Gods and Robots

by Adrienne Mayor

  The most captivating devices created by Hephaestus were those described as exceedingly lifelike and/or as self-moving automata that mimicked natural bodily forms and possessed something like mind. We have already met some of Hephaestus’s artificial animated creatures: the bronze guardian Talos of Crete, the Khalkotauroi, fire-breathing bronze bulls wrangled by Jason, and Zeus’s torturing Eagle. Other lifelike animals made by Hephaestus include horses, dogs, and a lion. Except for Talos, the animating mechanisms or inner workings of these metallic wonders are not described in any surviving texts.11 But it is telling that they are made by the inventor god, the same god who forged Talos and other automata via techne.

  Most of the accounts of Hephaestus’s animal-shaped devices are very ancient. An exception is a story by the late Byzantine-era epic poet Nonnus (Dionysiaca 29.193), who imagined Hephaestus creating a pair of animated bronze horses to draw the adamantine chariot of his sons, the Cabeiroi. As with the brazen bulls, flames shoot from the horses’ mouths. “Their bronze hooves beat the dust with a rattling sound,” and the equine automata even emit a “dry whinnying sound from their throats.” By the time of Nonnus, the fifth century AD, a number of inventors had been building actual self-moving devices for several centuries (chapter 9). Some of these real creations may have inspired Nonnus’s vision of the flame-snorting horses as a kind of poetic double of the ancient myth of the bronze bulls.

  Much earlier—but puzzling—artistic evidence for a horse made by Hephaestus appears on a unique Etruscan mirror made in the fourth century BC. The horse statue and inscriptions engraved on the bronze mirror have stumped Etruscan scholars and classical art historians. The Etruscans, as we know, told their own oral versions of Greek mythology. The scene on the mirror shows a realistic metal horse statue (labeled Pecse) being created by Sethlans, the Etruscan Hephaestus, and an assistant named Etule wielding a smith’s hammer (fig. 7.7, plate 8).

  The horse labeled Pecse has been identified by some scholars as the Trojan Horse, but questions arise with that interpretation. Pecse is the Etruscan name for Pegasus, but the horse on the mirror has no wings, and in the Greek myth Pegasus was born from the Gorgon’s decapitated head, not forged by Hephaestus. This horse has no wheels; the Trojan Horse is wheeled in the earliest Greek artistic images.12 No known Greek myths associate Hephaestus with the Trojan Horse. According to Homer (Odyssey 8.493), the Trojan Horse was constructed of wood by a Greek craftsman named Epeius, not by Hephaestus, and it was either made with Athena’s help or else dedicated to Athena (see fig. 5.4, for this scenario on an Athenian vase by the Foundry Painter).

  Who is Etule? It is possible that Etule is meant to be Epeius, but if this is an Etruscan version of the Trojan Horse story, he was inspired or guided by Hephaestus, instead of Athena. Epeius did have an Italian association: he was the mythic founder of the Greek colony Metapontum (in southern Italy), and it was said that the citizens displayed his tools in the temple to Athena there.13

  On the Etruscan mirror, Sethlans/Hephaestus is doing something with some lumpy material around the horse’s neck. In his right hand he is holding some of the same material. He appears to be removing or applying clay or making a plaster mold, like those used in ancient bronze casting techniques. A comparable scene appears on an earlier red-figure Athenian vase painting of about 460 BC. This vase has an unusual scene of a god other than Hephaestus actually working to make an artificially lifelike being. Figure 7.8 (plate 9) shows the goddess Athena, the patroness of Athenian craftsmen, making a clay model of a horse (the Trojan Horse). The hind leg is unfinished and its body is still rough. Behind Athena are tools like those used by Daedalus and Hephaestus and ordinary craftsmen in their workshops: a saw, drill, and bow drill. There is a mound of clay at her feet, and she is applying a handful of the clay to the horse’s head. This classical vase image of Athena making a horse with clay is remarkably similar to the image of Sethlans/Hephaestus molding clay on the horse’s neck on the Etruscan mirror.14

  FIG. 7.7 (PLATE 8). Hephaestus (Sethlans) and assistant (Etule) making an artificial horse (Pecse), Etruscan bronze mirror, fourth century BC, from Orvieto, BnF Cabinet des Medailles, Bronze.1333, photo Serge Oboukhoff © BnF/CNRS-Maison Archéologie & Ethnologie, 2011. B. Woodcut of mirror, Victor Duruy, History of Greece (Boston, 1890), redrawn by Michele Angel.

  FIG. 7.8 (PLATE 9). Athena making a clay model of a horse; she is holding a handful of clay and there is a pile of clay at her feet. Above left, a saw, drill, and bow drill. The horse’s back leg is unfinished. Athenian red-figure wine jug, about 460 BC, F 2415. Bpk Bildagentur / Photo by Johannes Laurentius / Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen, Berlin / Art Resource, NY.

  Looking more closely at the image on the Etruscan mirror (fig. 7.7, plate 8) one notices that the lively-looking artificial horse is chained by its front foot to a rock hobble. This is an odd detail for a lifeless statue. Odd, that is, until we recall the ancient Athenian jokes about needing to tether or bind “living statues” to prevent them from running away (chapter 5). The chain on the horse’s leg could emphasize how realistic the artificial horse is—or it could indicate that Sethlans/Hephaestus and his assistant are making an animated statue of a horse, apparently illustrating an unknown Etruscan tradition.

  Besides the bronze phylax empsychos (“animated guard”) Talos, Hephaestus fashioned two other gifts for Minos. One was magical—a quiver full of arrows (or a javelin) that never missed their mark. The other item is more interesting: a supernaturally swift hunting dog that never lost its prey (the dog’s image appears on the other side of coins of Crete depicting Talos). Sometimes viewed as an automaton hound, and sometimes as a wonder-dog with enhanced natural abilities, this mythic canine creation had many adventures. Often called Laelaps, the dog features in a story (part of a lost Homeric epic, the Epigoni) that begins with Minos.

  His wife, the witch Pasiphae, we recall, had cursed Minos with scorpion ejaculations to keep him faithful (chapter 4). Minos is finally cured of that malady with a reverse spell cast by another witch, named Procris. Minos gives the special hound Laelaps to Procris in gratitude. Then Procris’s husband, Cephalus, takes Laelaps to Boeotia, in Greece, to hunt the Teumessian Fox, a monstrous fox that could never be caught. This fantastical hunt sets up the sort of paradoxical conundrum that was so popular in Greek mythology and philosophy. The dilemma of a hound that cannot fail to catch prey and a fox that cannot be caught is resolved when Zeus transforms both hound and fox to stone. A pair of rock formations in the shape of the two animals was a famous ancient attraction near Thebes.15

  Confusingly, the hound of Crete/Laelaps story is entangled with the myth of the Golden Hound. Rhea, Zeus’s mother, set this animated hound made of gold to guard the infant Zeus when he was hidden on Crete from his murderous father, Cronus. Who made this golden watchdog? Some say the Golden Hound was made by the metalworking gnomes or daimons called Kouretes or Dactyloi, who were charged with protecting the infant Zeus on Crete. (They were associated with the Telchines, who made the fabled living statues of Rhodes; chapter 5). But other sources say the Golden Hound was made by Hephaestus. At any rate, when Zeus assumed power on Mount Olympus, he ordered the Golden Hound to continue to guard the sacred site of his infancy at his temple on Crete. According to one mythic thread, Pandareus stole this precious Golden Hound from Zeus’s temple, but the god Hermes recovered the Hound for Zeus. The rescue of the Golden Hound was illustrated on an archaic vase painting of the early sixth century BC (fig. 7.9).

  FIG. 7.9. The Golden Hound made by Hephaestus, recovered by Hermes, after it was stolen by Pandareas. Black-figure cup, about 575 BC, Heidelberg Painter, Louvre A478. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

  In the second century BC, the poet Nicander of Colophon interwove threads of these various tales to praise the origins of the marvelously swift real-world Molossian and Chaonian hounds admired by Greek hunters: “They say these dogs are the descendants of a dog” that Hephaestus manufactured. Hephaestus, he wrote, “cast it in Demo
nesian bronze and set a soul (psyche) in it.” This animated hound, recounts Nicander, was passed from Minos to Procris to Cephalus, and ultimately was turned to stone by Zeus. The poet’s folklore phrase “they say” imagines that an animated dog of metal could copulate with a living dog and have offspring. Nicander plays with the idea that an artificial animal could be so “real” that it could even procreate, much as some later Roman-era writers pretended that Galatea and Pandora—neither one born of biological parents—were so “human” that they could reproduce. Nicander employs this poetic conceit to confer a divine pedigree on the best hunting hounds of antiquity, much as Athenian craftsmen claimed Daedalus as their ancestor (chapter 5).16

  The earliest known story of animals wrought in metal by Hephaestus appears in Homer’s Odyssey (7.91–98). The scene describes the pair of dogs, one silver and the other gold, that defended the splendid palace of the mythic king Alcinous of the Phaeacians, a mysterious advanced culture. Odysseus admires these ferocious watchdogs, “fashioned with cunning skill,” standing guard at the richly decorated entrance gates. Homer describes the ever-vigilant hounds as “deathless and ageless.” Some interpret the myth to indicate that the mastiffs could move to attack and even bite intruders, but that is not clear and Homer does not say how. Another mythic tradition says these same gold and silver dogs had once helped the god Poseidon, who then gave them to Alcinous.17

  Three versions of a previously unknown mythic tradition about a bronze lion constructed by Hephaestus to guard the island of Lesbos came to light in 1986. The accounts appear in a badly damaged fragment of papyrus from the second century AD. The earliest source in the fragment appears to be from the third century BC. According to the papyrus, this bronze lion was hidden on the coast of Lesbos to defend against attacks from mainland Anatolia. The story comports with the ancient and medieval belief that bronze statues could serve as guardians and “magic shields” (chapter 1), and some statues, like Talos and the Golden Hound, were further imagined as “animated” (empsychos).

  The lion statue of Lesbos was made in a two-step process, recalling the “soul” placed in the bronze dog mentioned by Nicander. In this case, Hephaestus cast the hollow lion and then placed pharmaka (powerful substances) inside it. The “animating” pharmaka were “beneficial to mankind.”18 This process brings to mind Medea placing powerful pharmaka inside the hollow bronze statue of Artemis in chapter 2, and the internal life force inside Talos in the form of ichor (chapter 1). One might also note that the artificial lion “animated” by powers “beneficial to mankind” seems to anticipate the science-fiction author Isaac Asimov’s first law of robotics (1942): A robot may not harm humans. That rule—broken by Talos and other ancient automata—still resonates with modern experts who work on the ethics of robotics and Artificial Intelligence. In the “23 Asilomar AI Principles” for ensuring ethical human values in Artificial Intelligence (set forth by the Future of Life Institute in 2017) the final rule states that “superintelligence should only be developed . . . for the benefit of all humanity.”19

  When the goddess Thetis interrupts him at his forge, Hephaestus is engaged in a project of “inspired artistry.” Forging twenty bronze cauldrons on tripods mounted on golden wheels, he is in the act of riveting the handles, which have not yet been attached. Bronze tripods, three-legged stands for basins or cauldrons, were ubiquitous everyday furniture in classical antiquity. Ceremonial, ornate tripods were often dedicated in temples or presented as prizes and gifts. When completed, this very special fleet of tripods invented by Hephaestus could travel of their own accord, automatoi, delivering nectar and ambrosia to banquets of the gods and goddesses on command and then returning to Hephaestus (Homer Iliad 18.368–80). Unlike the ancient descriptions of Talos, no internal mechanism for the tripods was given by Homer, but they fit the definition of machines in that they can travel on their own and change direction.

  The passages about the tripods and the automatically opening gates of Olympus (Iliad 5.749 and 18.376) are the earliest appearances of the ancient Greek word αὐτόµατον, automaton, “acting of one’s own will.” In the fourth century BC, Aristotle quoted the Homeric verse and referred to the tripod-carts as automata (Politics 1.1253b). Notably, Philostratus (AD 170–245) reported that the peripatetic sage Apollonius of Tyana saw many amazing sights in India in the first or second century AD (Life of Apollonius 6.11). Among the thaumata, “wonders,” were tripodes de automatoi and automated cupbearers that attended royal banquets. As many modern historians have remarked, the self-moving tripods serving the Olympian gods call to mind modern self-propelled, laborsaving machines, driverless cars, and military-industrial robots. Homer’s myth reminds us that the impulse to “automate” is extremely ancient.20

  Wheeled tripods do not appear in surviving ancient Greek art, and archaeological examples are unknown. However, many ornately decorated four-wheeled bronze carts for transporting cauldrons have been excavated in Mediterranean sites, dating to the Bronze Age (thirteenth to twelfth century BC). Today, one might speculate about tracks, springs, levers, strings, pulleys, weights, cranks, or magnets as plausible operating systems for self-moving tripods that behaved something like those in Homer’s passage about Hephaestus. Indeed, a hypothetical working model of an automatic wheeled tripod can be viewed in the Kotsanas Museum of Ancient Greek Technology (near Pyrgos, Greece). The model uses millet grain, weights, ropes, and transverse pins, applying techniques developed by later historical engineers working in Alexandria, Philo and Heron (chapter 9).21

  By the third century BC, Alexandria, Egypt, with its grand library and museum, had become a center for mechanical innovations. Perhaps inspired by Hephaestus’s wheeled serving tripods in the Iliad, Philo (a Greek engineer born in Byzantium, but living in Alexandria) invented an automaton in the form of a woman who served wine. This robot was stationary but it could easily have been placed on wheels to move on an incline, using a simple design that would have been possible with materials, skills, and technology available in classical antiquity.22 Just such a wheeled female servant automaton is described in the later Arabic treatise of AD 1206 by al-Jazari (b. AD 1136), a prolific practical engineer during Artuqid rule in eastern Asia Minor. In this design, liquid is poured into a vessel at the top and trickles into a basin until the basin tips and fills a cup in the servant’s hand. The weight in the cup then causes the wheeled servant to roll down an inclined plane toward the drinker (many more historical self-moving devices and automata are discussed in chapter 9).23

  The salient point about the self-driving tripods and similar fictions in Greek mythology about self-moving devices made by Hephaestus is that—in the time of Homer, more than twenty-five hundred years ago—ingeniously designed self-propelling carts manufactured by a super-smith were at least thinkable in the realm of mythology, even though the technology was not specified or known.24

  Rolling tripods are absent in ancient Greek art, but there is a striking image of a flying tripod. It appears on a beautiful vase painting made in about 500–470 BC by the talented and prolific artist known as the Berlin Painter (fig. 7.10). The scene shows the god Apollo seated on a winged tripod flying over the sea above leaping dolphins. Everyone knew that the priestess of Apollo at the Delphic oracle sat on a special tripod while in a prophetic trance. A legend circulated in antiquity about a beautiful golden tripod, made by Hephaestus and owned by Helen of Troy, designated by the Delphic oracle for “the man most wise.” According to the oracle, the tripod would travel on its own to the wisest man. The golden tripod passed among the Seven Sages and ultimately was dedicated to Apollo.25 Could this curious legend be somehow related to the vase scene of Apollo’s tripod “transformed into a fantastic flying machine”? The image is unique and the myth it illustrates is unknown.26 Such a device would have been crafted by Hephaestus, who made the golden tripod, the special chair for his mother, and the fleet of self-propelled tripods to serve the gods. Indeed, plenty of literary and artistic evidence shows that the idea of fl
ying “machines” in the form of wheeled chariots was current in archaic times.

  FIG. 7.10. Apollo seated on his tripod flying over the sea with dolphins and other marine creatures. Attic red-figure hydria, about 500–480 BC, Berlin Painter, Vatican Museums, Scala / Art Resource, NY.

  Three of the many vase paintings depicting these flying chairs/chariot-cars are by the Berlin Painter, while the earliest known example is a vase of about 525 BC attributed to the Ambrosios Painter. The scene shows Hephaestus himself seated in a wheeled chair or chariot-car with wings, illustrating another unknown story (Hephaestus, we recall, was lame). Several other vases portray Triptolemus, associated with Demeter and the Eleusinian Mysteries, seated in or about to mount his flying wheeled chair-chariot (fig. 7.11). In this myth, the goddess sends Triptolemus to disperse knowledge of agriculture over the earth, traveling in an airborne chair. Among the many ancient sources is a fragment of Sophocles’s lost play about Triptolemus (468 BC) that describes him flying about in his special chair. Wings were not mentioned in the written sources—the wings were added later by vase artists as a way of indicating flight. We can guess that wings were attached to the flying machines of Apollo and Hephaestus for the same reason, to show that the wondrous vehicles were self-moving and capable of flight.27

  FIG. 7.11. Triptolemus in his flying chair, with Kore, red-figure Attic cup found in Vulci, by the Aberdeen Painter, about 470 BC, Louvre G 452, Canino Collection, 1843, photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen, 2007.

  The tripods created by the blacksmith god were mindless machines. But Hephaestus also fabricated wondrous automata in the shape of human beings with special abilities. One example appears in a fragment of a lost poem by Pindar. The scrap of poetry tells how Hephaestus made a bronze temple for Apollo, god of music, at Delphi. The pediment of the temple was graced by the Keledones Chryseai, “Golden Charmers,” six golden statues of women who could sing. In the second century AD, the Greek traveler Pausanias (10.5.12) investigated the existence of the singing statues. He visited the site but learned that the bronze temple and the statues had long ago either toppled into a chasm during an earthquake or melted in a fire.28