Gods and Robots

by Adrienne Mayor

  Finding felicitous and apt language to describe the range of automata and nonnatural beings designated in ancient mythology as made, not born is daunting. The magical and the mechanical often overlap in stories of artificial life that were expressed in mythic language. Even today, historians of science and technology acknowledge that robot, automaton, cyborg, android, and the like are slippery terms with no fixed definitions. I tend to use informal, conventional understandings for android, robot, automaton, puppet, AI, machine, cyborg, and so on, but for clarity, technical definitions are given in the text, the endnotes, and the glossary.

  This book surveys the wide range of forms of artificial life in mythology, which includes tales of quests for longevity and immortality, superhuman powers borrowed from gods and animals, as well as automata and lifelike replicants endowed with motion and mind. Although the focus is on the Mediterranean world, I have included some accounts from ancient India and China as well. Even though the examples of animated statues, self-moving objects, and simulacra of nature imagined in myths, legends, and other ancient accounts are not exactly machines, robots, or AI in the modern sense, I believe that the stories collected here are “good to think with,” tracing the nascent concepts and imaginings about artificial life that preceded technological actualities.

  It is important to avoid projecting modern notions of mechanics and technology onto antiquity, especially in view of the fragmentary nature of the ancient corpus about artificial life. This book is not intended to suggest direct lines of influence from myth or ancient history to modern technology, although resonances with modern science are noted. Here and there, I point out similar themes in modern mythologies of fiction, film, and popular culture, and I draw parallels to scientific history to help illuminate the natural knowledge and prescience embedded in mythic material. Along the way, the age-old stories, some very familiar and others long forgotten, raise questions of free will, slavery, the origins of evil, man’s limits, and what it means to be human. As the evil robot Tik-Tok in John Sladek’s 1983 science-fiction novel remarks, the very idea of an automaton leads one into “deep philosophical waters,” posing questions of existence, thought, creativity, perception, and reality. In the rich trove of tales from the ancient mythic imagination, one can discern the earliest traces of the awareness that manipulating nature and replicating life might unleash a swarm of ethical and practical dilemmas, further explored in the epilogue.

  So much of antiquity’s literary and artistic treasure has been lost over the millennia, and much of what we have is incomplete and isolated from its original contexts. It is difficult to grasp just how much of ancient literature and art has vanished. The writings—poems, epics, treatises, histories, and other texts—that survive are but a tiny slice compared to the wealth that once existed. Thousands of artistic works have come down to us, but this is a small percentage of the millions that were created. Some art historians suggest that we have only about 1 percent of the Greek vase paintings ever made. And the modicum of literature and art that remains is often randomly preserved.

  These cruel facts of loss and capricious preservation make what we do have that much more precious. They also determine one’s approach and path of discovery and interpretation. In a study like this, we can analyze only what has managed to persist over millennia, as if we are following a bread-crumb trail in a deep, dark wood. And the birds have eaten most of the crumbs. Another analogy for what has perished and what survived derives from the nature of devastating wildfires cutting paths of destruction, driven by winds across a landscape of grass and trees. What remains after terrible fires is what foresters call a “mosaic effect”: wide swaths of burned regions punctuated by patches of flowery meadows and copses of still-green trees. The random ravages of the millennia on Greek and Roman literature and art related to artificial life have left a patchwork dominated by blackened, empty spaces dotted here and there with vital passages and pictures from antiquity. Such a mosaic pattern necessitates a wandering path between evergreen oases, fortuitously preserved and elaborated over thousands of years. Following that path, we may to try to imagine the original cultural landscape. A similar approach, “mosaic theory,” is also used by intelligence analysts to try to compose a big picture by amassing small bits of information. For this book I have gathered every text and scrap of ancient poetry, myth, history, art, and philosophy related to artificial life that I have been able to find—and enough compelling evidence emerges to suggest that people of antiquity were fascinated, even obsessed, with tales of artificially creating life and augmenting natural powers.

  This is all by way of saying that readers should not expect to find a simple linear route in these chapters. Instead, like Theseus following a thread to navigate the Labyrinth designed by Daedalus—and like Daedalus’s little ant making its way through a convoluted seashell to its reward of honey—we follow a meandering, backtracking, twisting thread of stories and images to try to understand how ancient cultures thought about artificial life. There is a narrative arc across the chapters, but the story lines are layered and braided, as we travel along what Artificial Intelligence futurist George Zarkadakis calls the “great river network of mythic narratives with all its tributaries, crisscrossing and circling back” to familiar characters and stories, and accumulating new insights as we go.

  It may come as a relief to some, after wending our way through the vast memory palace of myth, that the final chapter turns to real, historical chronology of inventors and technological innovations in classical antiquity. This historical chapter culminates in the proliferation of self-moving devices and automata in the Hellenistic era, centered in that ultimate space of imagination and invention, Alexandria, Egypt.

  Together these stories, both mythical and real, reveal the surprisingly deep roots of the quest for life that is made, not born. Let us join that quest.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE ROBOT AND THE WITCH

  TALOS AND MEDEA

  THE FIRST “ROBOT” to walk the earth—in ancient Greek mythology—was a bronze giant called Talos.

  Talos was an animated statue that guarded the island of Crete, one of three wondrous gifts fashioned by Hephaestus, god of the forge and patron of invention and technology. These marvels were commissioned by Zeus, for his son, Minos, the legendary first king of Crete. The other two gifts were a golden quiver of drone-like arrows that never missed their mark and Laelaps, a golden hound that always caught its prey. The bronze automaton Talos was charged with the task of defending Crete against pirates.1

  Talos patrolled Minos’s kingdom by marching around the perimeter of the large island three times each day. As an animated metal machine in the form of a man, able to carry out complex human-like actions, Talos can be spoken of as an imagined android robot, an automaton “constructed to move on its own.”2 Designed and built by Hephaestus to repel invasions, Talos was “programmed” to spot strangers and pick up and hurl boulders to sink any foreign vessels that approached Crete’s shores. Talos possessed another capability too, modeled on a human trait. In close combat, the mechanical giant could perform a ghastly perversion of the universal gesture of human warmth, the embrace. With the ability to heat his bronze body red-hot, Talos would hug victims to his chest and roast them alive.

  The automaton’s most memorable appearance in mythology occurs near the end of the Argonautica, the epic poem by Apollonius of Rhodes describing the adventures of the Greek hero Jason and the Argonauts and their quest for the Golden Fleece. Today the Talos episode is familiar to many thanks to the unforgettable stop-motion animation of the bronze robot created by Ray Harryhausen for the cult film Jason and the Argonauts (1963; fig. 1.1 is a bronze cast of the original model).3

  FIG. 1.1. Talos, bronze cast of the crumbling original model made by Ray Harryhausen for the film Jason and the Argonauts (1963), forged 2014 by Simon Fearnhamm, Raven Armoury, Dunmow Road, Thaxted, Essex, England.

  When he composed his epic poem Argonautica in the third century BC, Apoll
onius drew on much older oral and written versions of the myths of Jason, Medea, and Talos, stories that were already well known to his audience. An antiquarian writing in a deliberately archaic style, at one point Apollonius casts Talos as a survivor or relict from the “Age of Bronze Men.” This was an ornate allusion to a conceit in a figurative passage about the deep past taken from the poet Hesiod’s Works and Days (750–650 BC).4 In the Argonautica and other versions of the myth, however, Talos was described as a technological production, envisioned as a bronze automaton constructed by Hephaestus and placed on Crete to do a job. Talos’s abilities were powered by an internal system of divine ichor, the “blood” of the immortal gods. This raises questions: Was Talos immortal? Was he a soulless machine or a sentient being? These uncertainties would prove crucial to the Argonauts, although the answers remain ambiguous.

  In the final book of the Argonautica, Jason and the Argonauts are homeward bound with the precious Golden Fleece. But their ship, the Argo, has been becalmed. With no winds to fill their sails, exhausted from days of rowing, the Argonauts make their way into a sheltered bay between two high cliffs on Crete. Immediately Talos spots them. The great bronze warrior begins breaking off rocks from the cliff and heaves them at the ship. How could the Argonauts escape the clutches of this monstrous android? Quaking in fear, the sailors desperately attempt to flee the terrifying colossus astride the rocky harbor.

  It is the sorceress Medea who comes to their rescue.

  A beautiful princess from the kingdom of Colchis on the Black Sea, the land of the Golden Fleece, Medea was a bewitching femme fatale with her own set of mythic adventures. She possessed the keys to youth and age, life and death. She could hypnotize man and beast, and she could cast spells and brew powerful potions. Medea understood how to defend against flames, and she knew the secrets of the unquenchable “liquid fire” known as “Medea’s oil,” a reference to volatile naphtha from natural petroleum wells around the Caspian Sea. In Seneca’s tragedy Medea (lines 820–30, written in the first century AD), the sorceress keeps this “magical fire” in an airtight golden casket and claims that the fire-bringer Prometheus himself taught her how to store its powers.5

  Before their landfall in Crete, Medea had already helped Jason on his expedition to win the Golden Fleece. Medea’s father, King Aeetes, promised to give Jason the Fleece if he could complete an impossible, deadly task. Aeetes owned a pair of hulking bronze bulls created by Hephaestus. Aeetes ordered Jason to yoke the fire-breathing bronze beasts and plow a field while sowing the earth with dragon’s teeth that would sprout an instant army of android soldiers. Medea decided to save the handsome hero from certain death, and she and Jason became lovers (for the full story of how Jason dealt with the robo-bulls and the dragon-teeth army, see chapter 4).6

  The lovers had to flee the enraged King Aeetes. Medea—whose own golden chariot was drawn by a pair of tame dragons—guided Jason to the lair of the dreadful dragon that guarded the Golden Fleece. With her shrewd psychological insight, powerful pharmaka (drugs), and technai (devices), Medea overcame the dragon.7 Murmuring incantations, dipping into her store of exotic herbs and rare substances gathered from remote crags and meadows high in the Caucasus Mountains, Medea lulled the dragon into a deep sleep and seized the Golden Fleece for Jason. Medea and Jason absconded with the prize to the Argo, and she accompanied the Argonauts on their homeward voyage.

  Now, facing the threat of the looming bronze automaton blocking their way, Medea takes charge again. Wait! she commands Jason’s fearful sailors. Talos’s body may be bronze, but we don’t know whether he is immortal. I think I can defeat him.

  Medea (from medeia, ”cunning,” related to medos, ”plan, devise”) prepares to destroy Talos. In the Argonautica, Medea uses mind control and her special knowledge of the robot’s physiology. She knows that the blacksmith god Hephaestus constructed Talos with a single internal artery or tube through which ichor, the ethereal life-fluid of the gods, pulsed from his head to his feet. Talos’s biomimetic “vivisystem” was sealed by a bronze nail or bolt at his ankle. Medea realizes that the robot’s ankle is his point of physical vulnerability.8

  Apollonius describes Jason and the Argonauts standing back in awe, to watch the epic duel between the powerful witch and the terrible robot. Muttering mystical words to summon malevolent spirits, gnashing her teeth with fury, Medea fixes her penetrating gaze on Talos’s eyes. The witch beams a kind of baleful “telepathy” that disorients the giant. Talos stumbles as he picks up another boulder to throw. A sharp rock nicks his ankle, opening the robot’s single vein. As his life force bleeds away “like melted lead,” Talos sways like a great pine tree chopped at the base of its trunk. With a thunderous crash, the mighty bronze giant topples onto the beach.

  It is interesting to speculate about this death scene of Talos as it was depicted in the Argonautica. Was the vivid image influenced by the sensational collapse of a real monumental bronze statue? Scholars have suggested that Apollonius, who spent time in Rhodes, had in mind the magnificent Colossus of Rhodes, built in 280 BC with sophisticated engineering techniques involving a complex internal structure and external bronze cladding. One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, it stood about 108 feet tall, roughly the size of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Unlike the mythical Talos, who spent his days in constant motion, the immense figure of Helios (“Sun”) did not have moving parts but served as a lighthouse and gateway to the island. The Colossus was demolished by a powerful earthquake during Apollonius’s lifetime, in 226 BC. The massive bronze statue broke off at the knees and crashed into the sea.9

  Other models were also at hand. Apollonius was writing in the third century BC, when an array of self-moving machines and automata were being made and displayed in Alexandria, Egypt, a lively center for engineering innovations. A native of Alexandria, Apollodorus served as head of the great library there (P. Oxy. 12.41). Apollodorus’s descriptions of the automaton Talos (and a drone-like eagle, chapter 6) suggest his familiarity with Alexandria’s famous automated statues and mechanical devices (chapter 9).

  In older versions of the Talos story, technology and psychology are even more prominent—and ambiguous. Does his metallurgic origin make Talos completely inhuman? Notably, the question of whether Talos has agency or feelings is never fully resolved in the myths. Even though he was “made, not born,” Talos seems somehow tragically human, even heroic, cut down by a ruse while carrying out his assigned duties. In the other, more complex descriptions of his downfall, Medea subdues the bronze giant with her spellbinding pharmaka, then uses her powers of suggestion, compelling Talos to hallucinate a nightmare vision of his own violent death. Next, Medea plays on the automaton’s “emotions.” In these versions, Talos is portrayed as susceptible to human fears and hopes, with a kind of volition and intelligence. Medea convinces Talos that she can make him immortal—but only by removing the bronze rivet in his ankle. Talos agrees. When this essential seal on his ankle is dislodged, the ichor flows out like molten lead, and his “life” ebbs away.

  For readers today, the robot’s slow demise might call to mind the iconic scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). As the doomed computer HAL’s memory banks fade and blink out, HAL begins to recite the story of his “birth.” But HAL was made, not born, and his “birth” is a fiction implanted by his manufacturers, much as eidetic, emotional memories are manufactured and implanted in the replicants in the Blade Runner films (1982, 2017). Recent studies in human-robot interactions show that people tend to anthropomorphize robots and Artificial Intelligence if the entities “act like” humans and have a name and a personal “story.” Robots are not sentient, and have no subjective feelings, yet we endow self-moving objects that mimic human behavior with emotions and the ability to suffer, and we feel pangs of empathy for them when they are damaged or destroyed. In the film Jason and the Argonauts, despite the expressionless face of the monolithic bronze automaton, Harryhausen’s astonishing animation sequence
suggests glimmers of personality and intellect in Talos. In the poignant “death” scene, as his life-fluid bleeds out, the great robot struggles to breathe and gestures helplessly at his throat while his bronze body cracks and crumbles. The modern audience feels pity for “the helpless giant and regrets that he was taken in unfairly” by Medea’s trick.10

  In the fifth century BC, Talos was featured in a Greek tragedy by Sophocles (497–406 BC).11 Unfortunately, that play is lost, but it is easy to imagine that the fate of Talos might have evoked similar pathos in antiquity. One can appreciate how oral retellings and tragic dramas would have elicited compassion for Talos, especially since he behaved in a human-like way and his name and backstory were well known. Indeed, there is ample evidence that ancient vase painters humanized Talos in illustrations of his death.