Brazen bull

The brazen bull, bronze bull, or Sicilian bull, was a torture and execution device designed in ancient Greece. According to Diodorus Siculus, recounting the story in Bibliotheca historica, Perillos of Athens invented and proposed it to Phalaris, the tyrant of Akragas, Sicily, as a new means of executing criminals. The bull was made entirely of bronze, hollow, with a door in one side. The bull was in the form and size of an actual bull and had an acoustic apparatus that converted screams into the sound of a bull. The condemned were locked inside the device, and a fire was set under it, heating the metal until the person inside was roasted to death.

Phalaris commanded that the bull be designed in such a way that its smoke rose in spicy clouds of incense. The head of the bull was designed with a complex system of tubes and stops so that the prisoner's screams were converted into sounds like the bellowing of an infuriated bull. According to legend, when the bull was reopened, the victim's scorched bones "shone like jewels and were made into bracelets."

Perillos said to Phalaris: "His screams will come to you through the pipes as the tenderest, most pathetic, most melodious of bellowings." Perillos believed he would receive a reward for his invention. Instead, Phalaris, who was disgusted by these words, ordered its horn sound system to be tested on Perillos himself. When Perillos entered, he was immediately locked in and the fire was set, so that Phalaris could hear the sound of his screams. Before Perillos could die, Phalaris opened the door and took him away. After freeing him from the bull, Phalaris took Perillos to the top of a hill and threw him off, killing him. Phalaris himself is said to have been killed in the brazen bull when he was overthrown by Telemachus, the ancestor of Theron.

Biblical scholars link the design of the Brazen Bull to statues of the Carthaginian deity Baal Hammon (often identified with the Biblical Moloch) in which infants were sacrificed alive within a bronze, calf-headed statue of the deity by being placed on the hands of the statue and sliding down into the bronze furnace. The noises of the child's screams were often drowned out by drumming and dancing, since the sacrificial altars did not have the pipes system that the Brazen Bull had (see Tophet). The practices of the city of Tophet are also cited by scholars to be the inspiration for the Brazen Bull because of Akragas' Carthaginian roots.

...
Wikipedia