one account he was a bull, according to another he was
the sun. Probably he was identical with the Minotaur, and stripped
of his mythical features was nothing but a bronze image of the sun
represented as a man with a bull's head. In order to renew the solar
fires, human victims may have been sacrificed to the idol by being
roasted in its hollow body or placed on its sloping hands and
allowed to roll into a pit of fire. It was in the latter fashion
that the Carthaginians sacrificed their offspring to Moloch. The
children were laid on the hands of a calf-headed image of bronze,
from which they slid into a fiery oven, while the people danced to
the music of flutes and timbrels to drown the shrieks of the burning
victims.


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