M ythology: a dream

Understanding this centuries long thread, takes us back to when Greek philosophers strolled the dry, stone-paved streets of ancient Greece.

The year is 800 B.C.E, Greek mythology emerges as a medium of cultural unity; a shared vocabulary for describing and questioning the strange phenomena around the human existence. [1]

Medeia and Talos. Painting courtesy of Sybil Tawse

A particular question from this period still persists to this day: what makes us humans so different from any living and non-living thing in the world? [2]

This question, materializes in myths like Pygmalion and Galatea [3]. Pygmalion, a Cypriot sculptor, carved a woman out of ivory. His statue was so beautiful and realistic that he fell in love with it. At the altar of Aphrodite he wished for a bride in likeness to his ivory girl. When he returned, he kissed his ivory statue, and found that its lips felt warm, the ivory had lost its hardness. Aphrodite had granted Pygmalion’s wish.

Or Talos, a gift given in love to Europa by Zeus. A giant, living, bronze automaton, forged by Hephaestus. The giant was given the task of patrolling the island and circled it three times a day, driving off pirates with rocks [4]

Both are a mythical metaphor for the very idea of robotics: breathing life into matter (animating).

But it is Hephaestus, the god of metallurgy, who is credited with the first recorded incarnation of a robot like creature [5]. What in the myths of Talos and Galatea is a mystical concept, in Homer’s description of Hephaestus’ curious helpers, has a very concrete mechanical meaning.

“( … ) He was working on twenty tripods which were to stand against the wall of his strong-founded dwelling. And he had set golden wheels underneath the base of each one so that of their own motion they could wheel into the immortal gathering, and return to his house: a wonder to look at.’’ —Homer, Iliad 18.370–379

Homer describes a mechanical apparatus, traveling on own accord from his house to the Olympus. Millennia later, this myth is the first step in a field we now call robotics.

A small, albeit important, shift in perspective, slowly moves us away from the mythological, abstract, view into the realm of the concrete: animating matter with mechanical means.