Yet another group of automata wrought by Hephaestus represents a stunning “evolutionary leap forward” in replicating lifelike humanoids.29 In the Iliad scene of the visit of Thetis to Hephaestus’s forge, Thetis observes something astonishing: a staff of self-moving, thinking female automata who assist Hephaestus. These female assistants surpass the functionalities of the automatic gates, the traveling tripods, the singing statues on the roof at Delphi, and even Talos, the bronze guard who seemed to possess a kind of agency and consciousness. “Fashioned of gold in the image of maidens, the servants moved quickly, bustling around their master like living women” (Iliad 18.410–25). As the writer Philostratus remarked several centuries later (Life of Apollonius 6.11), “Hephaestus constructed handmaids of gold [and] made the gold breathe.”
These humanoid helpers are not merely ultrarealistic “living statues” of gold with the ability to move, however. Hephaestus “built the mechanical serving girls” and then placed “within them mind, wits, voice, and vigor” (noos, phrenes, aude, sthenos) as well as the skills and knowledge of all the immortal gods.30 So these golden assistants of Hephaestus are not only spontaneously mobile, but they anticipate and respond to his needs. And they are endowed with the hallmarks of human beings: consciousness, intelligence, learning, reason, and speech. (The people on Achilles’s fabulous shield were endowed with the same capabilities, above.) “Hephaestus’s Golden Maidens set the standard for artificial life,” remarks a scholar of classical and modern science fiction. With “human intelligence and bodies indistinguishable from the real thing,” the Golden Maidens are exceptional “divine artifacts in that they are composed of metal but have human-like abilities.” The mythic gold helpers seem to presage modern notions of thought-controlled machines and AI. Like other automata made by Hephaestus, however, their inner workings are cryptic “black boxes.”31
Yet the human-like qualities of the Golden Maidens could be seen as an ancient version of “Artificial Intelligence.”32 In effect, they are endowed with what AI specialists term “augmented intelligence,” based on “big data” and “machine learning.” In what might appear to be a case of mythic overkill, the Iliad’s female androids are described as a kind of storehouse of all divine knowledge.33 In modern contexts, AI entities destined for specific tasks usually require no more information than would be needed for efficiency in problem solving. They need to be able to access useful knowledge but do not require a massive and indiscriminate “data dump.” But just as it is difficult for modern AI developers to anticipate exactly what knowledge could be relevant to complex tasks or might become necessary down the road, the Homeric myth imagines that the gods would naturally wish to imbue Hephaestus’s marvelous automata with a wealth of divine knowledge.34
The automata described in the Iliad are not the only self-moving entities in ancient literature imagined as possessing some form of intelligence and agency. In the Argonautica, for example, a supernatural oak beam in Jason’s ship, the Argo, can speak and prophesy. Even more compelling in terms of an ancient vision of “Artificial Intelligence,” however, are the remarkable ships of the Phaeacians, inhabitants of the technologically marvelous land encountered by Odysseus, in Homer’s Odyssey (7–8). Phaeacian ships require no rudders or oars, no human pilots, navigators, or rowers, but are steered by thought alone. The Homeric myth envisions the vessels as controlled by some sort of centralized system, with access to a vast data archive of “virtual” maps and navigation charts of the entire ancient world. King Alcinous boasts that his unsinkable ships can travel very long distances under any weather and sea conditions and return to his port on the same day. The ships themselves “understand what we are thinking about and want,” explains Alcinous, “They know all the cities and countries in the whole world and can traverse the sea even when it is clouded with mist, so there is no danger of being wrecked or coming to any harm.” To transport Odysseus back to Ithaca, the ships simply “need to be told his city and country and they will devise the route accordingly.” Odysseus marvels at the steady course of the pilotless Phaeacian ship, as swift as a falcon, as it carries him across the sea to his home island. The analogy to modern Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and automatic pilot and navigation systems is inescapable.35
Incidentally, a group of ancient Egyptian tales describe ships powered by artificially animated oarsmen. The texts are found in fragments of demotic papyrus pages dating to the Ptolemaic-Roman period (fourth century BC–fourth century AD). Set in the historical time of Ramses II, these stories tell how evil sorcerers make wax models of ships and rowers and command the figures to carry out tasks. It is interesting that the rowers are not only animated but apparently capable of independent thought and actions while completing their missions.36
Hephaestus’s self-moving tripods and automated female servants have piqued the interest of historians of robotics. Their glamor overshadows yet another set of automated objects that have received less attention, although they too perform specialized labor in Hephaestus’s forge.37 Invented in antiquity to deliver more air to increase combustion and heat, real bellows technology was crucial in the development of metallurgy, which requires extremely hot fires. Later in the Iliad scene (18.468–74), Hephaestus sets in motion twenty bellows that are self-operating and self-adjusting according to his needs. In the scene, Hephaestus “turns the bellows toward the fire and gives them their orders for working. The bellows begin to blow on the crucibles, blasting forced air from all directions wherever he required hotter or lower flames, following him as Hephaestus goes to and fro, working on his great anvil with his ponderous hammer and tongs.” Like the automated doors of Olympus that open and close on their own, the traveling tripods, and the Golden Maidens, the bank of automatic bellows to stoke the blacksmith’s fires were imaginary mechanical, laborsaving machines, doing work that would otherwise be done by living assistants or slaves.38
One of the essential motivations for the creation of machines and robots is economic. By performing mechanized labor, they relieve their masters of tedious toil. This line of thinking led Aristotle, in about 322 BC, to speculate about the socioeconomic implications of inventions like those described in Greek myths about automata (Politics 1.3–4). First, Aristotle compares human slaves to tools or automata that fulfill the wills of masters. To live well, he notes, one depends on “instruments, some of which are alive [and] others inanimate.” Thus, for “the pilot of a ship, his tiller is without life [and] his sailor is alive.” Aristotle continues, “A servant is like an instrument in many arts [and] a slave is an animated instrument—but a servant or a slave that can minister of himself is more valuable than any other instrument.”
Aristotle’s discussion is part of his defense of slavery. But then, in a remarkable passage, Aristotle engages in a thought experiment, suggesting a condition that might preclude slavery. If inanimate instruments could carry out their work themselves, he muses, then servitude might be abolished. “If every tool could perform its own work when ordered to do so or in anticipation of the need, like the statues of Daedalus or the tripods of Hephaestus, which the poet tells us could of their own accord move into the assembly of the gods,” and “if in the same manner, shuttles could weave and picks could play kitharas (stringed lyres) by themselves, then craftsmen would have no need of servants and masters would have no need of slaves.”39
Today, the ancient speculative fantasy that machines could free many workers from drudgery and replace slaves has become a commonplace reality in many parts of the world. Ironically, however, industrial robotics technologies now threaten to abolish human wage earners’ livelihoods, leaving masses of idle, unpaid workers.
Meanwhile, dystopian science fictions paint nightmarish scenarios of a new, rising “servile class” of automaton-slaves that ultimately will rebel. The idea that creations of superior masters might revolt against their makers is also quite ancient. More than two millennia before Karel Čapek coined the word robota (derived from “slave”), the link between sl
avery and robots was already evident in Aristotle’s passages, above, and in Socrates’s comments about tethering living statues lest they escape and become useless to their masters, like runaway slaves (chapter 5). The theme is taken up in Jo Walton’s percipient science-fiction trilogy set in classical antiquity, in which the goddess Athena establishes an experimental city based on Plato’s Republic. Athena imports robots from the future to be mindless worker-slaves, but Socrates discovers that the robots not only possess consciousness but yearn for liberty.40
Modern historians of robotics and artificial life have so far only superficially addressed the question of whether or not the mythic moving statues of humans and animals, the driverless tripod-carts, the singing statues and mobile servants made by Hephaestus and other bronze workers should be considered mechanical automata. For example, Berryman maintains that Hephaestus’s golden handmaids and the tripods could not have been imagined as products of “material technology” because “the technology of [Homer’s] day” was not advanced enough to contemplate the idea of self-moving automata. “It may be tempting to read accounts of [ancient] ‘statues that move’ as anticipating modern robots,” she remarks, but this is “not warranted, unless there is evidence of technology available” already that could make such things conceivable (Berryman’s argument omits the bronze automaton Talos).41 Truitt’s history of medieval robots briefly discusses Hephaestus’s tripods and golden assistants, but not Talos.42 In his discussion of the four categories of automata in Greek mythology, Kang mentions the self-moving tripods, but leaves out the more relevant example of Hephaestus’s female automata endowed with mind, strength, knowledge, and voice.43
The imaginary automata in question are, of course, located in mythical material, and their workings are not fully described in the extant ancient texts, but it is appropriate to consider how such entities were conceived of and visualized in ancient literature and art. Admittedly, the written material about mythic automata that survives from antiquity is incomplete and often contradictory. And the artistic evidence that exists today represents a minuscule portion of what existed in antiquity. Even so, it is worthwhile to glean as much information as one can about automata from Homeric times to the late Roman era, to try to understand all the ways that artificial life could be envisioned by ancient people. Any animal and human forms that were described as manufactured—that is, made, not born biologically—were products of what can be termed biotechne, life by craft, and therefore they deserve serious attention as the earliest imaginings of artificial life. Moreover, the many visualizations of artificial life in the mythic writings were put to good use in antiquity, as provocative ways to think about alternative worlds, which in turn raised ethical and philosophical questions about agency and slavery.
The surviving literary and artistic evidence, even though only a fraction of what once existed, shows that as early as the very first Greek writings in the time of Homer and Hesiod, people were already dreaming up notions of animated statues and self-moving contraptions. The myths demonstrate that automata were thinkable, long before technology made them feasible. Some, but not all, lifelike facsimiles were willed to come to life by mystical divine forces, like Pygmalion’s ivory maiden. But as we have seen, many other self-moving “machines” and artificial beings were produced by inventors of myth and legend who were renowned for their technological prowess and ingenuity with clay and metal. The evidence demonstrates that nearly three thousand years ago people could express in mythological terms the idea that some type of exceptional technology might be capable of manipulating familiar materials, tools, and processes to make animated objects that mimicked natural forms but with features and workings beyond anyone’s ken.
Around the time that Homer was describing Hephaestus’s intelligent Golden Maidens on Mount Olympus, the poet Hesiod was using similar language to describe their cousin, Pandora. She too was “made, not born.” But this female replica was sent down to earth, on a mission from a god.
CHAPTER 8
PANDORA
BEAUTIFUL, ARTIFICIAL, EVIL
TO PUNISH MORTALS for accepting fire stolen from the gods, Zeus commanded Hephaestus to make a “snare” (dolos) in the form of a desirable young woman called Pandora. This archaic myth was first written down in two separate poems penned in the eighth or seventh century BC, the Theogony and Works and Days attributed to Hesiod of Boeotia. It is no surprise to find that humanity’s defender Prometheus and his thoughtless brother are both involved in this myth of Zeus’s retribution via biotechne.
When we last encountered the two Titans, they were making the original humans and animals and doling out natural capabilities, as requested by Zeus (chapter 4). In this mythic cycle of Zeus’s revenge on humankind, Prometheus has been freed at last by the hero Heracles from the rock where he was chained. Prometheus and Epimetheus are now the allies and associates of earthlings. Armed with foresight (and rational paranoia), Prometheus tells his impulsive brother to reject any gifts from Zeus. True to his name, “Mr. Afterthought” forgets the warning.1
To recap the basic story: Zeus, fuming over the theft of fire, contrives a way to deliver an eternal curse disguised as a gift for humans—a kalon kakon, “beautiful evil”—with the help of the smith god Hephaestus. Hephaestus creates an artificial female, a simulacrum or effigy of a woman. Athena and the other gods contribute to her composition, hence her name Pandora, “All Gifts” (the name can mean either “giver” or “recipient”). Dispatched to earth with more nefarious “gifts,” a swarm of evil spirits sealed inside a jar, Pandora is the source of all the misfortunes and sorrows suffered by mortals.2
As in the Old Testament story of Eve and the serpent, the Pandora myth blames a woman as the agent of mankind’s woes. The similarity has elicited much religious and moral soul-searching about patriarchy and the relationship of the sexes in both ancient and modern cultures. Both stories pose profound philosophical questions about theodicy, the existence of evil, divine omniscience and entrapment and human autonomy, temptation, and free will.3 Yet there are significant differences in the traditions. In the Genesis tale, Eve was an afterthought, created to be a helpmeet for the lonely first man, Adam. The Creator willed Eve to life from Adam’s rib and forbade the couple to eat a certain fruit, thus setting in motion a chain of events leading to mortals’ original sin. In the Greek myth recounted by Hesiod and others, Pandora is a beguiling artifice deliberately designed by Zeus with gleeful malice toward the human race.
FIG. 8.1. Hephaestus creating Pandora, a modern neoclassical gem commissioned by Prince Stanislas Poniatowski (1754–1833) to interpret the Pandora myth as described by Hesiod. Beazley Collection, photo courtesy of Claudia Wagner.
A crucial difference between Eve and Pandora is that Pandora was not summoned into existence but constructed, by the god of craftsmanship—the same god, Hephaestus, who built other ingenious automata, such as the bronze robot Talos, the self-moving tripods, and a staff of female helpers made of gold (chapter 7). Indeed, Pandora’s “manufactured” nature is prominent in all versions of the Greek story, as many classical commentators have pointed out. Pandora’s fabrication and her artificiality are also the focus of ancient artistic representations.4
In the brief version in Hesiod’s Theogony (507–616), Hephaestus, following Zeus’s orders, molds the image of a nubile girl. He places on her head a splendiferous crown of gold decorated with daedala, intricately worked miniature sea and land monsters so lifelike they seem to writhe and roar. The special crown is reminiscent of the Daedalic sound and light display that Hephaestus crafted on Achilles’s marvelous shield, and the vivid artistic images that terrified Odysseus in the Underworld (chapters 7 and 5).5 Next, Athena dresses this unnamed maiden in a shimmering robe and veil and tucks spring flowers in her hair. Zeus’s plot depends on the artificial girl’s ethereal physical beauty and her luxurious adornments to “trick” mortals. When Zeus displays the completed Pandora to a gathering of gods and men, everyone is filled with awe (thau
ma). Their reaction—“seized with amazement”—parallels other ancient descriptions of the uncanny emotions evoked by encounters with miraculously realistic statues (chapter 5).6
The “manufactured maiden, gift of Zeus,” is accepted by “foolish” Epimetheus, who eagerly welcomes her to his home. There is no mention of the jar filled with disasters, and Pandora is not named or called the first woman in the Theogony. Hesiod piles on heavy-handed misogyny. Pandora is presented as the prototype of idle, greedy women parasitic on men’s labor and economic wealth, like queen bees sponging up nectar stored up by worker bees. Hesiod ends with a jeremiad on “the deadly race of females who live with mortal men” and bring them never-ending misery.
A different tone suffuses the longer, more dramatic episode in Hesiod’s Works and Days (53–105). Again, Zeus is portrayed as a vindictive tyrant taking malicious pleasure in his plot to make humankind pay forever for the secret of fire. He laughs out loud as he orders Hephaestus to create an android in the form of a seductive virgin that will bring ruin to men even as her charms arouse lust and love. Hephaestus molds clay into the shape of a young woman with the unearthly splendor of an immortal goddess. Like Pygmalion’s ivory virgin, “the manufactured Pandora” surpasses the beauty of any mortal woman ever born. Hesiod’s descriptions make it clear that Pandora is not a real woman but a “constructed thing.”7
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