Retellings and embellishments of the ancient traditions about Prometheus are found in about two dozen ancient Greek and Latin sources. In the earliest versions, Prometheus was the benefactor of humankind, showing them how to use fire. In later myths his gifts expanded to include speech, writing, mathematics, medicine, agriculture, domestication of animals, mining, technology, science—in other words all the arts of civilization. Of interest in this chapter is the persistent thread of myth describing Prometheus as the creator of the human race, either at the beginning of humanity or after the great disaster known as Deucalion’s Flood. This tradition would help explain his concern for humans and his theft of fire for them. The earliest surviving mention of this myth comes from a fragment of Sappho. In about 600 BC, she wrote, “After he created men Prometheus is said to have stolen fire.”2
The myth of Prometheus making the first people on earth is one of many ancient traditions demonstrating that “human beings were once viewed as artificial creations.” Earth and water, combined and brought to life by divine power: this was the earliest human metaphor for life. As in other tales around the world, from Gilgamesh to Genesis, the creator or demiurge uses mundane materials—such as clay, mud, dust, bone, or blood—to form male and female shapes that receive the spark of life from gods, wind, fire, or some other force of nature. This mud metaphor would be eclipsed many centuries later, with new understandings of the human body as a mechanistic entity driven by dynamic, moving fluids, and with the invention of mechanical, hydraulic, and pneumatic engineering in the Hellenistic era.3
In the ancient Greek myth about Prometheus, the Titan mixes earth and water—or tears—and shapes the mud or clay into the first men and women. By some accounts, he makes all the animals too. Athena is involved in some versions, and in others Zeus commands the wind to give the clay figures the breath of life; other interpretations suggest that fire brought Prometheus’s creations to life.4
Ancient folklore about Prometheus’s creation of the first humans was still circulating when the inquisitive traveler Pausanias toured Greece in the second century AD. He had heard the folklore that Prometheus had accomplished his handiwork near the very old town of Panopeus in Phokis, near Chaeronea, central Greece. Pausanias (10.4.4) visited the fabled site near the ancient town’s ruins and saw two large clay boulders in a ravine, each big enough to fill a cart. “They say that these are remains of the clay out of which the whole race of man was fashioned by Prometheus.” The “scent of human skin still clings to the large lumps of clay,” declared Pausanias. One can only imagine the odor that Pausanias and others detected, but rocks and clays can release distinctive odors when heated, breathed upon, or scraped, owing to chemical composition and trapped gas bubbles.5
A number of Greek tales, as in other cultures’ myths, describe lifeless matter, statues, idols, ships, and stones brought alive by gods or magic. These stories of artificial life differ from the tales about the animated statues we have considered so far, such as the bronze robot Talos manufactured by Hephaestus with internal workings and the animated statues attributed to the inventor Daedalus (chapters 1 and 5). In what we might term “magic-wand” scenarios, life is bestowed on inert objects simply by a god’s command. No craft or manufacturing processes, internal structure, or notions of mechanics are implied. One example of bringing inanimate objects to life by fiat occurs in the myth of the great flood sent by Zeus. Deucalion and his wife, Pyrrha, are the sole survivors. They learn from an oracle how to repopulate the earth. They each toss stones over their heads, and the stones are immediately transformed into men and women.
The most familiar classical example of a statue magically enlivened by divine order is the myth of Pygmalion and his love for a nude ivory statue of his own making. Ovid’s version (Metamorphoses 10.243–97) is the most vividly detailed account of Pygmalion. The young sculptor is disgusted by vulgar real women, so he sculpts a virginal maiden for himself. In the modern imagination, his statue is often pictured as marble, but in the myth it is ivory, a warmer, organic medium. His ivory maiden looks so real that Pygmalion immediately “burns with passion for her,” caressing her perfect body with awe and desire, imagining that were he to press against her forcefully she would actually bruise. He showers the statue with gifts and words of love. In the Temple of Aphrodite he beseeches the goddess to make his “simulacrum of a girl” come alive.
Pygmalion returns home and makes love again to his fantasy woman’s ivory form. To his astonishment, the statue warms to his kiss, and in his embrace her body becomes flesh. Unlike cold marble, ivory is a once-living material with a soft, creamy luster. In antiquity, ivory figures were tinted with subtle, naturalistic colors to resemble real skin tones. Ancient audiences would have imagined her as an exquisitely sensuous, flawless female form. Under her maker’s caresses, Pygmalion’s statue awakens into consciousness and she “blushes with modesty.” Aphrodite has answered his prayer.6
It is important to emphasize that Pygmalion’s artifact was not constructed to be an automaton. Its realism became reality supernaturally, thanks to the goddess of love. This oft-told ancient “romance” of artificial life takes on new relevance today because it presages ethical questions posed by modern critics of lifelike robotic dolls and AI entities specifically designed for physical sex with humans. “Is it possible,” one writer asks, “to have consensual sex with a robot, even one that’s aware of its own sexuality?”7
Although the Pygmalion myth is often presented in modern times as a romantic love story, the tale is an unsettling description of one of the first female android sex partners in Western history. It is not clear that Pygmalion’s passive, nameless living doll possesses consciousness, a voice, or agency, despite her “blushes.” Has Aphrodite transformed the perfect female statue into a real live woman, with her own independent mind—or is she now “just a better simulation?” The statue is described as an idealized woman, more perfect than any real female. So Pygmalion’s replica “surpasses human limits,” much like the sex replicants in the Blade Runner films that are advertised as “more human than human.”8 Ovid, notably, does not describe her skin and body as feeling lifelike. Instead Ovid compares her flesh to wax that becomes warm, soft, and malleable the more it is handled—in his words, her body “becomes useful by being used.”
Ovid ends his fairy tale with the marriage of Pygmalion and his nameless living statue. He even adds that they were blessed with a daughter named Paphos, a magical feat of reproduction intended to show that the ideal statue became a real, biological woman. Notably, the plot of the film Blade Runner 2049 turns on a similar magical reproduction of a replicant, the biological birth of a baby to the replicant Rachael, which is supposed to be impossible for artificial life forms.9
In retelling the Pygmalion story, Ovid was drawing on earlier narratives, now lost. One source was Philostephanus of Alexandria, who recounted a full version of the myth in his history of Cyprus, written in 222–206 BC. In a variant by the later Christian writer Arnobius, Pygmalion sculpts and makes love to a statue of the goddess Aphrodite herself. No artistic representations of the Pygmalion myth survive from antiquity. But many medieval illustrations show Pygmalion interacting with his ivory statue; the tale served as a kind of prurient religious warning against worshipping idols. By the eighteenth century, European storytellers had finally given Pygmalion’s statue a name, Galatea (“Milk-White”). Variations on the Pygmalion myth have proliferated over millennia, inspiring myriad fairy tales, plays, stories, and other artworks.10
In the Pygmalion myth, the sculptor’s ivory statue is “clearly an artifactual being created for sex.”11 But Pygmalion’s ivory woman was not the only statue that aroused an erotic response in viewers in antiquity. There is a long ancient history of agalmatophilia, statue lust.12 Lucian (Amores 13–16) and Pliny the Elder (36.4.21) told of men who were passionate for the beautiful, undraped statue of Aphrodite at Knidos. It was created by the brilliant sculptor Praxiteles in about 350 BC, the first life-size femal
e nude statue in Greek art. The men surreptitiously visited her shrine at night, and stains discovered on Aphrodite’s marble thighs betrayed their lust. The sage Apollonius of Tyana tried to reason with a man who fell in love with the Aphrodite statue by recounting myths of unhappy trysts between gods and mortals (Philostratus Life of Apollonius 6.40). In the second century AD, the Sophist Onomarchos of Andros composed a fictional letter by “The Man Who Fell in Love with a Statue,” in which the thwarted lover “curses the beloved image by wishing upon it old age.”13
In yet another infamous case, reported by Athenaeus (second century AD), one Cleisophus of Selymbria locked himself in a temple on the island of Samos and tried to have intercourse with a voluptuous marble statue, reputedly carved by Ctesicles. Discouraged by the frigidity and resistance of the stone, Cleisophus “had sex with a small piece of meat instead” à la Portnoy.
Most “statue lust” stories feature men having sex with female statues, but several ancient sources relate the sad tale of the widow Laodamia (also known as Polydora) whose beloved husband, Protesilaus, died in the legendary Trojan War. The earliest known text was a fifth-century BC tragedy by Euripides, but the play no longer exists. Ovid’s version takes the form of a letter from Laodamia to Protesilaus. They were newlyweds when he departed for Troy (the war lasts a decade). Laodamia aches for her husband’s return. Each night Laodamia erotically embraces a life-size waxen image of her husband, who was “made for love, not war.” The replica is so realistic that it lacks only speech to “be Protesilaus.” Hyginus recounts a variation of the tale. When Protesilaus is killed, the gods take pity on the young couple and allow Protesilaus to spend three precious hours with his wife before he must return to the Underworld forever. Distraught with grief, Laodamia then devotes herself to a likeness—this time in painted bronze—of her husband, showering the statue with gifts and kisses. One night, a servant glimpses the young widow in passionate embrace with the male figure, so lifelike that the servant assumes it is her lover. The servant tells her father, who bursts into the room and sees the bronze statue of the dead husband. Hoping to end her torment, the father burns the statue on a pyre, but Laodamia throws herself on the pyre and dies.14
One can compile about a dozen accounts of heterosexual and homosexual love for statues in Greek and Latin sources. Historian of medieval robots E. R. Truitt calls these tales and the story of Pygmalion “parables about the power of mimetic creation” and the ways one can “confuse the artificial with the natural.”15
Alex Scobie, a classicist, and the clinical psychologist A.J.W. Taylor have pointed out that this particular sexual “deviance” arose at a time when Greek and Roman sculptural artistry was achieving a high degree of realism and idealized beauty. Beginning with Praxiteles, there was “an abundance of sculptured human figures with which people could identify,” life-size and very naturalistic in appearance, coloring, and poses. Beautiful, realistically painted statues were not only plentiful but “conveniently accessible” in temples and public places, encouraging “the populace to form personal relationships with them.” Nude cult statues were often treated as though they were alive, given baths, clothing, gifts, and jewelry. Writing in 1975, Scobie and Taylor concluded that agalmatophilia for marble (or ivory or wax) statues that replicated life with intimate realism was a pathology made possible by the technical expertise of superbly talented artists in classical antiquity. As they and art historian George Hersey, writing in 2009, speculated, advances in anatomically realistic silicone sex dolls and biomimetic, AI-endowed cyber-sexbot technologies will result in the ancient paraphilia evolving into a modern form of “robotophilia.”16
Greeks and Romans were not the only ancient cultures to spin tales about sexualized automata. An irresistible female robot appears in a Buddhist tale from the Mahāvastu (a collection of oral traditions that were compiled over the period from the second century BC to the fourth century AD). Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, and Tocharian versions of the tradition tell how a celebrated inventor of mechanical devices constructs a lovely, lifelike girl (yantraputraka, “mechanical doll”) to show off his mastery.17 The inventor welcomes a foreign guest, a highly respected painter of lifelike images, to his home, and entertains the artist with all manner of honors. That night, the painter retires to his room and is surprised to find a beautiful girl ready to “do service to him.” Modest and shy, the girl looks down and does not speak but reaches her arms out to the painter and draws him to her bosom. He notices that a jeweled brooch on her chest rises and falls as though with breath. The painter believes she is a real woman—but who is she? Could she be his host’s relative, his wife, sister, or daughter? Or a serving maid? There follows a long passage as the painter weighs the moral risks of having sex with the willing young woman in his room.
Finally the painter gives in to his aroused feelings and takes the girl in his arms with “violent passion.” Thereupon the mechanical girl breaks apart, “her clothes, limbs, strings, and pegs falling to pieces.” The painter realizes he’s been tricked by a cunning artifice. Mortified, he conceives of a way to get even with his host. Taking out his supplies, the artist spends the rest of the night painting a gruesome trompe l’oeil image of himself hanging dead, suspended from a rope on a hook on the wall.
In the morning, the host, fooled by the painted illusion, summons the king and his ministers and citizenry to see the tragic scene of the broken mechanical woman and the painter’s suicide. He calls for an axe to cut down the body of his guest. The ruse is revealed when the painter suddenly steps out from hiding and everyone has a good laugh.
The Buddhist story reflects the lifelike realism that was achieved by painters and makers of mechanical androids in ancient Asia (see chapters 5 and 9 for other ancient Buddhist tales about robots). The theme of intense rivalry between the two master artists who trick each other with their creations of preternatural realism is similar to anecdotes related by Pliny (35.36.64–66) about trompe l’oeil contests between the classical Greek artists Zeuxis and Parrhasius (chapter 5). But the Buddhist tale is also a philosophical parable about illusions of self-control and the timeless questions of human free will raised by creations of artificial life. In her study of mechanical beings in ancient Indian literature, Signe Cohen points out that the soulless female automaton stands for the soullessness of all beings, embodying the Buddhist teaching that, in essence, “We are all robots.”18
Pygmalion’s statue of Galatea is an example of an inert object instilled with life by transcendent love or a god’s “supernatural power . . . with no reference to mechanical craft.” Accordingly, Minsoo Kang places it in his first category of ancient nonrobots, along with the “biblical story of the creation of Adam and Eve,” which was not conceived of as “technological.” Indeed, “magic-wand” myths, like the story of Pygmalion, do not involve “mechanical ingenuity” or a “life-imitating machine.” But such technological features do distinguish Talos (chapter 1), and they figure in some interesting artistic illustrations of Prometheus as the maker of the first humans.19
The tale of Pygmalion’s ivory sex doll and the myth about the rolling stones that magically became people after Deucalion’s Flood are helpful in distinguishing between unambiguous “magic-wand” tales, like those in Kang’s first category, and more complex tales of artificial life and automata that were imagined in mythical accounts that include manufacture using tools and methods, some manner of internal structure, and sometimes even intelligence and agency. In the most familiar versions of Prometheus as an artisan who molds familiar plastic material—clay—into lifelike figures of men and women, a god or goddess bestows the finishing touch that completes the Titan’s work. This vision is depicted in widely known artistic illustrations of Prometheus making the first humans, guided by Athena/Minerva who provides the supernatural life spark, symbolized by a butterfly. It is important to note, however, that all of these well-known images were late Roman artworks, created in the early Christian era.
In the late Roman
-Christian period, Prometheus as the creator of humans appears in elaborate reliefs on sarcophagi, mosaics, and wall paintings in the third and fourth centuries AD. The images emphasize the collaboration of Prometheus and Athena (Minerva). Prometheus forms small, realistic mannequins of men and women, who lie or stand about awaiting the divine touch to spring to life, much like Pygmalion’s statue of Galatea. These scenes have obvious features in common with—and are thought to have influenced—later Christian representations of the biblical creation of Adam and Eve. The popularity of the Prometheus scene on so many Roman sarcophagi may also have represented Neoplatonic concepts of creation in contrast to Christian scriptures about Adam, a religious debate that was ongoing when these scenes were being made.20
FIG. 6.1. Prometheus making the first humans, guided by Minerva/Athena, late Roman marble relief, third century AD. Albani Collection MA445, Louvre, photo by Hervé Lewandowski, RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.
FIG. 6.2. Prometheus making the first humans, guided by Minerva/Athena. Late Roman marble sarcophagus, third century AD, Capitoline Museum, Rome. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.
Remarkably, however, about a thousand years before the Roman-Christian images of Prometheus became so popular on coffins, another group of creative artists in Italy took a very different approach to the fabrication of the first human beings by Prometheus. These Hellenistic-era Etruscan artists illustrated the scene in a way that clearly differentiates the statues magically given life from the creations of Prometheus.21 On a fascinating group of carved scarabs and seals, the first humans were not imagined as clay dolls awaiting a life spark. Instead the humans are pictured being crafted with tools and assembled piece by piece on a framework, much as a sculptor would construct a human statue beginning with an internal armature or part by part (see fig. 1.9, plate 3). In other words, the gems refer to biotechne rather than simple magic deployed to create life.
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