Automatons

The first automatons appear in the poems of Homer, composed in the eighth century BCE, where the divine blacksmith Hephaestus, the god of fire and invention who walked with a limp after being cast from Olympus by his mother Hera, is shown running a forge unlike any other. In his workshop beneath the volcanoes of Lemnos, Hephaestus crafted twenty golden tripods with wheels beneath their bases, tripods that could roll of their own accord into the gathering places of the gods and return to his house when the feasting ended. These were not mere furniture but servants, a wonder to look upon, and they wheeled themselves through the halls of the immortals as if they possessed will and purpose. Homer also tells of the palace of King Alcinous, ruler of the Phaeacians, where golden and silver watchdogs stood eternal guard at the doors, crafted by Hephaestus with wit and cunning to prevent unwanted guests from entering, deathless and unaging for all time.

But the most famous of all automatons was Talos, a giant forged from bronze and given to Europa, the Phoenician princess whom Zeus had carried to Crete in the form of a white bull. Talos stood as the island's eternal guardian, circling the coastline three times each day with heavy bronze steps, scanning the horizon for pirates and invaders. When ships approached unwelcome, he tore boulders from the cliffs and hurled them with crushing force. If any enemy reached the shore, Talos would seize them in his superheated arms and roast them against his burning chest. Inside his bronze body ran a single vein from neck to ankle, sealed with a bronze bolt, and through this channel pulsed ichor, the golden life-fluid of the gods themselves. This was his power and his vulnerability, for without that sealed vein he was merely inert metal.

The hero Jason and his crew of Argonauts, sailing aboard the ship Argo in search of the Golden Fleece, encountered Talos when they came to Crete seeking supplies. The bronze giant advanced upon them, tearing rocks from the earth, and the Argonauts could not match his strength. But Medea, the sorceress princess of Colchis who had joined Jason's quest, understood the nature of the automaton's construction. She approached Talos with promises of immortality, convincing him that she could make him eternal if he allowed Jason to remove the bronze bolt from his ankle. Talos, weary of his lonely circuit and tempted by the promise of true divinity, agreed. Jason pulled the bolt, and the ichor flowed out like molten lead, draining the life from the bronze body. Talos stumbled, crashed to the earth with a sound like a falling mountain, and lay still, the first machine ever decommissioned by a hacker's trick.

Hephaestus crafted other wonders as well. For King Aeetes of Colchis, whose father Helios the sun-god had rescued Hephaestus during the war against the Giants, the smith made two bronze bulls that breathed fire from their nostrils and struck sparks with their brazen hooves. Jason later faced these creatures as part of his impossible labors, yoking them to a plough to sow a field with dragon's teeth that sprouted armed warriors. For the first temple of Apollo at Delphi, Hephaestus created the Celedones, golden singing maidens whose voices rivaled the Muses themselves. For his own household on Olympus he fashioned the Kourai Khryseai, the Golden Maidens, who looked like real women, moved on their own, possessed reason and mind, and held all the knowledge of the gods. Even the Caucasian Eagle that tore daily at the liver of Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire for mankind, was said by some to be a bronze automaton forged by Hephaestus for that terrible purpose.

The mortal craftsman Daedalus, the Athenian inventor who built the Labyrinth for King Minos of Crete, also tried his hand at animate statues. Plato later wrote that Daedalus's statues were so lifelike that they had to be tied down to prevent them from walking away, and ancient painters depicted his workshop filled with figures in various stages of completion, some already stepping forward with promise of motion. Daedalus's most notorious creation was the hollow wooden cow he fashioned for Queen Pasiphae, but his moving statues represented a mortal's attempt to replicate the divine craft of Hephaestus. The tradition of self-moving metal beings persisted into the Hellenistic period, when real mechanical devices began to appear in the temples of Alexandria, turning the ancient myths into working technology and proving that the Greeks had imagined robots long before they could build them.