Gods and Robots

by Adrienne Mayor

  Shelley tells how the young scientist Victor Frankenstein devotes two years of painstaking work to building an artificial, intelligent android. He assembles the creature part by part using raw materials from slaughterhouses and medical dissections. In light of Shelley’s story of a “modern Prometheus,” the ancient Etruscan illustrations, on gems, of Prometheus putting together human body parts and skeletons seem to take on an eerie prescience. In fact, the engravings of the Carafa gems in figures 6.5 and 6.6 were published in 1778. Several of the intaglios showing Prometheus working on the unfinished torsos and assembling skeletons were included in the vast collection of ancient and neoclassical gems amassed by the Scottish engraver and antiquarian James Tassie (1735–99). An illustrated two-volume catalogue of Tassie’s collection was published in 1791.41 Shelley and her circle may well have observed or heard described a number of gems featuring Prometheus making a human with body parts.

  Yet another classical influence on Shelley’s Frankenstein could have been the horrifying Thessalian necromancer Erichtho. A witch who haunts battlefields and graveyards seeking body parts for her spells, Erichtho most famously appears in Lucan’s writings of the first century AD, a Latin poet well known to Shelley. In his Civil War, Lucan describes Erichtho striding grimly across a smoking battleground, seeking serviceable cadavers with intact lungs to resurrect. In a grisly scene, Erichtho uses dead animal parts to reanimate the human corpses. In imagery reminiscent of the witch Medea in Greek myths (chapters 1 and 2), Erichtho mutters incantations and gnashes her teeth as she compels the dead to come alive. The corpses jerk back to life convulsively, then walk about “remarkably quickly but stiff-limbed,” evoking the stereotypical stiff-jointed walk of zombies, animated statues, and robots. Appalled to be unnaturally summoned back to life by the witch, the living dead throw themselves onto burning pyres.42

  In Shelley’s story, often hailed as the first modern science-fiction novel, the scientist hopes to create a humanoid of sublime beauty and soul. But the resulting creature is a hideous, sentient monster who wreaks havoc and bitterly resents being brought into existence. Some early modern thinkers saw the ancient myth of Prometheus’s endless torture as a symbol of his gnawing doubts about his creation of humankind. Echoing Kant, some historians of robotics see the Promethean tale as a warning that anyone who “tries to build life artificially is acting outside the legitimate human province, carelessly straying into the divine orbit.”43As in so many ancient myths and popular legends about artificial life achieved through mysterious supertechnology, Shelley’s horror tale is a gripping meditation on the themes of striving to surpass human limits and the perils of scientific overreaching without full knowledge or understanding of the practical and ethical consequences.

  In some accounts, Zeus asked Prometheus to make the first humans. But Zeus also meted out revenge on Prometheus for stealing fire and other tools to give to humans. (Zeus devised a separate eternal penalty for humanity, as well, as we shall see in the next chapter.) Ancient estimates of how long humanity’s champion endured the torment of Zeus’s Eagle range from thirty to one thousand to thirty thousand years. According to one strand of the myth, illustrated by many ancient artists, at last Zeus gave Heracles permission to kill his huge Aetos Kaukasios (“Eagle of the Caucasus”), thus ending Prometheus’s anguish.44

  The divine torture-eagle had various origins, recounted in different versions of the myth. Of particular interest is the summary given by Hyginus, a Roman librarian (b. 64 BC) who compiled a wealth of mythological material from numerous Greek and Latin sources (many now lost) in two treatises, Fabulae and Astronomica. Reviewing the ancient traditions, Hyginus (Astronomica 2.15) reported, “Some have said that this eagle was born from Typhon and Echidna, others from Gaia and Tartarus, but many point out that the eagle was made by the hands of Hephaestus.” This tradition mentioned by Hyginus, that the giant Eagle sent to ravage Prometheus was fashioned by the god of the forge, conjures an image of a kind of metallic drone-eagle set to home in on Prometheus’s liver at a certain time each day.

  Notably, Apollonius (Argonautica 2.1242–61) penned an extraordinary description of Zeus’s great Eagle as an unnatural, gleaming bird of prey with machinelike movements. Jason and the Argonauts observe the “shining Eagle” returning to the Caucasus crag “each afternoon flying high above the ship with a strident whirr. It was near the clouds, yet it caused all their canvas sails to quiver to the beat of its wings. For its form was not that of an ordinary bird: the long quill-feathers of each wing rose and fell like a bank of polished oars.”

  There are several pieces of ancient literary evidence for the idea of metallic birds of prey. The man-eating Stymphalian Birds, for example, were destroyed by Heracles in his Sixth Labor. The monster birds were often visualized with bronze feathers and armor-piercing beaks. From central Asian epic comes another image of robotic raptors. In the folk traditions about Gesar of Ling, the evil hermit Ratna makes and dispatches a trio of sinister giant metal birds to kill the hero Gesar. With rattling feathers that are “thin blades of iron and copper” and “beaks like swords,” the birds swoop down on young Gesar, who fells them with three arrows.45

  Mechanical birds were actually constructed as early as the fifth and fourth centuries BC in Greece. There was a bronze eagle that flew up to signal the start of the horse races at the Olympic Games (described by Pausanias 6.20.12–14) and a flying dove model was attributed to the scientist Archytas. As noted in chapter 1, Apollonius would have observed numerous automata and self-moving devices in Ptolemaic Alexandria (see chapter 9 for these and other historical inventions).46

  Zeus’s Eagle, fabricated by the god Hephaestus, would not be the only artificial animal created expressly as a killing or torture device in Greek myth and history, as the following chapters reveal. Throngs of animated devices and creatures “made, not born” fill out Hephaestus’s stellar résumé of ingenious artifices and automated devices. Some are laborsaving, but others are deliberately intended to inflict harm.

  CHAPTER 7

  HEPHAESTUS

  DIVINE DEVICES AND AUTOMATA

  ONLY ONE GOD in Greco-Roman mythology has a trade. Not only does this god engage in strenuous physical labor; he even breaks a sweat. This same god possesses great intelligence, and his technological productions evoke universal wonder. The hardworking god is Hephaestus, supreme master of metalworking, craftsmanship, and invention.

  An outsider among the other divinities, the blacksmith Hephaestus was lame and by some accounts had no father. Both his mother, Hera, and his wife, Aphrodite, rejected him; he was even cast out of Mount Olympus for a time. Yet all the gods and goddesses were in awe of Hephaestus. They called on the smith god whenever they required something of beautiful or clever design and sublime craftsmanship. Hephaestus created the divinities’ gold and marble palaces secured with unbreakable locks. He made special weapons, armor, and equipment for gods and heroes: a partial list includes arrows for Apollo and Artemis; the Medusa shield for the hero Peleus; armor for Heracles, Achilles, Diomedes, and Memnon; Athena’s spear and Apollo’s chariot. He made an ivory replacement shoulder blade for the hero Pelops. For King Aeetes, Medea’s father, he made the fire-snorting bronze bulls, and he engineered four fabulous fountains that provided wine, milk, oil, and hot and cold water. Against his will, Hephaestus was ordered by Zeus to make the chains that shackled Prometheus on the mountain, and the smith god forged Zeus’s dread lightning bolts, depicted in art as a stylized bundle of metal projectiles hurled like a javelin. Zeus’s scepter was another of his works—this was said to have been given to the mythical King Agamemnon of Trojan War fame. The scepter was displayed in a temple in Chaeronea, one of the several artifacts attributed to Hephaestus seen by Pausanias (9.40.11–12).1

  The earliest description of Hephaestus at his forge appears in an extended passage in the Iliad. In the scene, the goddess Thetis seeks out Hephaestus to create a glorious set of armor for her son, Achilles (fig. 7.1). She finds the smith “
glazed with sweat,” working at his anvil in his abode made of bronze, where he is aided by various automated devices. Hephaestus wipes his brow with a sponge, sets aside his project, stores his tools in a silver chest, and greets his guest.

  Thetis requests a bronze helmet, a richly decorated shield, and chest and leg armor more fabulous than any other ever made. Elaborate descriptions of the individual pieces of armor follow. The shield is the centerpiece, made of “fine bronze, tin, silver, and gold” and “forged in five layers” with a “triple-ply rim.” Homer’s detailed description of the sophisticated technology of the shield’s construction attracts the attention of modern engineers, such as Stepfanos Paipetis. Paipetis notes that Hephaestus uses composite materials to make “successive metal laminates with very different properties.” The god’s craftsmanship represents the ideal perfection of a human smith’s knowledge of “dynamic mechanical properties of laminated composite structures,” either observed in Homer’s own day (eighth century BC) or perhaps transmitted from earlier times in oral traditions.2

  FIG. 7.1. Hephaestus in his forge, showing Thetis the marvelous armor for her son, Achilles. Red-figure kylix, from Vulci, about 490–490 BC, by the Foundry Painter, F 2294. Bpk Bildagentur / Photo by Johannes Laurentius / Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen, Berlin / Art Resource, NY.

  Later in the Iliad, on the battlefield at Troy, Achilles and his companions admire the magnificent armor intricately embossed with dazzling panoramas that seem alive. The scenes on the divinely wrought shield reflect a marvelous “artificial world complete with motion, sound, and lifelike figures.”3 As if in a “movie in animated metal,” the people on the shield’s scenes are “vigorous and moving; they can sense, reason, and argue,” and they have voices, “like living mortals.” Homer’s description is reminiscent of the eerily true-to-life images that frightened Odysseus in the Underworld and prefigures the “virtual reality” phantasia productions by the artist Theon of Samos (fourth century BC), which incorporated sounds, music, and lights (chapter 5). In the curious and paradoxical Iliad passage, Homer stresses the astounding realism of the scenes on the shield, specifying the different metals and techniques that Hephaestus used to “construct the various figures” while “calling attention to their crafted realism.” The description causes one to wonder, “Could this verbal description have achieved any of this precision without referencing some visual artifact?”4

  Before we move on to Hephaestus’s other marvels and his artificial life projects, it is worth pausing to recognize that metal armor was one of the earliest artificial human enhancements (chapter 4). Bronze armor was designed to make warriors’ bodies less vulnerable. But what is most striking about the bronze armor of classical antiquity is its form. The main piece of armor, the cuirass or chest plate, was molded to look like an idealized male physique cast in bronze. The “anatomical” armor, also called the “heroic” or “muscle” cuirass, first appeared in archaic Greece and became widespread by the fifth century BC. It was cast in two pieces, front and back, attached by straps. The hammered bronze cuirass was made to fit a man’s upper body, with realistic details in relief to mimic the bare torso of a “hero,” with nipples, navel, and impressively sculpted pectoral and abdominal muscles, resembling those of the mythic strongman Heracles. The greaves, bronze shin guards, were also shaped to delineate the knee and calf muscles.

  FIG. 7.2. Muscle cuirass, bronze, Greek, fourth century BC, 92.180.3 © The Metropolitan Museum, Art Resource, NY. Greaves, realistic leg armor, fourth century BC, Archaeological Museum, Sofia, Bulgaria. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

  A Greek hoplite who donned the artificial human enhancement of bronze chest and leg armor was essentially donning an exoskeleton that replicated the outer appearance of an idealized, “heroically nude” bronze statue. Notably, the heroic bronze cuirass worn by ordinary Greek soldiers on ancient vase paintings (fig. 7.3) resembles the robust bronze body of the automaton Talos, painted yellowish white (compare figs. 1.3, 1.4, plate 1). The bronze chest plate and greaves transformed every soldier—no matter what his body type—into a formidable, muscle-bound warrior. An advancing, clanking phalanx of Greek hoplite soldiers clad in muscle armor would present a living wall of superhuman bronze warriors.5

  FIG. 7.3. Vase painting of “heroic” cuirass, 325 BC, National Archaeological Museum of Spain. Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen.

  Later, the Romans took up the heroic cuirass molded to look Herculean. The Romans further embellished the ceremonial armor and sometimes included realistic silver face masks, which resulted in the appearance of a fully metallic superwarrior. Other military cultures fashioned armor intended to frighten enemies with the semblance of an army of iron men, for example, the eerie iron face masks of the Kipchak of central Asia (see chapter 4 for a medieval Islamic tale about Alexander’s iron cavalry). By the Middle Ages in Europe, full body armor as a metal exoskeleton had evolved into elaborate, heavy suits of armor, as knights dueled with swords and jousted with spears. As we saw in chapter 1, today’s military scientists are reviving a highly advanced exoskeleton idea, modeled on the mythic figure of Talos, to be further enhanced with computers and sensors.

  As a god, Hephaestus was capable of workmanship and engineering superior to what could be achieved by mortal artisans. His works displayed prodigious creativity and skills, surpassing those of his earthly parallel, the legendary Daedalus. But like Daedalus and the Titan Prometheus, Hephaestus was imagined using implements and methods resembling those used by real smiths and artisans. And like Daedalus and other craftsmen, in ancient art and literature Hephaestus was portrayed at work surrounded by his tools and half-completed devices and statues. Generic scenes of smiths and sculptors at work closely mirrored the typical scenes of Hephaestus at work in his forge, in Greek vase paintings and in Roman frescoes (Hephaestus was called Vulcan in Rome).6

  Many of the items of Hephaestus’s manufacture were made expressly for gods and goddesses. To enable the divinities to drive their chariots with ease in and out of their Olympian abode, for example, he made gates that swiveled “on their hinges of their own accord, automatai”—thus, jokes classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, “anticipating by nearly thirty centuries the automatic garage door.”7

  Two cunning devices were wielded against Hephaestus’s unfaithful wife, Aphrodite, and his uncaring mother, Hera. In one myth, Hephaestus fashioned a nearly invisible net of incredibly fine but strong metallic mesh to ensnare Aphrodite in bed with the war god Ares. To take revenge on Hera for rejecting him, Hephaestus presented his mother with a golden throne cleverly devised to include a trap set with some mechanism, perhaps a spring or lever, to restrain her as soon as she sat down. Hera was stuck until Hephaestus released her. The scene of Hera on the throne is depicted on several ancient vase paintings. In one, Hephaestus is shown actually releasing the fetters.8

  FIG. 7.4 (PLATE 4). Blacksmith at work, with tools, red-figure kylix, late sixth century BC, 1980.7. Bpk Bildagentur/ Photo by Johannes Laurentius / Antikensammlung, Staatiche Museen, Berlin / Art Resource, NY.

  Hera, lacking her son’s technology, deployed a supernatural creature named Argus as a sentinel against her husband, Zeus. Argus’s special powers could be seen as a form of divine artificial enhancement. In a fragment of a Hesiod poem, Aegimius, and subsequent texts, Argus was a giant guardian sent by Hera to defend the nymph Io when she was in the form of a heifer being pursued by Zeus. Called Panoptes (“all-seeing”), Argus never slept and could see in all directions with his many eyes, ranging from four to a hundred depending on the source. On vases painted in the sixth to fourth century BC, the body of Argus Panoptes is shown entirely covered with eyes, as described by the mythographer Apollodorus. A fine wine jug (lekythos) of 470 BC by the Pan Painter was recently discovered in ancient Aphytis, northern Greece (fig. 7.6). The body of the humanoid Argus is covered in eyes and has a janiform head looking in opposite directions.9

  FIG. 7.5. Top, blacksmith tools, about 250 BC, Museum für Vorgeschichte, Asparn
, Zaya, Austria. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. Bottom, ancient blacksmith tools, from the Byci Skala cave, Czech Republic, sixth–fifth century BC, Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

  FIG. 7.6. Argus with many eyes and janiform head. Attic red-figure lekythos from Aphytis, by the Pan Painter, about 470 BC. © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, courtesy of Ephorate of Antiquities of Chalcidice and Mount Athos.

  The ancient myth of a hypervigilant watcher that never sleeps and observes from all angles inspired Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century panopticon designs for institutions and prisons, heralding the proliferation of banks of surveillance cameras ubiquitous in the modern world. Accordingly, numerous security providers operate under the name “Argos/Argus.” The computerized exoskeleton TALOS suit to augment soldiers’ senses to be developed by US military scientists also features multiple “eyes” like Argus’s (chapter 1), while other military scientists seek ways to create soldiers who can forgo sleep, like Hera’s sentinel (chapter 4).10