Gods and Robots

by Adrienne Mayor

  We have only fragments of the many stories about the Cretan robot that circulated in antiquity, and some versions are lost to us. Illustrations on vases and coins help to fill out the picture, and some artistic images of Talos contain details unknown in surviving literature. The coins of the city of Phaistos, one of the three great Minoan cities of Bronze Age Crete, are an example. Phaistos commemorated King Minos’s bronze guardian Talos on silver coins from about 350 to 280 BC. The coins show a menacing Talos facing forward or in profile, hurling stones. No surviving ancient source says Talos had wings or flew, but on the Phaistos coins Talos has wings. The wings could be a symbolic motif that signaled his nonhuman status or they might suggest his superhuman speed as he circled the island (this would entail traveling more than 150 miles per hour by some calculations). On the reverse of some of the Phaistos coins Talos is accompanied by the Golden Hound Laelaps, one of the three engineering marvels made by Hephaestus for King Minos. The wonder-dog has its own body of ancient folklore (chapter 7).12

  About two centuries before Apollonius wrote the Argonautica, Talos appeared on red-figure Greek vase paintings of about 430 to 400 BC. The details on some of the vases show that Talos’s internal “biostructure,” the ichor-filled artery system sealed by a bolt at his ankle, was already a familiar part of the story as early as the fifth century BC. The similarities and style of the scenes suggest that the vase paintings might be miniature copies of large public wall murals painted by Polygnotus and Mikon, renowned artists of Athens in the fifth century BC. The ancient Greek travel writer Pausanias (8.11.3) tells us that Mikon painted episodes from the epic saga of Jason and the Golden Fleece in the Temple of Castor and Pollux (the Dioscuri twins were honored in the Anakeion, chapter 2).

  FIG. 1.2. Talos hurling stones on coins of Phaistos, Crete. Left, silver stater, fourth century BC (reverse shows a bull). Theodora Wilbur Fund in memory of Zoe Wilbur, 65.1291. Right, Talos in profile, bronze coin, third century BC (reverse shows the Golden Hound). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius C. Vermeule III, 1998.616. Photographs © 2018 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

  Those murals admired by Pausanias in the second century AD are now lost, but surviving images on vases reveal how Talos was imagined in the classical era. The artists show Talos as part machine, part human, whose destruction required technology. The paintings also convey a sense of pathos in his destruction. For example, the dramatic scene on the extraordinary “Talos vase,” a large wine vessel made in Athens in about 410–400 BC, shows Medea mesmerizing the large man of bronze (figs. 1.3 and 1.4, plate 1).

  Cradling her bowl of drugs, Medea gazes intently as Talos swoons into the arms of Castor and Pollux. In Greek myth, the Dioscuri twins had joined the Argonauts, but no surviving stories include them in the death of Talos, so this image points to a lost tale. The Talos Painter depicts Talos with a robust metal body like that of a bronze statue; his torso looks like the realistic, heavily muscled bronze chest armor worn by Greek warriors (chapter 7, fig. 7.3). Employing the same technique used for images of warriors wearing bronze “muscle armor,” the artist painted Talos’s entire body yellowish-white to distinguish his bronze plating from human flesh. But despite his metallic form, Talos’s posture and his face are humanized to evoke empathy. One classical scholar even detects “a teardrop . . . falling from Talos’ right eye,” although this line might represent metallic molding or seams, like the other reddish outlines defining the robot’s anatomy.13

  FIG. 1.3. “Death of Talos,” The metallic robot Talos swoons into the arms of Castor and Pollux, as Medea holds a bowl of drugs and gazes malevolently. Red-figure volute krater, fifth century BC, by the Talos Painter, from Ruvo, Museo Jatta, Ruvo di Puglia, Album / Art Resource, NY.

  FIG. 1.4 (PLATE 1). “Death of Talos,” Ruvo vase detail. Album / Art Resource, NY.

  An earlier (440–430 BC) vase painting on an Attic krater found in southern Italy shows Talos as a tall bearded figure reeling off balance, again struggling against Castor and Pollux (figs. 1.5, 1.6, plate 2). This scene includes several striking details confirming the technological character of Talos’s vivisystem and destruction. We see Jason kneeling next to the robot’s right foot, applying a tool to the small round bolt on Talos’s ankle. Leaning over Jason, Medea is holding her bowl of drugs. A small winged figure of Thanatos (Death) grasps and steadies Talos’s foot. Death’s stance, posed on one foot with the other bent back, appears to replicate the death throes of Talos.

  FIG. 1.5 (PLATE 2). Medea watches as Jason uses a tool to unseal the bolt in Talos’s ankle held by a small winged figure of Death, as Talos collapses into the arms of Castor and Pollux. Red-figure krater, 450–400 BC, found at Montesarchio, Italy. “Cratere raffigurante la morte di Talos,” Museo Archeologico del Sannio Caudino, Montesarchio, per gentile concessione del Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, fototeca del Polo Museale della Campania.

  FIG 1.6. Detail of the Montesarchio krater, showing Jason using a tool to remove the bolt in Talos’s ankle. Drawing by Michele Angel.

  A similar scene showing the use of a tool appears on an Attic vase fragment of about 400 BC found in Spina, an Etruscan port on the Adriatic Sea. Talos is again seized by Castor and Pollux. At Talos’s feet, Medea holds a box on her lap and a blade in her right hand, ready to remove the nail on his ankle. Another tiny winged figure of Death points at Talos’s legs, heightening the suspense of the vignette.14

  In the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts, the bronze colossus was a dire obstacle to be vanquished. For King Minos of Crete, however, Talos was a boon, an early warning system and frontline defense for his strong navy. Likewise, the Etruscans, dominant in northern Italy from about 700 to 500 BC, regarded the guardian Talos as a heroic figure. Greek myths were favorite subjects for Etruscans, who imported shiploads of Attic vases decorated with familiar scenes and characters from mythology. The Etruscans often gave the Hellenic stories a local spin, however, reflected in their own artworks. Talos appears on several engraved Etruscan bronze mirrors of about 500–400 BC, when Roman power was rising as a threat to Etruria.

  An Etruscan mirror in the British Museum shows Talos, identified by his Etruscan name, Chaluchasu. He is struggling with two Argonauts identified, in Etruscan-language inscriptions, as Castor and Pollux. A woman leans down to open a small box while reaching out toward Talos’s lower leg (see the drawing in fig. 1.7). The scene replicates the actions of Medea in the Athenian vase paintings, but the woman is labeled “Turan,” the Etruscan name for the goddess of love, Aphrodite, suggesting an alternative, unknown version of the Greek myth.

  Other Etruscan bronze mirrors show a victorious Talos/Chaluchasu crushing his antagonists, perhaps reflecting his ability to roast victims by hugging them to his heated chest (fig. 1.7). Scholars conclude that a local Italian tradition glorified Talos, emphasizing the bronze robot’s original purpose as the guardian of Crete’s shores. The mirrors show that the Etruscans considered Talos/Chaluchasu as a positive heroic figure whose “invincibility helped to overpower trespassers [and] strangers” at a time when Etruscans were facing Rome’s incursions into their territory.15

  FIG. 1.7. Top, Talos crushing Castor and Pollux to his chest, while a woman opens a box and reaches toward Talos’s ankle. Etruscan bronze mirror, about 460 BC, drawing, 1859,0301.30. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Bottom, Talos crushing two men, Etruscan bronze mirror, 30480 Antikensammlung Staatliche Museen, Berlin, photo by Sailko (Francesko Bini), 2014.

  How ancient is the Talos tale? That is uncertain; but, as we saw, Talos appears in art of the early fifth century BC. Stories about other animated statues and self-moving devices serving the gods on Mount Olympus are found in archaic oral traditions that were first set down in writing in about 750 BC in Homer’s Iliad, the epic poem about the legendary Trojan War set in the Bronze Age (ca. 1150 BC).16 In classical antiquity, it was believed that King Minos of Crete had ruled three generations before the Trojan War. Renowned for his laws and for the strong navy h
e built to suppress piracy, Minos was treated as a “historical” ruler by the fifth-century BC historians Herodotus (3.122) and Thucydides (1.4) and later by Diodorus Siculus (4.60.3), Plutarch (Theseus 16), and Pausanias (3.2.4), among others. Modern archaeologists named the Minoan civilization (3000–1100 BC) after the legendary King Minos.

  Minoan-era seals from Crete depict many bizarre monsters and demons, which apparently served as guardians of cities and talismans. A bull-headed man, the Minotaur, appears on some Minoan seals. One Late Minoan seal stamp, known as the Master Impression (1450–1400 BC), is quite striking. It shows a fortified city on a hill above a rocky seashore (matching the topography of Kastelli Hill, Kydonia, modern Chania, Crete, where the seal was discovered). A gigantic faceless male figure, “unusually sturdy and strongly built,” looms atop the highest point of the city. The enigmatic figure does not represent Talos of Greek myth. But if this and similar seals circulated in the Greek world in antiquity, it is possible that a scene like this—a giant seemingly guarding a Minoan city—might have influenced early oral traditions about Talos defending Crete for King Minos. That is speculation, of course, and in the absence of any literary texts the meaning of the scene on the Minoan seal remains a mystery.17

  King Minos figured in other ancient tales of technology associated with the legendary craftsman Daedalus, whose works were sometimes conflated with those of the inventor god Hephaestus (chapters 4 and 5). In any event, it is clear that Talos, the bronze automaton of Crete, was well known in Greek poetry and artworks long before Apollonius of Rhodes wrote his Argonautica in the third century BC. Besides Pindar (Pythian 4, ca. 462 BC), Apollonius’s sources for Talos are unknown, but some scholars believe that the epic traditions about the Argo’s voyage are even older than the Trojan War stories.18 So the tale of Talos could be very ancient indeed.

  Talos appeared in the lost tragedy Daedalus by Sophocles in the fifth century BC. But the earliest written description of Talos is in a fragment of a poem by Simonides (556–468 BC). Simonides calls Talos a phylax empsychos, an “animated guardian,” made by Hephaestus. Notably, Simonides says that before taking up guard duties on Crete, the great bronze warrior had destroyed many men by crushing them in his burning embrace on Sardinia. Sardinia, the large island west of Italy, was renowned for copper, lead, and bronze metallurgy in antiquity. Sardinia had long-standing ties to Crete dating back to the Bronze Age, and the Etruscans traded and settled in Sardinia as early as the ninth century BC.19 During the Nuragic civilization of Sardinia, which flourished from about 950 to 700 BC, smiths forged myriad bronze figures using lost-wax casting. Nuragic sculptors employed surprisingly sophisticated tools to create a phalanx of giant stone statues that stood watch on Sardinia (see also chapter 5). Ranging from 6.5 to 8 feet tall, the imposing stone figures are concentrated at Mont’e Pramo on the west coast of the island. These remarkable Nuragic statues are the earliest anthropomorphic large sculptures in the Mediterranean region, after the colossi of Egypt.

  FIG. 1.8. Ancient stone giant of Mont’e Prama, Sardinia, Nuragic culture, about 900–700 BC. National Archaeological Museum, Cagliari, Sardinia.

  The enigmatic giants of Sardinia have distinctive faces: large concentric discs for eyes and small slits for mouths (fig. 1.8). It’s easy to see why these simple facial features are humorously likened to those of typical modern robots in popular science fiction, such as the droid C-3PO in the Star Wars films (1977–2017). Since 1974, archaeologists have unearthed forty-four of the great stone men at Mont’e Prama on Sardinia. The giants are believed to have served as sacred guardians. If so, they would have fulfilled the same function as Talos and other border-protecting statues in antiquity.

  Was the poet Pindar’s claim that the giant automaton Talos had once defended Sardinia somehow related to ancient Greek observations or reports of the towering stone giants of the island? Curiously enough, an island defended by boulder-hurling giants, the Laestrygonians, appears in Homer’s Odyssey (10.82, 23.318). The Laestrygonians’ name sounds similar to that of the Lestriconi, a tribe that inhabited northwest Sardinia. It has been suggested that the Homeric tale of the giants defending the island by throwing rocks could have arisen from sailors’ sightings of the colossal figures on Sardinia.20 The similarity to the actions of Talos is striking.

  Some modern historians of automata have misunderstood Talos as inert matter supernaturally instilled with life by the gods via magic. In his history of European automata, for example, Minsoo Kang divides the automata described in antiquity into four categories: (1) mythic creatures that resemble modern robots only in appearance; (2) mythic objects of human manufacture brought to life with magic; (3) historical objects of human design; and (4) speculative automata in theoretical inquiries of moral concepts. Kang places Talos in his first category of “mythic creatures” that look like robots but were created by “supernatural power with no reference to mechanical craft.” The “imaginary significance” of automata like Talos “in the premodern period had little to do with mechanistic ideas,” asserts Kang, who claims that Talos was “not a mechanical being but very much a living creature.”21 But ancient sources describe Talos as “made, not born.” As we saw, Talos’s internal anatomy and movements were explained through mechanistic concepts, and this was echoed in ancient artistic depictions: What living creature has a metallic body and a nonblood circulatory system sealed with a bolt? Moreover, the mythic accounts and fifth-century BC artworks illustrating the destruction of Talos show that his demise required technology, specifically the removal of the bolt.

  The exact definition of the term robot is debatable, but the basic conditions are met by Talos: a self-moving android with a power source that provides energy, “programmed” to “sense” its surroundings and possessing a kind of “intelligence” or way of processing data to “decide” to interact with the environment to perform actions or tasks. Kang’s notion that ancient ideas about technology played no role in the Talos myth is based, first, on a faulty comparison to the divine creation of Adam from mud or clay in the Old Testament, and, second, on a cursory reading of the one passage in the Argonautica (4.1638–42) referring to Talos as the last of a “race of bronze men,” the archaizing poetic trope mentioned above.22

  Philosopher of science Sylvia Berryman maintains that the Olympian gods were not portrayed as using technology in Greek myths, and that devices made by Hephaestus were not animated by craft. But Talos’s maker, Hephaestus, was the god of metallurgy, technology, and invention, usually depicted at work with his tools, and his productions were imagined as designed and constructed with implements and craft. In Berryman’s view, Talos cannot represent a “technologically produced working artifact” because he has no “physical means by which [he] is said to work.”23 But Talos is outstanding among mythic artificial beings because ancient writers and artists represented Talos as an automaton, a “self-mover,” a bronze statue animated by “an internal mechanism,” in this case the single tube or vessel containing a special fluid, a system that was described in biological, medical, and machine-like terms.

  Classical historian Clara Bosak-Schroeder cautions, rightly, that we moderns must guard against “projecting our technological understandings onto the past.” She suggests that in similar fashion the Hellenistic Greeks might have projected their knowledge of innovations back onto their ancient myths. Following Kang and Berryman, Bosak-Schroeder assumes that all mythic examples of “automata were originally imagined as purely magical,” and states that “the advent of advanced mechanics later in antiquity . . . caused Greeks in the Hellenistic and Roman ages to reinterpret magical automata as mechanical.” But the argument that a form of “relative modernism” led the Greeks to retroject their current technology onto imaginary automata in their myths and legends does not apply in the case of Talos and other mythic examples of artificial life that were described as fabricated by Hesiod, Homer, Pindar, and other classical sources.24 As discussed in chapter 9, some historical self-moving devices appeared i
n the fourth century BC. Moreover, Talos’s features cannot be interpreted as backward projections from the Hellenistic era because, as we saw, even in the earliest versions of the myth and in artworks, Talos was already imagined as a construction, a “self-moving or self-sustaining manufactured object [that] mimicked a natural living form,” the typical definition of a robot.25

  It seems that a more meaningful, nuanced approach to Talos and other animated statues of antiquity would recognize how “mythology blurs the distinction between technology and divine power.”26 There is a difference between stories of gods wishing or commanding inert matter to become alive, as in the biblical Adam and the myth of Pygmalion’s statue (chapter 6), and gods using superior forms of technology to construct artificial life, even if the inner workings are not described. As numerous scholars have pointed out, in myths about crafted beings like Talos, Pandora, and others, the artificial beings are seen as the products of divine artisanship, not just divine will. Indeed, “the mystical and technological approaches to making artificial life are not as distinct” as many believe, argues E. R. Truitt, a historian of medieval automata. Truitt explains that the promise of technologies such as metalworking “was precisely that it offered the possibility of surpassing” the ordinary limitations of human creations and ingenuity.27

  In many of the ancient myths and legends presented in this book, artificial beings are made of the same substances and by the same methods that human craftspeople use to make tools, instruments, weapons, statues, buildings, devices, and artworks, but with marvelous results befitting divine expertise. Talos and his ilk are examples of artificial beings created, not simply by magic spells or divine fiat, as many historians and philosophers of science and technology have assumed, but by what ancient Greeks might have called biotechne, from bios “life” and techne, “crafted through art or science.”28