In the ongoing escapades of the Argonauts, Medea mixes a potion and devises a clever tactic to protect Jason from her father’s fire-breathing brazen bulls and an army of unnatural soldiers that arise from dragon’s teeth. In search of ultrapowerful pharmaka for her lover, Medea treks to the high Caucasus Mountains, to the rocky crag where Zeus had chained Prometheus. Medea knows that a rare flowering plant grows in the soil wherever precious ichor drips from Prometheus’s side as the Eagle ravages him. When they are cut, the strange plant’s flesh-like roots ooze a black sap containing the essence of the immortal Titan’s ichor. Medea collects the sap in a pure white shell from the Caspian Sea and compounds a potent drug. Known as “Promethean,” the ointment imparts superhuman powers, deflects fire, and resists enemy spears. The effects of the ichor-drug are spectacular, but temporary, lasting only one day.6
In the Argonautica, the Promethean ichor preparation gives the normally passive Jason incredible Herculean strength and courage. As Medea promised, Jason suddenly feels “unbounded valor and great might like that of the immortal gods.” As the drug begins to circulate, he senses “terrifying powers entering his body.” His arms begin to twitch and flex, his hands clenching at his sides. Like a warhorse eager for battle, Jason “exults in the superhuman strength of his limbs.” Under the influence of the ichor coursing through his body, Jason “strides and leaps about, brandishing his spear and roaring like a wild beast.”7
FIG. 4.1. Prometheus bleeding ichor on the ground, as Zeus’s Eagle pecks his liver. Laconian cup, sixth century BC. Vatican Museum. Album / Art Resource, NY.
The effects of the drug as described in the Argonautica put one in mind of synthetic psychoactive stimulants: for example, modern street drugs chemically related to but much stronger than cathinone from qat plants which can cause users to feel that they have superhuman strength and goad them into ferocious acts. Today’s military pharmacologists are creating “human enhancement” concoctions that could supercharge soldiers mentally and physically, making them behave much like Jason under the influence of the Promethean ichor. Millennia ago in Homer’s Odyssey (4.219–21), Helen of Troy mixed an elixir called nepenthe, imagined as opium and wine, to dispel the traumatic memories, “anger, and grief” of the shell-shocked veterans of the Trojan War. Now military scientists seek drugs and other neurotechnological brain interventions that would allow troops to go without sleep, sense no physical pain, exceed normal aggression, override moral qualms about killing or torture, erase negative thoughts, and obliterate memories of wartime violence or atrocities.8
Returning to the myth of the Golden Fleece, we witness how Medea’s Promethean drug lends Jason the physical and mental power to wrangle the pair of bronze robo-bulls that were forged for King Aeetes by the smith god Hephaestus. Aeetes commanded Jason to plow a field with these fire-breathing bulls, plant a helmet-full of dragon’s teeth, and then defeat the invincible army that would arise from these sown dragon “seeds,” all before sunset. The king is confident that even if Jason somehow manages to avoid being burned to death and plants the teeth, he and his men will be destroyed by the unstoppable automaton warriors that will spring up from the field.
At dawn, the fearsome bulls emerge from their sooty underground stalls, pawing the ground with their brazen hooves. They charge at Jason, flames shooting from their nostrils “as though blasted by bellows from a bronze-smith’s furnace.” Jason braves the searing breath of the oxen and yokes them to the bronze plow. All day he plows the large field and sows the dragon’s teeth.9
It is nearly dusk when the plowed furrows begin to seethe and gleam as the “earthborn” warriors in armor sprout from the field. This is the horrid crop of robot-like soldiers that must be “harvested,” cut down, before nightfall. The scene of skeleton soldiers popping out of the ground is beloved by aficionados of science fiction and classical mythology film, as it was realized in the spectacular Harryhausen sequence in Jason and the Argonauts (1963).
In the Argonautica, the “earthborn” warriors are ghostly giants clad in bronze armor, springing up fully armed, ready to attack. Luckily, Medea has instructed Jason how to deal with the multiplying, uncontrollable mob. The earthborn soldiers lack one crucial attribute: they cannot be ordered or led, nor can they retreat. They are hardwired to advance and attack. With continuous reinforcements swelling their ranks, the armed androids march on the nearest “enemy”—Jason’s men.
Just as Medea figured out how to incapacitate the bronze robot Talos of Crete by exploiting his internal mechanical weakness and “almost human” artificial intelligence, she now takes advantage of the coding imprinted in the sown army. Medea advises Jason to toss a stone to trigger the soldiers’ programming. She realizes that a random impact will initiate a domino effect, a cascade of blows, causing each android to fight the nearest soldier and thereby destroy each other.
As the first ranks of the dreadful army begin to advance toward the Argonauts, Jason throws a boulder into their midst. Sensing the blows striking their bronze armor, the androids react as though attacked. They turn on each other in confused frenzy, hacking at each other with their swords. Then Jason and his companions rush into the fray and finish them off, including some emerging warriors still half-rooted in the plowed furrows.10
Recounting this myth more than two thousand years ago, the skeptic Palaephatus (3 Spartoi) remarked, “If this story were true, every general would cultivate a field like Jason’s!” But the story’s dilemma maintains its edge today. How can automaton soldiers distinguish friend from enemy? They could easily turn on each other or on one’s allies. How can their orders be recalled or revised? The archaic tale, which some scholars believe predates Homer, is one of the earliest observations that cyborg or robot soldiers will bring problems of command and control.11
The fire-breathing bronze bulls recall the abilities of Talos of Crete, who could heat his brazen body red-hot to roast adversaries (chapter 1). Heated bronze animated statues also bear similarities to some later lore about Alexander the Great. Among the many legends about his military inventions in the Alexander Romance traditions, two stand out for deploying fiery bronze statues against enemies. In the first, from the Byzantine-era Greek Romance, Alexander devises a strategy to counter the great war elephants of King Porus of India. He heaps onto a large fire all the lifelike bronze statues taken as booty in his conquests. Then his men carefully set out the red-hot statues as their front line on the battlefield. When Porus sends forth his war elephants to attack, the beasts take the bronze men for live soldiers. They crash into the heated metal statues and are badly burned.12
The second example presents a more technologically sophisticated version of fire-breathing bulls. In Persian legends that arose about Alexander, the young warlord Sikandar (Iskandar, Alexander) devises an iron cavalry to defeat the army of King Fur of Hind (Porus of India). In some Persian traditions, Alexander is advised by his grand vizier, the sage Arastu (Aristotle, Alexander’s tutor). In Firdowsi’s epic Shahnama (14–15; written in about AD 977, based on earlier oral stories), Alexander’s spies make wax scale models of Porus’s war elephants to convey how huge and terrifying these unfamiliar beasts are. Alexander then comes up with a battle plan. He commands twelve hundred Greek, Persian, and Egyptian master ironsmiths to forge a thousand life-size hollow iron statues of riders and horses. It takes them a month of painstaking work. The replica horsemen are painted realistically, attached with rivets to saddles, and fitted with armor, shields, and hollow spears. The horsemen’s faces would resemble the uncanny, lifelike iron and bronze masks typically worn by Kipchak and other central Asian mounted warriors of the era, which frightened enemies with the impression of an army of metal soldiers. Alexander’s craftsmen paint the iron steeds to look like real “dappled, chestnut, black, and gray” horses. The smiths fit the horses with wheels, and then, in the diabolical last touch, they fill the hollow iron figures with volatile naphtha collected from crude petroleum wells.
On the battlefield, Ale
xander’s men ignite the naphtha and set the iron cavalry rolling toward the enemy. The eerie host of metal horses and metal riders, painted to generate the illusion of life, with orange flames shooting from the horses’ nostrils and the ends of the riders’ spears, create an intimidating juggernaut. Porus’s burned elephants run amok; his army is routed. A dramatic color illustration of the spectacle appears in a medieval Mongol version of the Shahnama.13 The statues did not have moving parts but were wheeled like Pasiphae’s notorious artificial cow (made by Daedalus, described below).
The iron cavalry evoked a convincing sense of reality mixed with unnatural firepower. The legend reflects practices used by historical Mongol and other nomad armies, who deployed naphtha-wielding cavalry and used the trick of setting dummy soldiers on live horses to make their armies appear larger.14
Since antiquity, human augmentations and enhancements in the form of modern prosthetics have advanced to high levels, from implants, organ transplants, and replacement limbs to neurologically controlled artificial legs and arms. Replacement limbs and bionic body parts—the melding of human and machine—have deep roots in mythology and in actual history. In mythology, for example, the Celtic King Nuada (or Nudd) of the Silver Hand had an arm fashioned by the inventor god Dian Cecht. The Norse goddess Freyja was a kind of “organic cyborg” who combined both flesh and metal. In ancient Hindu epic traditions, the heroine Vishpala lost a leg in battle and Vadhrimati lost a hand—the gods replaced the body parts with, respectively, an iron and a gold replica. In ancient Greek myth, the god Hephaestus made an ivory scapula to replace the hero Pelops’s missing shoulder blade.15
The earliest historical record of a prosthetic body part was reported by Herodotus (9.37.1–4) in the fifth century BC. Hegesistratus, a Greek from Elis (southern Greece), lost part of his foot under torture by the Spartans. He managed to escape and had a wooden replacement made. He went on to fight in the Battle of Plataea (479 BC) on the Persian side, because of his hatred for the Spartans.16 Pliny (7.28.104–5) tells how M. Sergius Silus, a Roman veteran of the Second Punic War against Carthage (218–201 BC), recovered from twenty-three wounds and wore an iron hand to replace the one he had lost in battle. The Alexandrian author known as Dionysius Skytobrachion (“Leather-Arm,” fl. 150 BC) may have been so named because of a prosthetic arm.
Archaeological discoveries have unearthed surprisingly early evidence of artificial limbs and other body parts, some aesthetic and others functional. A skull from a site in France dated to 3000 BC, for example, sported a prosthetic ear carved from a shell. In Capua, Italy, a skeleton in a tomb of about 300 BC was fitted with a remarkably well-preserved wooden leg covered with thin sheets of bronze. Another skeleton from a grave of the same era, but in Kazakhstan, revealed that a young woman lived several years with a missing foot that had been replaced with the bones and hoof of a ram.17
Some of the most sophisticated prosthetic devices are the most ancient. In about 700 BC, a highly skilled artisan who understood human biomechanics made a finely carved artificial toe for a woman whose mummy was discovered in 1997 near Luxor, Egypt. Her replacement toe was not only realistic in appearance; it was tailor-made for her foot and shows evidence of refittings. Worn barefoot or with sandals, her prosthetic toe allowed relatively comfortable mobility: it was constructed in three sections of wood and leather, with a hinge for flexibility.
An ocular prosthesis was discovered by archaeologists in the Burnt City site in Iran. The meticulously realistic artificial eyeball was embedded in the left eye socket of a woman who lived about forty-eight hundred years ago. The anatomical details are amazingly true to nature, with convex surface, cornea, and pupil, and the interior even contained extremely fine golden wires to mimic the capillary network of the eye. The eye was engraved with rays and covered in gold leaf, which would have given the woman an “incredibly striking visage” in life. It is noteworthy that modern attempts to create lifelike prosthetics inspired the robotics engineer Masahiro Mori to suggest the concept of the “Uncanny Valley” in 1970 (for definition and further discussion, see chapter 5 and glossary).18
Some ancient Greek myths tell of those who, like modern military scientists, dreamed of replicating the special powers of animals and birds to amplify human abilities. The artisan par excellence in ancient Greek traditions was Daedalus, the mastermind of facsimiles of life and biotechnological inventions. Since Homer, the word daedala denoted any work of marvelous art and workmanship, including those attributed to Daedalus. The chronology and geography of his vast résumé are inconsistent. For example, Pausanias (10.17.4) reported the belief that Daedalus had lived in the mythic “epoch when Oedipus was king of Thebes,” while others placed him in King Minos’s court about a century before the legendary Trojan War. Various tales locate workshops of Daedalus in Crete, Sicily, and Athens. The activities of the enigmatic, prolific, itinerant “first inventor” called Daedalus can be pieced together from an extensive body of literature and art. The figure of Daedalus takes on a collective persona as a mythic “hero” of invention, the “archetypal craftsman.” Was “Daedalus” based on a real person? Modern scholars consider the evolving traditions about Daedalus as attempts to reconcile the many conflicting accounts—and as a reflection of the dual status of Daedalus as both a mythical character and a real historical innovator (or group of inventors) of the remote past.19
Unlike Medea’s witchcraft that melded biotechne with sorcery, Daedalus’s cunning devices and human enhancement schemes were achieved with no whiff of magic. Daedalus was a craftsman and inventor, not a magician. Using familiar tools, methods, techniques, and materials, Daedalus deployed creative expertise and technology to achieve wonderful results. Hyperrealistic sculptures, “living statues,” were his specialty (chapter 5). But Daedalus is probably most famous for his human-powered flight with wings. And that endeavor started with a witch named Pasiphae. She was Medea’s aunt and the wife of King Minos of Crete.
Queen Pasiphae cast a spell on her husband of a particularly foul nature: any time Minos attempted sex with another woman, he ejaculated scorpions, millipedes, and snakes.20 In turn, Pasiphae was cursed by Zeus with an unnatural desire to have sex with a handsome bull in Minos’s herds. She confessed her wish to Daedalus, the brilliant sculptor-craftsman in her husband’s court. To fulfill Pasiphae’s request, Daedalus constructed a wooden replica of a cow, hollow so that Pasiphae could crawl inside and present herself on all fours for the bull to mount.
This myth was first recounted in writing by the skeptic Palaephatus (fourth century BC) who raised several objections (2 Pasiphae). His primary doubt was that a bull would be fooled by an artificial cow decoy, because bulls “smell the genitals of their mates before copulating.” But other writers—Apollodorus (Library 3.1.4), Hyginus (Fabulae 40), and Philostratus (Imagines 1.16)—answered that objection, noting that Daedalus covered the wooden facsimile with the hide of a real cow from the herd in the pasture where the bull grazed, so that it appeared and smelled familiar. Modern animatronics experiments have demonstrated that a wide variety of mammals, from meerkats and monkeys to hippos, will interact socially with realistic robotic animals made with actual hides and anointed with species-specific scents. In classical antiquity, there were many anecdotes about paintings and replicas of fauna and flora so accurately rendered that they tricked animals into reacting as though they were alive.21
Ancient Greek sources tell of an interesting deception involving a troop of fake “war elephants” that looked and moved persuasively from afar, but failed to convince seasoned warhorses up close. The mastermind was the legendary Assyrian warrior queen Semiramis (probably based on the historical queen Shammuramat, ninth century BC); the story was first recounted by Ctesias (fifth century BC) and then by Diodorus Siculus (2.16–19; first century BC). The numbers are exaggerated but the ruse is plausible. Semiramis, facing a war against a superior Indian army equipped with thousands of war elephants and a strong horse cavalry, ordered her artisans and engineers to s
laughter 300,000 black oxen and sew the hides into realistic elephant shapes stuffed with straw. It took two years for the craftsmen, working in a secret place, to manufacture the dummy elephant forms. The ox-hide elephant shapes were then placed over remarkably cooperative camels, and men sat inside to flap the ears and swing the trunks in naturalistic fashion. Semiramis expected to gain the advantage because the Indians believed that only their armies deployed elephants. Indeed, the Indian commander was taken aback to see the “multitude of war elephants” approaching the battlefield. His cavalry, being quite used to elephants, attacked boldly. But upon reaching the fake elephants, the horses shied and ran amok when they detected the unfamiliar odor of the hidden camels.
Several instances of realistic fake animals were reported by Athenaeus. He told of male dogs, pigeons, and geese that attempted to copulate with female replicas of their species. One example was a bronze cow so seductive that it was mounted by a real bull at Priene, a town on the coast of Asia Minor (Athenaeus Learned Banqueters 13.605–6).
The sensational myth of Pasiphae mating with a bull is one of several myths about biotechnology allowing humans do things beyond what ordinary humans can (or should) do. Although the replica cow did not have moving parts, it was an imitation of life convincing enough to attract a real bull to mount it when it was wheeled out to the pasture. Daedalus’s realistic, life-size sex toy presents a remarkable form of ancient techne-pornography. The witch-queen Pasiphae’s lust for a bull is nothing like the fanciful liaisons, never explicitly detailed, between a mortal woman and a god in animal disguise, such as Zeus in the form of a swan impregnating Leda. The cow made by Daedalus was not an automaton or machine; rather, in effect, Pasiphae became the internal “living” component of a “sexbot” heifer fabricated with the intention of enabling her to copulate with a live bull. The details in the myth of Pasiphae’s zoophilia compel one to visualize the grotesque sex act made possible by Daedalus’s cunning biomimetic design.22
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