Gods and Robots

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Gods and Robots Page 10

by Adrienne Mayor


  Daedalus also spent time in Sardinia during his flight from Crete. The mysterious stone towers, the nuraghe of the Nuragic era (tenth to eighth century BC) dotting the island of Sardinia, were thought to be of his design. Sardinia is also the home of the enigmatic Nuragic stone giants of Mont’e Prama (chapter 1, fig. 1.8), which scholars compare to so-called Daedalic-style statues on Crete made in the seventh century BC. Archaeologists point out that advanced tools, surprising for an archaic culture, were used to carve the stone giants of Sardinia. This might help to explain why Daedalus was linked to the island. The statues show evidence of the use of sophisticated metal implements such as stone chisels with different sized blades, hand scrapers, the drypoint stylus, and grooved tooth chisels (which were not introduced in Greece until after the sixth century BC). As mentioned in chapter 1, the striking robot-like faces of the statues follow a “T-scheme” with pronounced brows and nose over eyes rendered with two concentric circles and a slit mouth. Making those perfect concentric circles required technological skill using a compass—and, indeed, archaeologists have discovered Nuragic drills and a complex iron compass on Sardinia.1

  For King Cocalus in Sicily, Daedalus devised a cantilevered platform for the Temple of Aphrodite on a precipice at Mount Eryx. To honor the goddess of love, Daedalus was said to have created a gilded ram whose horns, hooves, and woolly body were “so perfect that it would be taken as an actual ram.” The celebrated Bronze Ram of Syracuse, one of a pair from the palace of the tyrant Agathocles of Sicily (chapter 9), gives an idea of what the ram ascribed to Daedalus might have looked like (fig. 5.1, plate 6). Another marvel among the rich treasures in the Temple of Aphrodite at Mount Eryx was a perfect honeycomb made of gold.2 Both objects were of such splendid artistry that they were naturally attributed to Daedalus.

  The imitation golden honeycomb was an amazing artifact. How could a human craftsman capture all the details, texture, and geometry of such a fragile, ephemeral natural object in permanent metallic form?

  The British artist Michael Ayrton (1921–75) was devoted to re-creating some of the legendary wonders attributed to Daedalus. Working with a goldsmith, Ayrton demonstrated that the fabrication of a delicate golden honeycomb—although laborious and requiring great skill—was “a far less miraculous achievement to a metal worker than to an historian.” Historians, he noted, tend to underestimate the ingenuity and technological expertise of ancient artisans.3

  The lost-wax technique of casting metals, described in chapter 1, could employ as the core a natural object, such as a pinecone or shell, allowing an artist to replicate the object with incredibly precise details. Ancient Egyptian goldsmiths first perfected the painstaking process. We know that Egypt carried out lively trade with Minoan Crete, so Greek craftsmen might well have learned the technique at an early date. As Pliny (33.2.4–5) remarked in his discussions of intricate gold-working skills, “Man has learned to challenge nature!” In The Maze Maker, Ayrton’s remarkable novel channeling the mythic inventor, he describes the casting process of the honeycomb, as narrated by Daedalus. Being made of beeswax itself, the honeycomb serves as its own wax model in the complex lost-wax process. First he found a real piece of undamaged honeycomb and carefully uncapped each hexagonal cell and drained the honey. Next the honeycomb was meticulously coated with a fine clay slip. To the side of the clay-covered comb, he attached “a tiny pouring cup and thin ‘runners’ of wax’ as vents.” Then the object was placed in a kiln until the waxen honeycomb burned away, leaving its exact impression in a mold to be filled with molten gold. A perfect golden replica of a real honeycomb was the result.4

  FIG. 5.1 (PLATE 6). Realistic bronze ram. Was the sculptor of this life-size ram inspired by the story of Daedalus’s true-to-life ram dedicated to Aphrodite in the time of King Cocalus? Bronze Ram of Syracuse, Sicily, third century BC, Museo Archeologico, Palermo, Scala / Art Resource, NY.

  FIG. 5.2. Golden honeycomb cast from real honeycomb.

  The structural strength of honeycombs created by “builder” bees was admired by architects in antiquity. For example, in the sixth and fifth centuries BC, marble blocks of temples on Delos and other Aegean islands were carved to resemble massive honeycombs. It is possible that at some point a metal cast of a honeycomb, like the one in the temple at Mount Eryx, might have played a role in inspiring the sophisticated use of hexagonal “honeycomb” cylinders in the construction of stone buildings. The first written mention of this architectural innovation can be traced to mathematical writings of the second century BC. In about 30 BC, the ancient Roman scholar Varro described the so-called honeycomb conjecture, suggesting that the hexagon shape was the most geometrically efficient for compact volume and strength. More than two millennia later, in 1999, Varro’s theory was mathematically proven by Thomas C. Hales.5

  Daedalus’s projects for King Cocalus also included innovative waterworks, a network of rejuvenating steam baths. The legend of Daedalus’s thermal “spa” is associated with the volcanic thermal springs at Sciacca, near Selinus in western Sicily. Visitors today can still make out the ancient ruins of bathing grottoes that were cleverly constructed to take advantage of the natural hot sulfur springs issuing from the hillside.6

  The storied career of Daedalus in Sicily was not without drama. King Minos of Crete, as mentioned earlier, was obsessed with avenging the death of the Minotaur. Traveling across the Mediterranean seeking Daedalus, Minos contrived a puzzle to flush out his quarry. The king carried a large spiral seashell with him, offering a fabulous reward to anyone who could string a thread through its convoluted chambers—an obvious allusion to the trick of escaping the great Labyrinth complex built by Daedalus.

  When Minos finally arrived in Sicily, he showed the shell to King Cocalus. In hope of winning the reward, Cocalus secretly took the shell to Daedalus. Daedalus placed a drop of honey at the mouth of the shell and drilled a tiny hole at the top. Then he glued a slender thread to an ant and placed the tiny creature in the hole. The ant wound her way through the spirals and emerged with the thread at the mouth of the shell to get the honey. When Cocalus returned the threaded shell to Minos, the king immediately demanded that Cocalus surrender Daedalus, the only person clever enough to solve the puzzle.7

  Caught out, Cocalus pretends to agree to turn over Daedalus. But first he invites Minos to enjoy a refreshing dip in his highly esteemed hot vapor baths. His guest is attended by the royal princesses, Cocalus’s daughters. Readers who recall what happened to men who bathed in rejuvenating hot baths invented by Medea will sense an ominous pattern. Indeed, while soaking in the grotto, Minos is murdered by Cocalus’s daughters and Daedalus. They scald Minos with boiling water from the hot springs at Sciacca, an act reminiscent of the fate of King Pelias at the hands of his own daughters and Medea in chapter 2.

  The story of Daedalus’s sojourn in Sicily and his murder of Minos was told by numerous ancient authors, including Sophocles in his lost play The Camicians and Aristophanes in the lost comedy Cocalus.8 The Athenian audiences were quite charmed by Daedalus. According to Athenian lore, after the death of Minos, Daedalus’s long, picaresque life continued into its next chapter—in Athens.

  As their city grew in prominence, the ambitious Athenians saw a way to enhance their reputation by appropriating Daedalus as their very own star inventor. Legends arose linking Daedalus to Athens. By the fifth century BC, Daedalus had acquired Athenian roots and was said to have created an array of tools, among them the augur, axe, and plumb line. A stylish folding chair was displayed in Athens as his innovation. Daedalus was also given an extensive family tree in Athens. According to the Athenians, the craftsman accepted his sister’s young son as his apprentice. His nephew’s name, curiously enough, was Talos of Athens.

  The Athenian story about this Talos was worthy of a classical tragedy. Young Talos was reputed to be as gifted as his uncle Daedalus. Talos of Athens thought up several brilliant inventions: the potter’s wheel, the drawing compass, and other cunning implements. Naturally, t
he elder Daedalus grew resentful of the young apprentice’s accomplishments. The last straw was Talos’s invention of a serrated saw. On a jaunt in the countryside, the youth had come across a snake jaw. Playing around with it, he noticed that the row of small jagged teeth cut easily through a stick. Talos created a new iron tool modeled on the snake’s teeth. In the Agora, people gathered around to see Talos showing off how well his new tool sawed wood.

  In a fit of envy Daedalus murdered his nephew. After pushing him off the Acropolis, Daedalus was discovered secretly burying the body. Athens grieved the loss of their brilliant young inventor: Talos’s grave, on the south slope of the Acropolis, was still honored when Pausanias (1.21.4) visited it in the second century AD. According to their myth, the Athenians put Daedalus on trial for murder, and the Council of the Areopagus found him guilty. Daedalus fled Attica and sailed to Crete—where, so the Athenians claimed, he found work with King Minos. According to the new Athenian chronology, this was when Daedalus began his Cretan adventures (described in chapter 4).9

  In antiquity, Daedalus’s illustrious reputation revolved around his ability to replicate life with staggering authenticity. His specialty was statuary so true to life that the figures were believed to be capable of movement. As noted, the word daedala came to describe “Daedalic” wonders, statues and marvelous images so realistic they seemed beyond the scope of human manufacture, apparently wrought by superhuman skills. The list of statues attributed to Daedalus is very long. Besides the ram mentioned above, examples include a pair of tin and brass statues of himself and Icarus on the Electridae islands in the Adriatic; an Artemis at Monogissa, Caria (Asia Minor); a self-portrait statue in the Temple of Hephaestus in Memphis, Egypt; realistic lions and dolphins for an altar on the coast of Libya; and Heracles statues in Thebes and Corinth.10

  According to a tale recorded by Apollodorus (Library 2.6.3), Heracles himself was fooled by Daedalus’s spitting-image portrait of Heracles. One night, Heracles unexpectedly came upon the imposing statue in a portico. So startled was the mighty hero that he instantly grabbed a stone and hurled it at the “intruder.”

  The Athenian playwrights famously drew on ancient traditions and inserted original revisions in their dramas about mythological events and characters. Daedalus’s myth was no exception. Daedalus’s so-called living statues were featured in numerous Athenian plays, now known only from fragments quoted by other authors. We know that Sophocles and Aristophanes each wrote a play called Daedalus. In both plays, characters claim that Daedalus’s animated statues must be bound in place or they will escape. In Euripides’s extant play Hecuba (ca. 420 BC) Daedalus’s automata are compared to those made by the god Hephaestus, and his comedy Eurystheus also refers to daedalic animated statues. A comic play by Cratinus (Thracian Women, ca. 430 BC) jokes that a bronze statue that runs away was made by Daedalus, and a fourth-century BC comedy by Philippus features a wooden statue carved by Daedalus that can speak and walk. The theme of runaway statues became a popular Athenian joke, taken up by Socrates (chapter 7). Artists employed the theme too. A unique scene of artisans making a horse statue so lifelike that it is chained by the leg was engraved on an Etruscan bronze mirror (discussed in chapter 7, fig. 7.7, plate 8). A group of archaic black-figure vase painters (sixth–fifth century BC) illustrated statues of men and animals on buildings coming to life and escaping their architectural frames.11

  Modern scholars have often noted that the figure of Daedalus might originally have been an earthbound human double of the inventor god Hephaestus. Indeed, the Athenians gave Daedalus a genealogy that made him a descendant of Hephaestus, who was revered alongside the goddess Athena in Athens.12 A district of Athens came to be named for Daedalus, populated by craftsmen who saw him as their patron and claimed to be his descendants. Socrates, whose father was a stonemason, twice refers to Daedalus as his ancestor.

  FIG. 5.3. The sculptor Phidias making a nude statue, by Andrea Pisano, fourteenth century, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence, Alfredo Dagli Orti / Art Resource, NY.

  Socrates also mentions Daedalus in some of his metaphors in Plato’s philosophical dialogues. In two instances, for example, Socrates likens vacillating arguments to Daedalus’s celebrated moving statues (Plato Alcibiades 121a; Euthyphro 11c–e). In another passage, Plato’s Socrates compares people’s fleeting opinions unmoored from reason to Daedalus’s animated statues. If one’s thoughts or opinions are to be of any value, maintains Socrates, then they—like Daedalus’s automata—must be tethered to a plinth, or else they will escape, like runaway slaves (Meno 97d–98a).13

  The ancient Greek comparison of automata to slaves remains a concept with a moral significance in modernity. In antiquity, Greek and Roman masters were held responsible for the behavior of their slaves. Today, prescient philosophers of Artificial Intelligence and robotics ethics maintain that it is imperative that AI and robots be considered tools and property—essentially slaves—and that makers must be held responsible for their programming and behavior.14

  In about 350 BC, Aristotle discussed automata, puppets, and toys set in motion by artisans’ practical techne (strings, weights, springs, wheels, and other forms of stored, temporary energy) and their similitude to animal locomotion in his natural history treatises (e.g., Movements of Animals 701b; Generation of Animals 734b). In a curious passage in Movements of Animals, Aristotle, referring to semen as the liquid that “animates” an embryo, draws an analogy to the way “sculptors create statues and automata” that contain latent or potential power akin to wound-up clockwork. Aristotle’s discussions allude to legendary animated statues like those associated with Daedalus, but it is also possible that Aristotle had in mind real self-moving machines, “mechanical dolls of some kind” made by contemporary inventors (chapter 9). Notably, Aristotle remarks that “an artifact might imitate” a living thing, and he defines an automaton as “a kind of puppet with the ability to move by itself.”15

  In the Politics (1.4, discussed more fully in chapter 7), Aristotle clearly speaks of self-moving statues like those made by Hephaestus and Daedalus. In a complicated passage in On the Soul (De Anima 1.3.406b), Aristotle specifically mentions Daedalus’s self-moving sculptures. The statues come up in his discussion of the atomism theory of the fifth-century BC natural philosopher Democritus (b. ca. 460 BC). Democritus’s sixty-some treatises have not survived, but from testimonia in other works, we know that he based his theory of living beings and their motion on the existence of minuscule, indestructible, invisible “atoms jostling back and forth.” In his comments about Democritus’s theory—that ceaselessly moving spherical atoms initiate movement—Aristotle refers to the claim made by his contemporary, the Athenian comic playwright Philippus (mentioned above), that the secret of a famous moving statue of Aphrodite was that Daedalus had poured mercury into the hollow figure. Aristotle’s point is to compare Democritus’s atomism theory to the way balls of mercury naturally move to draw together.16

  In fact, the shifting weight of mercury flowing to the end of a tilted tube with enough force to change the center of gravity was used to animate self-moving toys in medieval and early modern times. The engineer Heron of Alexandria (first century BC) designed self-opening doors for temples using boiling water and pulleys, and he stated that others used an alternative system based on heated mercury. It is not implausible that mercury could have been used in antiquity to animate devices. The idea that the little-understood metallic fluid called “quicksilver” or “living” mercury could impart mobility to a statue also appears in ancient Indian texts about automatically moving machines. For example, a light wooden model of a giant bird “flew by the energy generated from vats of boiling mercury,” and mercury was the key substance to power a sort of perpetual-motion machine.17

  According to a brief poem by Pindar (Olympian 7.50–54, written in 464 BC), a group of legendary animated statues with similarities to works by Daedalus were located in Rhodes. “All along the avenues,” wrote Pindar, stood works of exalted ar
t so gloriously crafted that they seem to “breathe and move.” An ancient scholiast’s commentary on the poem calls the statues “moving things with a soul or life spark.” In this case, the maker was not said to have been Daedalus or Hephaestus, but the Telchines, blacksmith wizards of magical metallurgical lore, fabled to be the original inhabitants of Crete and Rhodes. The Telchines carried out activities similar to those of Hephaestus, but on a smaller scale, forging weapons and baubles for the gods. The powers of the statues of Rhodes recall the bronze guardians defending harbors and borders, the function of the mythic Talos of Crete and the historical Colossus of Rhodes (chapter 1).18

  The legendary “living statues” attributed to Daedalus are of great interest as examples of imaginary and genuine “artificial life” described by classical writers. Many claimed that daedala, life-mimicking sculptures, could move their eyes and make sounds, lift their arms, and take steps forward. At the same time, however, controversy arose over the nature of “living statues.” Could Daedalus’s statues really move on their own? Or was their movement illusory? Numerous ancient Greek accounts refer to wood, metal, and marble statues that could move their heads, eyes, or limbs, perspire, weep, bleed, and make sounds. The archaic idea that statues, especially of divinities, possessed agency has a deep history, long before the fifth and fourth centuries BC when artists began to create exceptionally lifelike figures and historical inventors began to design self-moving devices (chapter 9). It was possible to make statues with parts and hidden or internal mechanisms capable of movement, such as nodding, moving inset eyes, raising arms, opening temple doors, and so on. Hollow statues with cavities and tubes allowed priests to ventriloquize their voices, and Plutarch, Cicero, Dio Cassius, Lucian, and others discuss ways to cause a statue appear to shed tears, sweat, or bleed.19

 

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