Gods and Robots

by Adrienne Mayor

  Contriving artificial human enhancements based on bird wings for torture and entertainment was not confined to the ancient Mediterranean world. In China, Gao Yang/Wenxuan, the first emperor of the Northern Qi dynasty in AD 550–559, was feared for his erratic bloodthirsty rages. He enjoyed executing prisoners by harnessing them to great wings woven of bamboo or paper kites in the form of birds, large enough to carry a man. He forced the victims to “fly” from the 108-foot-high Tower of the Golden Phoenix (in the Qi capital, Ye) and laughed at the spectacle of doomed men attempting to stay aloft. Apparently the killer kites were also manipulated by skilled men on the ground holding the strings—the idea was to keep the victim in the air as long as possible. It was reported that hundreds of involuntary “test pilots” died for the emperor’s amusement. But one man, Yuan Huangtou, an Eastern Wei prince, won fame for surviving the ordeal in AD 559. Strapped to an ornithopter kite shaped like an owl, he managed to take off from the Phoenix Tower and glided a mile and a half to the Purple Way at Zimo, where he landed safely. Presumably he was aided by the kite-holders on the ground.6

  In the Greek myth, Daedalus escaped from King Minos of Crete by flying to Sicily with his bird wings. As we saw, once in Sicily Daedalus continued to create wonderful inventions for King Cocalus in Acragas, including the boiling hot pool used to murder Minos (chapter 5). Daedalus also designed an amazing temple and the impregnable citadel at Acragas for his royal patron. With these mythic stories in mind, we turn to a real-life inventor in the actual history of the city of Acragas (Agrigento). This inventor constructed a torture apparatus for the tyrant of Acragas that bears some resemblances to certain mythic creations by Daedalus and Hephaestus.

  Acragas was founded by Greeks from Crete and Rhodes in about 580 BC. An ambitious, wealthy citizen named Phalaris undertook the construction of the grand temple to Zeus Atabyrios (named for the highest peak on Rhodes) at Acragas. Phalaris parlayed his status into military power and became an absolute dictator. Detested for his savage brutality, Phalaris was finally overthrown in 554 BC. During his iron rule, a shrewd Athenian bronze smith named Perilaus, seeking favor with Phalaris and knowing his penchant for torture, forged a lifelike statue of bronze bull. It was hollow, with a trapdoor or hatch big enough for a man to enter.

  Perilaus presented this handsome bull statue to Phalaris and explained how it worked. “Should you wish to punish someone, lock him inside the bull and build a fire under it. As the bronze bull’s body heats up, the man roasts within!” Then Perilaus described the fiendish mechanism in the bull’s interior. Perilaus had installed a system of pipes to amplify the victim’s screams. While smoke flowed from the bull’s nostrils, the tubes directed the sounds of the victim to issue from bull’s mouth, transforming the shrieks of agony into the “most pathetic bellowings of a bull, music to your ears.” Impressed, Phalaris slyly requested a demonstration of the special sound effects. “Come then, Perilaus, show me how it works.” As soon as Perilaus crept inside to yell into the pipes, Phalaris locked the door and built a fire under the bull. The bronze smith was roasted to death (some say he was baked and then thrown from a cliff).

  The story evokes the ironic folk motif of an inventor/criminal killed by his own invention/plot. Yet such sadistic behavior in real-life despots is hardly unknown (two Roman examples were the emperors Nero and Caligula). The existence of the Brazen Bull of Phalaris is not in doubt; it was described in numerous extant and lost ancient sources. And Phalaris became the prototypical evil dictator. In fifth-century Greece, the poet Pindar could assume that everyone knew the “hateful reputation” of Phalaris who, “with his pitiless mind, burned his victims in a bronze bull” (Pythian 1.95). A century later, Aristotle twice referred to Phalaris’s tyrannical rule as common knowledge.7

  In the first century BC, Plutarch told of Phalaris’s bronze bull in which he burned people alive, citing an earlier lost historian. The historian Diodorus Siculus also expounded on the bull. Pliny (first century AD) criticized the sculptor Perilaus (Perillus) for conceiving of such a horrid use for his art and approved of his fate as the bull’s first victim. According to Pliny (34.19.88) the sculptor’s other statues were still preserved in Rome “for one purpose only, so that we may hate the hands that made them.” In the second century AD, the satirist Lucian composed a humorous essay pretending to defend the reputation of the loathsome Phalaris.8

  The bull spawned other roasting devices. Plutarch’s Moralia referred to a lost history by Aristides, who described a very similar Sicilian invention in the city of Segesta, but in the shape of a realistic bronze horse, forged by one Arruntius Paterculus for a cruel tyrant named Aemilius Censorinus, known to reward artisans for inventing novel tortures.9 Diodorus Siculus, a native of Sicily, mentions another deadly statue, this time in the form of a bronze man, also set up in Segesta but by the vicious tyrant Agathocles, who ruled in about 307 BC (Diodorus 20.71.3; see fig. 5.1, plate 6, for the celebrated Bronze Ram of Syracuse, which belonged to Agathocles).

  Diodorus returns to the infamous Brazen Bull of Acragas several times in his history. He notes (19.108) that the statue was located on Phalaris’s stronghold, a hill on Cape Ecnomus (“wicked, lawless”). Diodorus describes how during the First Punic War, the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca looted costly paintings, sculptures, and other artworks from the cities of Sicily. The most valuable prize was the Brazen Bull of Phalaris in Acragas, which Hamilcar shipped to Carthage (Tunisia) in 245 BC. A century later, at the end of the Third Punic War, the Brazen Bull actually returned to Acragas. When the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus finally defeated Carthage in 146 BC, he restored all the plundered treasures to the cities in Sicily, including the Brazen Bull. Polybius (Histories 12.25), writing in the second century BC, confirms that the bellowing bronze bull was taken to Carthage and later returned; Polybius notes that the trapdoor on the bull’s back was still operative in the second century BC. In 70 BC, Cicero (Against Verres 4.33) states that among the treasures recovered by Scipio from Carthage was the great Brazen Bull of Acragas, which “the most cruel of all tyrants, Phalaris, had used to burn men alive.” Scipio took that occasion to observe that the bull was a monument to the barbarism of local Sicilian strongmen, and that Sicily would be better off ruled by the more kindly Romans. Diodorus goes on to affirm that one could still view the notorious Brazen Bull in Acragas, when he was writing his history, sometime in 60–30 BC.10

  The Brazen Bull of Phalaris continued to exert a morbid appeal into the Middle Ages. According to Christian legends, the martyrs Eustace, Antipas, Pricillian, and George were each burned in a variety of red-hot bronze or copper bull statues in the first to fourth century AD. The final incident appears in Visigoth chronicles, and this time the victim was a hated despot. Burdunellus, tyrant of Zaragosa, Spain, was executed in Toulouse in AD 496 by being “placed inside a bronze bull and burnt to death.”11

  FIG. 9.1. Phalaris, the tyrant of Agrigentum, Sicily, burns the clever craftsman Perilaus in his own creation, the Brazen Bull. “Perillus condemned to the bronze bull by Phalaris,” sixteenth-century woodcut by Pierre Woeiriot de Bouze. HIP / Art Resource, NY.

  The horror of the Brazen Bull has a familiar ring, sounding mythic echoes from previous chapters. A hyperrealistic bull statue brings to mind the artificial cow created by Daedalus for Queen Pasiphae (chapter 4). Like Pasiphae’s fake heifer, Phalaris’s Brazen Bull was animated by the living human encased inside.12

  Even more compelling mythic comparisons to the Brazen Bull would be the two deadly bronze automata created by Hephaestus for other powerful royal patrons. King Aeetes hoped to incinerate Jason with his awesome pair of fiery bronze bulls. And recall that King Minos’s bronze automaton Talos could heat his body fiery-hot and crush victims to his chest, roasting them alive. Did the mythic parallels to Phalaris’s bronze bull also occur to people in antiquity? In the absence of any surviving texts expressing direct links to the myths, that is unknowable but not implausible. Ancient tales and traditions about bronze b
ulls and heated metal statues were certainly pervasive in popular culture by the time of Phalaris.

  Moreover, it turns out that artificial bulls were prominent talismans in the founding mother city of Phalaris’s Acragas. Acragas was founded by colonists from Rhodes; Phalaris’s father was born there. The island was well known for extraordinary feats of mechanical engineering, such as the Colossus of Rhodes (chapter 1). Evidence indicates that the complicated bronze astronomical calculating machine with thirty gears, the Antikythera mechanism, known as the world’s first analogue computer, was made between the third and first centuries BC in Rhodes.13 As we saw in chapter 5, Rhodes was also renowned for its animated bronze statues, celebrated in Pindar’s poem (Olympian 7.50–54):

  The animated figures stand

  Adorning every public street

  And seem to breathe in stone

  Or move their marble feet

  Among the wonders of Rhodes were two life-size bronze bulls. Were these bulls the prototypes for the Brazen Bull created for Phalaris of Acragas? The bronze bulls of Rhodes stood guard on the island’s highest peak, Mount Atabyrios. (Guardians made of bronze were common in antiquity, chapter 1). We know that Phalaris was involved with the construction of the Temple of Zeus Atabyrios in Acragas, which was named for the mountain in Rhodes guarded by a pair of bronze bulls. But even more striking, the bulls of Rhodes were ingeniously manufactured to bellow. The bull sentries served as signal horns—they “bellowed loudly to warn the Rhodians of the approach of enemies.”14 A configuration of tubes in the bulls amplified the voices of human watchmen stationed on the mountain. It is not impossible that the Brazen Bull of Acragas was perversely designed with similar pipes to transform the victim’s screams into bellowing sounds.

  Signal horns and other megaphonic devices to augment the human voice were devised in various cultures of the ancient world. The artificial amplification of human voices to convey messages was attributed to Alexander the Great, who employed an enormous bronze horn or megaphone suspended on a large tripod to send signals in any direction to his army, several miles distant. The instrument was named after the prodigiously loud herald named Stentor in the mythic Trojan War (Homer Iliad 5.783). An exaggerated stentorophonic device also turns up in medieval legends about Alexander, whose phenomenally loud war trumpet, sometimes called the Horn of Themistius, could summon an army sixty miles away.15

  More melodious mechanized sounds were also possible, emanating from a number of statues and automata, recalling the legendary singing maidens on the temple at Delphi (chapter 7). One example of a noisemaking statue is particularly appropriate here, namely, the statue of Athena created by the sculptor Demetrios (fourth century BC). According to Pliny (34.76) the statue was dubbed the “musical” or “bellowing” Athena (musica or mycetica—the manuscript is unclear). Strange sounds were said to emanate from the writhing serpents in the hair of the fierce Gorgon on the goddess’s shield.16

  A fascinating archaeological discovery in Cairo, Egypt (1936), reveals how some speaking and singing statues worked in antiquity. A large limestone bust of the sun god Ra-Harmakhis has a cavity in the back of the neck from which a narrow canal leads to an opening on the right jaw under the ear. The archaeologists speculate that a priest hiding behind the statue spoke into the cavity and tube, which modified his voice to make it seem that the god delivered oracles.17

  A sublime song at dawn was said to issue from one of the Colossi of Memnon in Egypt, a pair of gigantic seated stone statues, sixty feet high, which were a tourist attraction in antiquity. Amenhotep III (Eighteenth Dynasty) erected the twin statues of himself in about 1350 BC at his temple on the Nile at Thebes. The Egyptians called the “singing” statue Amenophis, Phamenophes, or Sesostris; the Greeks called it Memnon. It was the northern statue—broken after the earthquake of 27 BC—that produced a marvelous tone or “voice” at dawn. In Greek myth, Memnon was the son of the goddess Eos and her undying mortal lover, Tithonus (chapter 3). As king of the Ethiopians, Memnon allied with the Trojans in the Trojan War. Some observers fancied that the speech or song uttered by Memnon’s statue at sunrise was meant to console his mother, Eos, “Dawn.” The rays of the sun made his eyes gleam, and the sound was heard “as soon as the sunbeam reached his lips.” Visitors experienced the eerie sense that Memnon was on the verge of rising from his throne to greet the new day.18

  FIG. 9.2. The Colossi of Memnon, Thebes, Egypt, photo by Felix Bonfils, 1878. HIP / Art Resource, NY.

  The Roman historian Tacitus (Annals 2.61) noted that when struck by the sun’s rays, Memnon “gives out the sound of a human voice, while the pyramids, made by the vast wealth of kings, loom like mountains in the impassable wastes of shifting sand.” Some proposed that the sound was the result of the sudden expansion of the stone from the heat of the rays of the rising sun, perhaps activating internal levers that were attached to vibrating strings. (Perhaps a similar effect caused the Golden Charmers to “sing” at Delphi, chapter 7). Visiting the statues at sunrise in about 26 BC, the geographer Strabo and his friends (17.1.46) heard the sounds but could not be sure whether they came from the statue or from someone standing at the base. The main character in Lucian’s satire Philopseudes (33; second century AD) claims to have heard a “prophecy” uttered by Memnon at dawn, although “most visitors only hear unintelligible sounds.” In AD 80–82, a Roman centurion named Lucius Tanicius inscribed the dates and times when he heard the song on thirteen visits. Many other ancient tourists left graffiti on the singing colossus—the last datable inscription is from AD 205. Some commentators maintained that after Emperor Septimius Severus restored the statue in AD 200, Memnon’s song was never heard again, but the Christian Fathers Theodoret, Jerome, and others insisted that all the old Egyptian idols ceased to speak when Jesus was born.19

  As we’ve seen, there were many ways to cause statues to appear to move, speak, or give the illusion of being alive.20 Paul Craddock (an expert on ancient Near Eastern metallurgy) speculated that such “temple tricks” might have included making an idol that produced a tingling sensation when touched. Craddock’s theory attempted to account for the enigmatic objects known as “Baghdad Batteries” discovered in 1936–38 in Iraq. The artifacts are thought to be either Parthian (ca. 250 BC to AD 240) or Sassanian (AD 224–640). The objects are controversial: some historians take them as evidence of early Persian experimentation with electricity. Unfortunately, the artifacts vanished in the looting of Baghdad’s Iraq Museum in 2003, but written descriptions, diagrams, and photographs provide the details.

  The small terra-cotta jars, each about five inches long, contain cylinders made of iron rods encased in rolled sheets of copper, sealed at the top with asphalt (bitumen) and at the bottom with a copper disc and asphalt: the copper-wrapped iron rod projects above the asphalt at the top. The jars’ inner walls show evidence of corrosion. No wires were recovered: they may have been overlooked or corroded away. It is worth noting that very thin bronze “needles” have been found with similar jars (lacking cylinders) in the same region. The materials and construction seem to suggest a primitive galvanic cell. Modern experiments demonstrate that replicas of the Baghdad batteries produce a feeble 0.5 volt current, using a 5 percent electrolyte solution, with substances available in antiquity such as grape juice, vinegar, wine, or sulfuric or citric acid. If strung together and connected, a cluster of the jars might produce a higher output, enough to give a mild shock akin to static electricity.

  The purpose of the cells is unknown; some suggest a medical function, while others propose a magical or ritual use. In Craddock’s speculative scenario, if the jars were really electrical cells and were hidden and activated somehow inside a metal statue, the figure would seem charged with mysterious life and power. Anyone who touched it would be awed by a sensation of warmth, a strange buzzing vibration, and perhaps even a subliminal blue flash of light in a darkened chamber.21

  Between the third century BC and the first century AD, fluctuating notes that imitated birdson
g were made to issue from the beaks of realistically painted models of birds designed by Philo and Heron, famed inventors in Alexandria, Egypt, whose works are further described below. But even earlier, people were excited by an artificial bird capable of flight. This automaton was attributed to a philosopher-scientist-ruler named Archytas (ca. 420–350 BC), an associate of Plato. Archytas lived in Tarentum, a colony founded by Greeks in the heel of southern Italy.22 Admired for his intelligence and virtue, Archytas was elected to the office of strategos, general, and he is thought to have influenced the idea of philosopher kings in Plato’s Republic. Aristotle refers to Archytas’s theories in several treatises, but Archytas’s own writings no longer survive except in scraps.23

  Horace addresses a poem to Archytas (Ode 1.28, “the Archytas ode”), and many ancient sources discuss Archytas, but a work by Aulus Gellius (writing in the second century AD) is the only extant text to describe the first self-propelled flying machine in the shape of a dove. What Archytas “devised and accomplished is marvelous” but not impossible, comments Aulus Gellius (Attic Nights 10.12.9–10). Aulus Gellius quotes “the philosopher Favorinus, a studious researcher of ancient records,” who stated that Archytas “made a flying wooden model of a dove in accordance with mechanical principles.” The Dove was “balanced with counterweights and moved by a current of air enclosed within it.” The bird flew some distance, but “when alighted it could not take off again.” Here, I’m sorry to report, the passage breaks off, and the rest of the text is lost.