Gods and Robots

by Adrienne Mayor

  Some writers, such as Diodorus Siculus (4.76), maintained that Daedalus must have “towered above all others in building arts, metal and stone work,” and crafted “statues so like their living models that people felt that they were somehow endowed with life.” Others proposed that Daedalus was the first sculptor to depict the walking pose in art. “This is the workshop of Daedalus,” wrote Philostratus (Imagines 1.16); “all around are statues, some with forms blocked out, others in a quite complete state in that they are already stepping forward and give promise of walking about. Before the time of Daedalus, the art of making statues had not yet conceived such a thing.”20 On the other hand, writing in the same era (third century AD), Callistratus (Ekphrasis 8) described fourteen well-known bronze and marble sculptures, and he attributed the motion of Daedalus’s statues to some sort of “mechanical” workings (mechanai).

  Whether or not statues made by the mythic inventor Daedalus could actually move is moot. What matters is how they were described and envisioned in antiquity. Some historians and philosophers of science argue that myths about Talos and other literary accounts of “living statues” cannot be taken as evidence that people “imagined the building of mechanical automata” in antiquity—because mechanical conceptions cannot be envisioned before the technology actually exists. Berryman’s study of mechanics in ancient Greek thought takes a literalist view of imagination and innovation: “We should not expect people to be able to imagine what devices can actually achieve without practical experience.” In this admittedly “tautological” view, no one in antiquity could have “imagined” such inventions “unless they were informed by experience with technology” to compare them to. In other words, there must have already been some “technology available” before anyone could have conceived of the techniques or tools that might achieve the results described in the myths.21

  There are of course tensions and gaps between imagination and actuality, representation and reality. Yet it seems obvious that the long history of human innovation relies on the ability to imagine or contemplate unheard-of technologies beyond what already exists or is possible. Indeed, the ancient Greeks are generally acknowledged as innovators in culture, literature, politics, philosophy, the arts, warfare, and science; they embraced creativity, novelty, and imagination. Instead of assuming that changes, improved techniques, and new technologies somehow simply happen, ex nihilo, the Greeks saw dreams, ambition, inspiration, resourcefulness, skill, effort, competition, and ingenuity as the essential drivers of change and invention in all fields of endeavor. They could, in literature and art, imagine all manner of things that “could happen.” Not all creativity is based on technological precedent or material resources. It is because of surprising ideas and “novelty in the ancient Greek imagination and experience” that “saliently different” concepts and innovations “emerge into being,” remarks Armand D’Angour in The Greeks and the New. Moreover, imagining technologies that do not yet exist has always been the wellspring of the genre of speculative fiction that we call “science fiction” today, which modern Greek and Latin scholars have traced back to classical antiquity. “Where science fiction leads, philosophers and inventors soon follow.”22

  The animated figures and artificial human enhancements made with prodigious creativity and expertise using familiar materials, tools, and technology to achieve amazing results, as described in classical traditions, are not literal prototypes of modern, full-fledged robots and other forms of man-made life. As noted earlier, their internal workings are inscrutable, expressed in mythic language, rendering them “black boxes.” But they are significant to us because the accounts show that people in antiquity could imagine artificial life and speculate on its possible realization through some ingenious, sublime biotechne not yet known or understood. The myths express the idea that there might be discoverable practical ways to achieve synthetic nature in the forms of humans or animals; that perhaps there were ways to create artificial life outside or beyond mere magic or fiat.23

  A striking aspect of the stories of “living statues” is that ancient philosophers, poets, and playwrights tell us that contemporary images and sculptures of startling realism called up conflicting strong emotions in the viewers.24 By the fifth century BC, Greek sculptors were achieving extraordinary levels of anatomical verisimilitude, with exceedingly minute details of veins and musculature and a variety of facial expressions. Sculptors began to depict naturalistic, fluid poses that had been impossible before innovations in artistic technology. And keep in mind that both marble and bronze statues were realistically painted. A host of eminent artists’ works were described by Pliny.25 Among his examples of sculptures of “miraculous excellence and absolute truth to life” was a bronze dog licking its wound—a statue so valuable that it could not be insured for loss but had bodyguards charged to defend it with their lives. Pliny also singled out Pythagoras of Rhegium (fifth century BC), who was renowned for his muscle-bound marble athletes with visible tendons and veins. The festering ulcer on the leg of his Lame Man caused viewers to wince with sympathetic pain. The paunchy and balding portrait statues made by the Athenian sculptor Demetrius of Alopece (ca. 400–360 BC) were so “lifelike that they were unflattering.”26 People even developed the desire to have sex with erotically compelling statues (see chapter 6).

  FIG. 5.4. Athena visiting the workshop of a sculptor (Epeius?) making a realistic horse statue (Trojan Horse?). Attic red-figure kylix, by the Foundry Painter, about 480 BC, Staatliche Antikensammlungen and Glyptothek Munich, photographer Renate Kühling.

  Meanwhile, painting masterpieces began to feature astonishing depth and perspective. Compelling three-dimensional effects made hands and objects appear to project from the surface. Examples from the fourth century BC, described by Pliny in his Natural History, include Aristides of Thebes who painted emotions so skillfully, and Apelles, whose life-size pictures of energetic horses elicited neighs from live horses. Several ancient writers praised the works of Theon of Samos, who specialized in “imaginary visions that they call phantasias,” vivid paintings accompanied by 3-D and theatrical effects of sounds, music, and lights to give realistic “sense-surround” impressions. Another great Greek artist was Parrhasius, whose incredibly lifelike portraits of athletes appeared to pant and sweat. For his vivid painting of Prometheus ravaged by the Eagle of Zeus, it was whispered that Parrhasius must have tortured a slave to death as his model. The paintings of Zeuxis, Parrhasius’s rival, were examples of unprecedented illusionism. These and other artists competed with each other to produce astounding trompe l’oeil paintings and objects, such as luscious-looking bunches of grapes that deceived birds into trying to peck them.27

  As we will see in chapter 9, by the Hellenistic era a number of artisans were designing and making real mechanical models of humans and animals, such as serving maids, whistling birds, moving serpents, drinking horses, and so on. Marvels of artificial life only imagined in the ancient myths were being realized in engineering plans and inventors’ workshops.

  As artist Michael Ayrton noted, modern historians tend to undervalue the role of technical ingenuity in ancient artworks. In his survey of realistic artworks, Pliny explained how bronze sculptors made lifelike plaster (and wax) casts of living people, a technique that enhanced the realism of portraits. Physical evidence for the use of plaster and wax casts of real people’s bodies to make phenomenal, true-to-life bronze sculptures has come to light in some magnificent statues of the fifth century BC. These unexpected discoveries of artistic technology shocked the modern art world; we had been accustomed to assuming that classical sculptors possessed inimitable, awesome virtuosity in achieving such realism in their bronze figures. The technique, detected and explained by Nigel Konstam in 2004, helps explain the stunning mimetic qualities of many bronze statues.28

  FIG. 5.5 (PLATE 7). Realistic bronze and marble statues. Upper left, face of the Hellenistic bronze Boxer of Quirinal (Terme Boxer). Album / Art Resource, NY. Upper right, beard and mouth with si
lver teeth, Riace bronze statue A, found in bay of Riace, Calabria, Italy, in 1972, thought to be the work of Myron of Athens, 460–450 BC. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Reggio Calabria, Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. Lower left, marble arm of the Discus Thrower, Roman copy of the classical Greek bronze original by Myron of Athens, 460–450 BC. Museo Nationale Romano, Rome, © Vanni Archive / Art Resource, NY. Lower right, athlete, fourth to second century BC, recovered off the coast of Croatia in 1996, Museum of Apoxyomenos, Mali Losinj, Croatia. Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen, 2013.

  Mercury, quicksilver, was a substance of mystery in antiquity, as we have seen. Curiosity about mysterious lodestones—magnetite, a naturally occurring magnet that attracts iron—led some ancients to suggest that magnets also possessed a kind of life, a soul or breath or daimon within. The strange, rare mineral—popularly called ferrum vivum, “live iron”—had bewitching powers to move and enliven objects made of iron. This led creative thinkers to imagine how the stone’s inexplicable ability to draw or repel iron might be exploited to mystify viewers. What if “living iron” could allow a human replica made of iron to float in midair, to actually levitate and hover effortlessly like the gods, or soaring birds?29

  Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the Macedonian Greek king of Egypt (283–246 BC) oversaw many unprecedented engineering feats in Alexandria, including an impressive female automaton (chapter 9). He married his own sister, Queen Arsinoe II, and honored her as a goddess after her death. In 270 BC he decreed that her likeness should grace every temple in Egypt. Pliny reports that the king commissioned a renowned architect to create an especially sublime statue of Arsinoe for a temple in Alexandria. Pliny gives his name as “Timochares,” but he may have meant Dinocrates of Rhodes, the brilliant engineer for Alexander the Great, who designed the city of Alexandria and other wonders. The plans called for constructing a vaulted roof of magnete lapide, magnetic stone, over a lifelike statue of Arsinoe, either made of iron or with an iron core. The idea was that the queen would miraculously hover unsupported in midair, symbolizing her ascent to the heavens (Pliny 34.42.147–48). Surviving sculptures of Arsinoe are realistic, sensuous portraits, nude or transparently draped, so one can guess a similarly erotic statue was planned for this temple. But the grand project was never completed, owing to the deaths of the architect and Ptolemy II Philadelphus in 246 BC.

  In fact, the design for the perpetually or even momentarily hovering Arsinoe was an impossible dream. In his study of the long history of “magnetism fantasies” from antiquity to the Middle Ages, Dunstan Lowe shows how the pervasive lore about “floating statues” arose from misunderstandings of the physics of magnets. “In reality,” Lowe points out, Earnshaw’s theorem of 1839 remains uncontested to this day: it states that “stable levitation” of a fixed magnetic object “against gravity using only ferromagnetic materials cannot work on any scale.” The ancient fascination with magnetic power in third-century BC Ptolemaic Egypt is an example of an attempt to imagine and realize an advanced technology millennia before electromagnetic levitation was perfected .30

  Yet the vision—the science fiction—of animated statues activated by “live iron” was perpetuated as a kind of “sacred physics” in the ancient world. Over the centuries, numerous reports accumulated, alleging that scores of statues, including likenesses of the Greek-Egyptian god Serapis, the Greek sun god Helios, the mythic Athenian king Cecrops, even a winged Eros/Cupid, really floated in midair, magically suspended or balanced by lodestones. Notably, in the twelfth century AD, a twirling statue of Muhammad, made of gold and silver and presumably iron, was said to have been balanced above a tent by means of four magnets and caused to rotate by fans—an idea that included the concept of rotation, but also impossible. All of these “floating” idols, if they really existed, were supported by other, cleverly hidden means, but they were taken as techno-miracles by viewers and ascribed to ingenious harnessing of magnetism by the learned.31

  Magnetism as a metaphor for sexual attraction turns out to be an ancient concept. The irresistible, mystical coupling of otherwise lifeless stones, magnetite and iron, was observed in antiquity. The phenomenon was “brought to life” in a pair of erotic statues in a racy Latin poem by Claudian (b. ca. AD 370). The mineral magnete, magnetite, writes Claudian, is “animated and invigorated by the hardness of iron” and it “languishes without it.” Iron, for its part, is charmed by lodestone’s “warm embrace.” The poem describes two statues in a temple, a Venus carved of magnetite and an iron Mars, standing some distance apart. The goddess of love and the god of war were lustful lovers in Greek myth: Claudian tells how the priests celebrate their divine love with bouquets and songs. As the figures are slowly moved closer together—suddenly Venus and Mars fly into each other’s arms, and it takes effort to pull them apart.32

  Did these magnetically animated statues really exist in Alexandria, or were they figments of the poet’s imagination? Claudian was a native of Alexandria, the home of many magnetic fantasies. The action described in the poem is not impossible levitation but realistic magnetic attraction. One can easily imagine that a pair of small figurines, along the lines of modern magnetic toys, could have been created for entertainment in that sophisticated city of technology.

  Unprecedented innovations and brilliant techniques in Greek art and in mechanical technology, evoked sebas, thauma, and thambos—awe, wonder, and astonishment—in antiquity. Many writers described how people confronted with true-to-life artificial animals and especially facsimile human beings experienced the “shock of the new,” a sense of surprise and pleasure—but mixed with acute feelings of disorientation, alarm, and terror. These unnerving effects of artistic illusions, vivid imitations of life, animated sculptures of humans and animals, and statues that seem to actually be what they portray can be seen as ancient parallels of the Uncanny Valley phenomenon. The Uncanny Valley, a psychological reaction first identified in robotics in 1970, refers to the unease and apprehension that people experience when they encounter eerie, “not quite but very nearly human” replicas or automata. Anxiety rises steeply when the line dividing the inanimate from the animate collapses, especially with anthropomorphic entities, and actual movement or the illusion of movement intensifies negative emotions.33

  A genre of ancient and early medieval oral traditions preserved in Hindu and Buddhist literature describes the wonder mixed with fear evoked by superrealistic android robots (yantra/yanta “machine, mechanical device” in Sanskrit and Pali, respectively) made by clever machine-makers (yantrakaras/yantakaras). The original dates of the oral tales (versions exist in Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, Tocharian, Mongolian, and Chinese) are unknown, but the stories began to be committed to writing in the third to first century BC. One tale tells of a brilliant inventor who visits a foreign king accompanied by a lifelike robot that he introduces to the court as his son. The robot, dressed in elegant robes, has “charming manners and dances most beautifully.” One day, however, the robot casts flirtatious glances at the queen. The outraged king orders his men to behead the “lascivious young man.” The inventor quickly offers to discipline his “son” himself and removes part of the robot’s shell to reveal the mechanism inside. Astonished and delighted, the king richly rewards the inventor (see chapter 6 for an ancient Chinese version of this tradition).34

  The earliest Greek examples of an Uncanny Valley–type response to artificial life occur in Homer’s Odyssey (11.609–14). In the Underworld, Odysseus reacts with fear when he encounters hyperrealistic images of wild animal predators and murderers with glaring eyes. Odysseus prays that this fiendish artist will not create any more of these terrifying pictures. Later (19.226–30), Odysseus describes an intricately wrought golden brooch depicting a hunting hound mauling a fawn. Everyone marvels at the “living” vignette of the dog seemingly captured in the very act of seizing and killing the fawn as it gasps out its last breath.35

  In two dramatic instances in lost plays of the fifth century BC by Euripides and Aeschylus, old men are frighten
ed out of their wits by Daedalus’s animated statues. In Aeschylus’s Theoroi, some satyrs are alarmed by effigies of their own heads nailed to a temple. One satyr cries out that they are so real they lack only voices to come alive. Another satyr exclaims that the replica of her son’s head would send his mother running and shrieking in horror. Such theatrical anecdotes suggest that classical audiences were familiar with artworks of disquieting realism, and, furthermore, they could imagine an extraordinary artisan who might be capable of even more preternatural mimesis than they had personally experienced.36

  Daedalus was imagined in antiquity as a brilliant craftsman, a sculptor of artificial life, and innovator of countless clever tools and designs to augment human abilities. In myth, the inventor not only borrowed the pinions of birds in order to fly to freedom; he was believed to have created such lifelike statues that they moved on their own or at least gave the startling appearance of motion. As mentioned earlier, Daedalus and his works sometimes overlap with those of his divine counterparts, Prometheus and Hephaestus. As we’ll see in the next two chapters, many of the marvels wrought by these two divinities eclipse those of Daedalus. Their artifices are still more splendidly “alive” and some even possess “intelligence.” Yet both Prometheus and Hephaestus were envisioned using the very same tools, methods, and technologies that the mortal Daedalus wielded in his earthly workshop.

  CHAPTER 6

  PYGMALION’S LIVING DOLL AND PROMETHEUS’S FIRST HUMANS

  THE LIFE AND times of Prometheus, the maverick Titan who deceived Zeus and championed early humans, trace a meandering path in ancient Greek mythology. He is first introduced in Hesiod’s poems written in 750–650 BC. Prometheus, enduring his shifting relationship with Zeus, also stars in the fifth-century BC dramatic trilogy Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and Prometheus the Fire-Bringer, often attributed to Aeschylus.1