The Brazen Bull: Killed by Own Creation
- ptcrawford
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Whether it be Marie Curie dying due to cancer caused by her radioactive discoveries, William Bullock succumbing to crush injuries caused by his own rotary printing press or most recently Stockton Rush perishing in the implosion of his unregulated submersible, people throughout history have fallen victim of their own creations, even if those creations were not intended as being weapons of death.
Being hoist by one's own petard was a prevalent enough idea that it could birth its own apocryphal tales, the most famous of which may be Joseph-Ignace Guillotin being executed by guillotine. While he may have advocated for more humane executions, this Dr Guillotin neither invented the device that his name was given to nor was he executed via it. Instead, he died in 1814, long after the French Revolution, from an infection; the mistake comes from another Dr. Guillotin being guillotined and an attractive but incorrect conclusion being jumped to.
Instances from the ancient world and its mythical stories could bring up the story of Daedalus, for while he managed to escape imprisonment in the Labyrinth, which he had designed, his son Icarus, who surely helped in the construction of this wings they looked to make their island escape with, died due to not following fatherly advice about not flying too close to the sun.
An apocryphal take of this sort stems from Ancient China. Li Si, chancellor under the first Qin emperors, was executed after being betrayed through the Five Pains method - tattooing, removal of the nose, amputation of a foot, emasculation and then death, in this case being cut in half at the waist, a method attributed by some to his invention, but this was an punishment/execution method that long pre-existed him.
We could take a slightly more abstract approach to 'killed own creation' and list any number of kings, emperors and rulers who were killed by their children, chosen heirs or appointed underlings.
However, here, we are looking at a specific (although likely still somewhat legendary) instance of an inventor being extinguished by his own invention. This is the story of the sixth century BC Athenian called Perilaus (also spelled Perillos).
Listed as a sculptor by Diodorus, Bib. IX.18.1, Perilaus approached Phalaris, tyrant of Akragas in Sicily, with a marvellous sculpture of a bull in bronze. Initially, Phalaris welcomed Perilaus and his bull, giving him presents and ordered that the bull be dedicated to the gods.
However, Perilaus then revealed the "inhuman savagery" (Diodorus, Bib. IX.19.1) of his device - it was in fact a hollow casted bronze bull with a door on one side. Condemned victims would be locked inside and a fire lit under the bull, roasting them to death. Its shape or addition acoustic apparatus converted the screams of the roasting condemned into the sounds of an actual bull. Furthermore, steam from inside the beast would emerge from the nostrils (it needed somewhere for pressure to be released to prevent it exploding) to add to the realism of the sculpture.
Against the reputation he gained for sadistic brutality, Phalaris was aghast at Perilaus’ contraption, although not so aghast as to not use it... fulfilling the notion that “those who plan an evil thing planned at others are usually snared in their own devices” (Diodorus, Bib. IX.18.1), the Akragan tyrant said “Come then, Perilaus, do you be the first to illustrate this; imitate those who will play the pipes and make clear to me the working of your device”. Thinking that he was merely giving a dry run, Perilaus complied, crawling into the bull’s belly. However, Phalaris then had the door closed and a fire lit under it.
Rather than have the bull polluted by death, Phalaris had Perilaus removed before he died - Perilaus still being alive was likely known due to the bull still giving out its bellows. The half-dead sculptor was then thrown from a cliff, so in a technical sense, Perilaus did not die from his own creation, but he seemingly died because of his creation of it.
Upon his overthrow in 554BC, Phalaris was reputedly burned in a brazen bull in Akragas. That this may have happened could suggest that despite his supposed horror at the revelation of what the bull was for, Phalaris gained a reputation for using the Brazen Bull, likely beyond the partial roasting of Perilaus. There was likely some poetic justice being meted out in his execution in the belly of the beast.
Possibly that same Brazen Bull was carried off by the Carthaginians, only to later be returned to Akragas by Scipio Aemilianus after his sack of Carthage in the Third Punic War in 146BC (Diodorus, Bib. XIII.90).
For his use of the Brazen Bull, Phalaris became something of a paragon of cruelty and torment, whether it be from the century after his death, like Pindar, Pythian 1 95
“but him who burned men with fire within a brazen bull, Phalaris that had no Pity, men tell of everywhere with hate”
Or centuries later in Biblical texts such as 3 Maccabees, in which the author claims that the Egyptian king Ptolemy IV was “possessed by a savagery worse than that of Phalaris” (5:20) and was “a Phalaris in everything and filled with madness” (5:42), or in the lines of Juvenal, Satire VIII.81-82...
“Be a fine soldier, and a fine guardian, and a sound judge too. If you're summoned as witness in a confused and ambiguous case, even if Phalaris, the Sicilian tyrant, orders you to lie, and spell out your perjuries, his Bronze Bull ready to torment you at hand, it's a worse evil to prefer survival to dishonour, and for the sake of staying alive, lose the reason for living”.
And these are just three such inferences – if you are interested in more historical mentions of Phalaris, his Brazen Bull and/or his reputation for cruelty, you can head over to the collected material at http://lucianofsamosata.info/wiki/doku.php?id=phalaris:phalaris-the-source-material#phalaris_-_the_source_material
Phalaris was also the focus of a defence by the 2nd century AD Hellenised Syrian, Lucian of Samosata, who describes Perilaus as “an admirable artist, but a man of evil disposition” (Lucian, Phalaris I.11), who only approached Phalaris because of the tyrant's reputation for loving torture. This work attempts to posit Perilaus as the sole inventor of the Brazen Bull, with Phalaris intrigued with it as a piece of “beautiful and exquisite ... workmanship” (Lucian, Phalaris I.11), but horrified when its torturous nature is revealed to him. This follows the record of Diodorus to a point, but perhaps not to the point of redeeming Phalaris. However, it must be said that Lucian does not appear to believe that Phalaris was worthy of such historical redemption, with the whole Phalaris work being a rhetorical exercise; indeed, Lucian’s choice of Phalaris as the subject of such an exercise likely demonstrates that Lucian and the wider literary/historical discourse of his time regarded Phalaris as an irredeemable character.
Regardless of who was the actual driving force behind the horrors of the Brazen Bull - did Perilaus make it on the orders of Phalaris?, legend has it that both Perilaus and Phalaris were executed using it. Therefore, whomever it was, the creator of the Brazen Bull met his end (largely) at the hands of his creation.
Later Christian sources take up the cruelty of the invention connected to Phalaris. Several Christian martyrs are recorded as facing the horrors of the Brazen Bull. A certain Antipas, ordained by the Apostle John as bishop of Pergamon (and possibly the same martyred Antipas recorded in Revelation 2:13), was reputedly martyred by roasting in a Brazen Bull-shaped altar during the reign of Nero or Domitian for casting out demons worshipped by the local population.
Eustathius (Anglicised as Eustace and perhaps originally named Placidus) was a general serving under Trajan who had been initially stripped of his rank and estates due to converting to Christianity only to be recalled by the emperor to lead an army against barbarians/rebels. However, upon the accession of Hadrian, Eustathius refused to sacrifice to the gods and was thrown to the lions, along with his family. When the lions refused to attack them, the emperor had the family roasted to death in a Brazen Bull, although even in death their bodies remained inviolate.
Some versions of the demise of Pelagia of Tarsus have her roasted to death in a Brazen Bull for a combination of her Christian faith and her rejection of advances from the son of the emperor Diocletian (who did not have a son historically) and then the emperor himself.
Bibliography
Adornato, G. ‘Phalaris: Literary Myth or Historical Reality? Reassessing Archaic Akragas’, AJA 116 (2012) 483-506
Bohak, G. ‘Classica et Rabbinica I: The Bull of Phalaris and the Tophet’, Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period 31 (2000) 203-216
Hamilton, J.T. ‘The Bull of Phalaris: The Birth of Music out of Torture’, Department of Germanic Languages & Literature, Harvard University (2012)
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