Beginning in the fifth century BC intricately carved Etruscan and Etruscan-style gems depicted sculptors and artisans at work, and they illustrated both mythic and real craftsmanship in imaginative ways. Of special interest here are several related miniature scenes, dated to the fourth or third through the second century BC, identified as “powerfully original” depictions of Prometheus creating the first humans. The scenes are engraved on personal rings, seals, talismans, ornaments, and scarabs. Some bear inscriptions (designating the owners) in Latin, Greek, or Etruscan letters. These gems have attracted scant attention despite their extraordinary imagery. The most recent work was by Italian scholar Gabriella Tassinari in 1992; her monograph catalogues sixty-three examples of gems showing Prometheus as the creator, noting differences in style and difficulties of dating. The gems can be divided into two types of scene: in both, Prometheus is shown as a solitary artisan using tools to fabricate the first man (sometimes woman) in a complex, step-by-step process.22 In the first group, Prometheus forms a human figure in sections on a framework of poles, starting with the head and torso. In the second group, even more surprising, Prometheus begins by making the figure’s internal armature—a human skeleton.
How ancient is the idea of Prometheus as the maker of the first humans? Explicit literary references appear in fourth-century BC Greek poems and plays, but the oral tradition appears to be even older.23 As we have seen, Etruscan artists often interpreted Greek mythological stories in a unique manner on gems, mirrors, and vases (chapters 1–4). The unusual Etruscan scenes of Prometheus (Prumathe in Etruscan) might have been inspired by other local oral traditions and art. As Etruscan scholar Larissa Bonfante remarks, “something about Prometheus evidently struck a special chord for the Etruscan artists and their patrons.”24
In the first type of these engraved vignettes, Prometheus assembles the prototypical human body in sections. Instead of molding clay into human-shaped dolls under the guidance of Minerva, as in the reliefs of the late Roman-Christian era (see figs. 6.1 and 6.2), Prometheus is shown alone, fashioning an unfinished body—usually only the head and torso are complete—supported on a framework of metal or wooden poles. Notably, Prometheus is employing tools and technologies of real craftsmen in antiquity. He uses a hammer or mallet, scraper, scalpel, and “a rod or a rope to measure the proportions of the human figure,” and he gauges his work with a plumb line. In figure 6.3, for example, Prometheus uses a plumb bob (plummet and a plumb line) on the incomplete human model attached to poles.25 In figure 6.4, Prometheus secures a half-formed body to a pole with rope.
FIG. 6.3. Prometheus using a plumb line as he constructs the first human on a framework, carved carnelian gem, third century BC, IX B 755, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.
FIG. 6.4. Prometheus molding the head and torso of the first man on a frame, sardonyx gem, third century BC. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.
A substantial number of Etruscan and Greco-Roman gems in museum collections have variations of the images in figures 6.3 and 6.4. Some have asked whether the scenes might depict maschalismos, the ritual dismemberment of enemy warriors practiced by Etruscans. But when that practice is depicted on gems, we see one or two soldiers using swords to decapitate and sever limbs of foes. Those rare scenes differ dramatically from the set of gems considered here, which clearly show an artisan, typically seated, working with tools to form an incomplete human figure.26 The pictures of Prometheus building a man in sections recall classical vase paintings of artisans forging and assembling statues of men and horses (see fig. 1.9, plate 3; fig. 5.4; fig. 7.7, plate 8; 7.8, plate 9).
The second type of gems considered here present another striking vision of the process of constructing the first man. In these highly unusual engravings, Prometheus builds the first human being from the inside out. He begins his creation with the natural anatomical structure, the skeleton. Skeletons were extremely rare in classical Greek and Etruscan art. As Tassarini points out, however, the main focus of these particular gems is not the skeleton itself but “the creative activity of Prometheus” as a craftsman.27
Two gems, dated to the second century BC, once in the collection of Giovanni Carafa, Duke of Noia, are arresting for their depictions of both types of intaglio images of Prometheus making the first man. The gem in figure 6.5 shows Prometheus “working on the modelling of the upper part of a bearded man, supported by two poles.” On either side of the scene are the foreparts of a horse and a ram. Their presence reflects ancient versions of the tradition that Prometheus also created the first animals.28
The second gem in the Carafa collection, known only by an engraving of 1778, has a curious scene that depicts a partially molded man’s torso on a human skeleton instead of on a metal or wood frame. In figure 6.6, Prometheus is seated and holding a tool in his right hand. He is working on the partially molded man’s upper back and arms, which are attached to a bare skull and the lower vertebrae, pelvis, and leg bones of the skeleton. The area where the partially fleshed out ribs meet the skeletal vertebrae is similar to the narrow “unfinished” waist in the other gems depicting the upper half of a man. The unfinished man holds a phiale, a shallow dish for libations, in each hand.
FIG. 6.5. Prometheus making the first man, flanked by the first horse and ram, second to first century BC. Gem and cast © Collection of the Duke of Northumberland and Beazley Archive, Oxford University; photo by C. Wagner. C. Engraving, Alcuni monumenti del Museo Carrafa (Naples, 1778), plate 25. Courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (89-B17579).
FIG. 6.6. Prometheus making the first man, half-completed with torso molded onto the skeleton. Engraving, Alcuni monumenti del Museo Carrafa (Naples, 1778), plate 25. Courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (89-B17579).
In the second gem type, Prometheus typically is shown affixing the arm bones to a human skeleton, as in figures 6.7–6.11. In figures 6.8 and 6.11 (plates 10 and 11), Prometheus uses a mallet or hammer to attach the arm to the skeleton.29 In these images, the supposition is that he will then attach sinews and muscles to the framework of bones, adding internal organs, blood vessels, skin, hair, and so on—working outward from naturalistic interior anatomy to the finished human prototype.
In the context of the construction of a human form from internal anatomy to external features, it is illuminating to compare an ancient Chinese tale of artificial life. In this case a lifelike automaton was created from the inside out with realistic and functional internal structure. Set during the reign of King Mu (ca. 976–922 BC) of the Zhou dynasty, the tale describes an android created by a master “artificer” named Yan (Yen Shih). The story appears in the Book of Liezi, attributed to the Daoist philosopher Lie Yukou (ca. 400 BC), although fixing the exact date is complex. In the tale, Master Yan introduces King Mu and his concubines to his marvelous man-made man, who walks, dances, sings, and otherwise perfectly mimics the actions of a real human being. The king is entranced—until the man flirts with the royal concubines. The king flies into a rage, then is astounded when Yan opens up the automaton to reveal its biotechnological construction, the “exact replication of human physiology in artificial form (jiawu).” Lifelike down to the finest detail, the outer body is made of leather, wood, hair, teeth, glue, and lacquer, and inside are artificial muscles and a jointed skeleton, with organs, liver, heart, lungs, intestines, spleen, kidneys—each of which controls specific bodily functions in Master Yan’s android.
FIG. 6.7. Prometheus, seated, attaching the arm bone to the skeleton of the first human. Etruscan-style carved scarab (hatched border), inscription PIPITU, and cast, third to second century BC?, Townley Collection, inv. 1814,0704.1312. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
FIG. 6.8 (PLATE 10). Prometheus, seated, constructing the first human skeleton, using a mallet to attach the arm bone to the shoulder. Carnelian intaglio gem, date unknown, perhaps Townley Collection, inv. 1987,0212.250. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
> FIG. 6.9. Prometheus sitting on a rock, attaching raised arm to skeleton of first human, cast of carved gem, dark green jasper, first century BC, 82.AN.162.69. Courtesy of the Getty Museum.
FIG. 6.10. Prometheus attaching the arm to a skeleton, carnelian scarab, about 100 BC (modern gold ring setting). Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 62.184, Gift of Mrs. Harry Lyman.
FIG. 6.11 (PLATE 11). Prometheus using a mallet to make a skeleton, chalcedony gem, first century BC, Thorvaldsens Museum, Denmark, acc. no. 185.
The ancient theme of building hyperrealistic androids from the inside out, beginning with anatomically exact skeletons and internal organs, evident in the Prometheus gems and in this Chinese tale, recurs in modern science fiction. For example, in the film Blade Runner 2049, the discovery of the buried skeletal remains of the runaway replicant Rachael reveals that replicants have “human” physiology—and might even be able to give birth to offspring.30
The artistic decision to show Prometheus constructing the first human starting with the bone structure likens the Titan to a sculptor who constructs a statue upon a model skeleton. Kanaboi, skeletal forms, usually of wood, were used by ancient sculptors as the internal core around which they attached clay, wax, or plaster in the first stages of creating statues. Wooden cores were also used with cold-hammered sheets of metal and in the lost-wax casting of bronze statues, as described in the writings of Pausanias, Pollux, Hesychius, and Photius. The artistic process is also mentioned by Pliny (34.18.45–47), who admired the excellently wrought small clay models and wooden skeletons used in the first stages of making bronze statues in the studio of the renowned sculptor Zenodorus in Rome. Wooden armatures would not survive the heat of casting, but modern analyses of famous ancient bronze statues reveal that metal armatures were also used. A kanabos served as a kind of three-dimensional diagram of body structure.31 The scenes on the unusual gems discussed above show Prometheus designing his project, using technology and tools, and starting by assembling a real kanabos, the physical structure of what will become the first man.
In his treatises on biological anatomy and movement, Aristotle refers to kanaboi. He compares the way the network of blood vessels “displays the shape of the entire body . . . like the wooden skeleton (kanabos) used in artist’s modeling.” Moreover, Aristotle invokes familiar devices of his day, mechanical dolls or some sort of self-moving automata, as analogies to help explain the inner mechanical composition and workings of animals and humans. Referring to the skeleton as the framework that allows movement, Aristotle’s language is mechanistic: he notes that animals have sinews and bones that function much like the cables attached to pegs or iron rods inside automata.32
The artistic representations of Prometheus working with sections of the human body and assembling a skeleton kanabos suggest that artists and viewers would understand his creation as a form of biotechne, analogous to a sculptor beginning with the interior framework to make automata that would then become the original living humans. In the first stage, he builds what viewers recognize as their own anatomy, logically assembling the progenitors of the human race from the inside out.
In all the variants of the Prometheus creation myth, the realistic forms of humans become the reality they portray: they become real men and women. This paradoxical perspective taps into the timeless idea that humans are somehow automata of the gods. The almost subconscious fear that we could be soulless machines manipulated by other powers poses a profound philosophical conundrum that has been pondered since ancient times: If we are the creations of the gods or unknown forces, how can we have self-identity, agency, and free will? Plato (Laws 644d–e) was one of the first to consider the idea of humans as nonautonomous: “Let us suppose that each of us living creatures is an ingenious puppet of the gods.” The myth of the artificial woman Pandora, fabricated by the god Hephaestus, calls up similar questions, as we will see in chapter 8. These concerns about autonomy and soul also suffuse traditional Hindu, Buddhist, and Daoist tales about robots (above and chapter 5). In one Hindu story, for example, an entire city is populated by silent but animated townspeople and animals, later revealed to be realistic wooden puppets, all controlled by a solitary man on a throne in the palace.33
The notion that humans arose as the automata or playthings of an imperfect and/or evil demiurge and the ensuing questions of volition and morality were forcefully articulated in the ancient movement of Gnosticism (first through third century AD). In modern times, questions of human autonomy were debated by T. H. Huxley and William James in the 1800s, and Gnostic concepts are powerfully revived by philosopher John Gray in Soul of a Marionette (2015) and novelist Philip Pullman in the epic trilogy His Dark Materials (1995–2000). The Blade Runner films (1982, 2017) are another example of how science-fiction narratives play on the paranoid suspicion that our world is already full of androids—and that it would be impossible to apply a Turing test to oneself to prove that one is not an android.34
One of the replicants in Blade Runner repeats, “I think, therefore I am,” the famous conclusion by the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650). Descartes was quite familiar with mechanical automata of his era powered by gears and springs, and he embraced the idea that the body is a machine. Anticipating Turing and similar tests, Descartes predicted that one day we might need a way to determine whether something was a machine or human. “If there were machines in the image of our bodies and capable of imitating our actions,” wrote Descartes, then perhaps tests based on flexibility of behavior and linguistic abilities would expose nonhuman things.35
In the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus, related by Plato (chapter 4), earth’s creatures are created and then “programmed” with capabilities and defenses so that they will not fall into mutual destruction but will maintain equilibrium in nature. But the limits of biotechnology are revealed when the animals receive all the “apps” and nothing is left over for the humans, naked and defenseless. Feeling pity, Prometheus gives mortals craft and fire. Ever after, the Greek myths demonstrate how the immortal gods and goddesses play out their own power games, manipulating, withholding, rewarding, and punishing generations of mortals, for eternity. And soon enough, humankind itself would develop the urge to create and control life, like the gods. Many ages ago, the vision of capricious gods or careless, even evil, demiurges haphazardly doling out natural capabilities, and controlling or neglecting their human toys, sketched the outlines of one of the most chilling genres of science fiction still capturing audiences today.36
By the fifth century BC, the Athenians were venerating the rebel Prometheus and the precious gifts of technology he gave to humanity. The Titan was worshipped at an altar in what became the grove of Plato’s Academy—alongside Athena and Hephaestus. During the city’s most important civic festival, the Panathenaia, the Fire-Bringer Prometheus was honored with a relay torch race. Runners began at the altar in the Academy outside the city walls and wound through the Kerameikos, the district of potters and other craftspeople who revered Prometheus as their patron (along with Daedalus). The torch race culminated with the last runner kindling the sacred fire on Athena’s altar on the Acropolis. A relief sculpture of Prometheus (and Hephaestus’s creation, Pandora) decorated the base of the majestic statue of Athena in the Parthenon.37
In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Prometheus’s theft of fire and his subsequent torment were transformed into an allegory for the human soul seeking enlightenment. Ever since, Prometheus has inspired artists, writers, thinkers, and scientists, as a symbol of creativity, inventive genius, humanism, reason, and heroic endurance and resistance against tyranny.38
Two famous literary works show how later authors were inspired by Prometheus’s creations. In Shakespeare’s Othello (1603), Othello says he cannot restore “Promethean heat” to Desdemona’s dead body once her “light” is extinguished. The allusion refers to the notion that Prometheus himself bestowed life on his clay figures with the fire he stole from the heavens.
“Promethean heat,
” in the form of electricity, animates the monster created from grafted parts of pillaged corpses in the sensational scene in the iconic 1931 film Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff, which was based on the celebrated novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Written in 1816 and published in 1818, Shelley’s story was strongly shaped by classical mythology. Her father, William Godwin, wrote a commentary on seekers of artificial life in antiquity, including the witches Medea and Erichtho and the artisans Daedalus and Prometheus. Mary’s companions Percy Shelley and Lord Byron were writing poems about Prometheus at the time. In the novel, Mary Shelley conceived of her scientific genius Victor Frankenstein as a Promethean “fire-bringer” for her era. She also drew on exciting scientific and pseudoscientific ideas about alchemy, occult transference of souls, chemistry, electricity, and human physiology current in her day.39
Some scholars suggest that Mary Shelley was influenced by reports of macabre dissection experiments carried out by the notorious alchemist Johann Dippel (b. 1673) of Frankenstein Castle, near the villa on Lake Geneva where she wrote the story. Debates over the electrostimulation work of Luigi Galvani and others were also much in the public eye by the 1790s. Shelley was certainly aware of morbid experiments in which animal and human corpses were grotesquely “reanimated” with electricity. A public demonstration of galvanism on the twitching cadaver of an executed criminal, for example, was staged in London in 1803. The life-giving principle was left vague in her 1818 novel, but Shelley does mention galvanism in her revised 1831 edition. She drew her subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, from the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s famous essay (1756) warning about the overweening “unbridled curiosity” exemplified by Benjamin Franklin’s “discovery” of electricity.40
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