![]() That mind, we are told, is “shameless,” and the character is “wily.” In the Greek creation myth, as in the biblical, the woes of humankind are attributed to the untrustworthy female. In that text, Pandora begins as inert matter-in this case not gold but clay (Hephaestus creates her golem-like body by mixing earth and water together)-that is subsequently endowed by him with “speech and strength,” taught “crafts” by Athena, and given both “mind” and “character” by Hermes. As such, they are essentially indistinguishable from the first human female, Pandora, as she is described in another work of the same period, Hesiod’s Works and Days. Hephaestus’s humanoid serving women are intelligent: they have mind, they know things, and-most striking of all-they can talk. These remarkable creations clearly represent an (as it were) evolutionary leap forward from the self-propelling tripods. These females bustled round about their master…. In them there is mind, with the faculty of thought and speech,Īnd strength, and from the gods they have knowledge of crafts. Limping whilst round their master his servants swiftly moved,įashioned completely of gold in the image of living maidens After toweling himself off, heĭonned his robe, and took a sturdy staff, and went toward the door, A little bit later in that scene in Book 18 of the Iliad, for instance-the one set in Hephaestus’s workshop-the sweating god, after finishing work on his twenty tripods, prepares to greet Thetis to discuss the armor she wants him to make. In the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, a third-century- BC epic about Jason and the Argonauts, a bronze giant called Talos runs three times around the island of Crete each day, protecting Zeus’s beloved Europa: a primitive home alarm system.Īs amusing as they are, these devices are not nearly as interesting as certain other machines that appear in classical mythology. To this class of lifelike but intellectually inert household helpers we might ascribe other automata in the classical tradition. In Book 7 of the Odyssey, Odysseus finds himself the guest of a fabulously wealthy king whose palace includes such conveniences as gold and silver watchdogs, ever alert, never aging. In Book 5 of the Iliad we hear that the gates of Olympus swivel on their hinges of their own accord, automatai, to let gods in their chariots in or out, thus anticipating by nearly thirty centuries the automatic garage door. These are not the only animate household objects to appear in the Homeric epics. ![]() So they might wheel down on their own to the gods’ assemblyĪnd then return to his house anon: an amazing sight to see. ![]() To stand along the walls of his well-built manse,Īffixing golden wheels to the bottom of each one In Book 18 of the Iliad, Achilles’ mother, the nymph Thetis, wants to order a new suit of armor for her son, and so she pays a visit to the Olympian atelier of the blacksmith-god Hephaestus, whom she finds hard at work on a series of automata: We have been dreaming of robots since Homer. Alicia Vikander as the robot Ava in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina 1. ![]()
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