High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The brazen bull, bronze bull, or Sicilian bull, was a torture and execution device designed in ancient Greece. Its inventor, metal worker Perillos of Athens, 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 condemned were locked in the bull, and a fire was set under it, heating the metal until it became yellow-hot and causing the person inside to roast to death.