Hephaestus' Golden Maidens: Artificial Helpers in the Iliad

In the oldest Greek epic, the smith god builds wheeled tripods that move by themselves and golden women who think and speak.

In Iliad Book 18, the smith god Hephaestus has tripods on golden wheels that move by themselves and golden handmaids who have sense, voice and strength and help him walk.

Book 18 of Homer's Iliad describes the workshop of Hephaestus, the lame smith god, when the goddess Thetis visits to ask for new armor for her son Achilles. She finds him making twenty tripods to stand along the wall of his house. He "set wheels of gold under them all, that they might go of their own selves to the assemblies of the gods, and come back again."

When Hephaestus gets up to greet her, he is helped along by attendants of his own making. In Samuel Butler's translation, there were "golden handmaids also who worked for him, and were like real young women," with sense, voice, strength and skill learned from the gods. Later writers call them the kourai khryseai, the golden maidens.

They are not his only animated works. The Odyssey says Hephaestus made gold and silver dogs, immortal and ageless, to guard the palace of King Alcinous. Other stories credit him with Talos, the bronze guardian of Crete, and with Pandora, the first woman, shaped from earth at Zeus's command. Hephaestus is the gods' engineer, and his works are always the most astonishing things on Olympus.

Scholars such as Adrienne Mayor argue that these passages show Greeks imagining artificial life long before anyone could build it: made things that move, reason and serve. That is the attraction for ancient-technology readers, who see in them a memory of real machines. Most classicists read them as expressions of divine craft, a way of showing that a god's handiwork surpasses anything human, and as early science fiction rather than reportage.