Made, Not Born
Long before anyone built a robot, Greek poets imagined bronze guards, golden servants and a woman made to order. What the old stories really say, what retellings add, and what they miss about AI.
On a large wine-mixing bowl painted around 400 BC, now in the Jatta museum at Ruvo di Puglia in southern Italy, a pale figure topples backwards. He is painted white, unlike everyone around him. Two young men, the twins Castor and Polydeuces, catch him as he falls. To the left stands Medea, holding a bowl.[1]
The falling man is Talos, the bronze giant who guarded Crete by throwing rocks at ships. In the fullest version of the story, written down about 150 years after the vase was painted, he dies when Medea bewitches him with her stare and he grazes his ankle on a rock. The one vein that runs through his body bursts, and the fluid that served him as blood pours out “like melted lead”.[2]
Adrienne Mayor, a historian of ancient science at Stanford, opens her 2018 book Gods and Robots with him. Her argument is that the Greeks imagined artificial life long before anyone could build it, and that they imagined it as a product of craft: beings “made, not born”.[3] The book has been widely read and widely summarised, and the summaries have travelled further than the book. Talos becomes a robot “programmed” to patrol, Hephaestus’ tripods become self-driving delivery carts, and an obscure Greek word becomes the ancestor of biotechnology.
This essay goes back to the texts. It sets out what Mayor argues, what the ancient sources say and do not say, which of the machines were real, and what her critics object to. At the end it asks what these stories can and cannot tell us about the machines being built now, which turned out to be made in a way no ancient poet imagined.
“Made, not born”
Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology was published by Princeton University Press in November 2018. After an introduction, nine chapters run from Talos and Medea through Daedalus, Pygmalion, Prometheus, Hephaestus and Pandora to the real automata of the Hellenistic world. An epilogue, “Awe, Dread, Hope”, carries the subtitle “Deep Learning and Ancient Stories”.[4]
The thesis is in the introduction. The artificial beings of Greek myth, Mayor writes, “were thought of as manufactured products of technology, designed and constructed from scratch using the same materials and methods that human artisans used to make tools, artworks, buildings, and statues.” She sets this against the view that ancient stories of artificial life “only describe inert matter brought alive by a god’s command or magician’s spell”. She reads the myths as “ancient thought experiments, ‘what-if’ scenarios set in an alternate world of possibilities”, and concludes that “ideas about creating artificial life were thinkable long before technology made such enterprises possible.”[3]
She is careful about her own vocabulary. The examples, she writes, “are not exactly machines, robots, or AI in the modern sense”, but they are “good to think with”; and “it is important to avoid projecting modern notions of mechanics and technology onto antiquity”.[3] Her interviews and essays are less careful, and that is where much of the popular version comes from.
Take the word that summaries put at the centre of the book. In the book Mayor introduces it with a hedge: stories about imitating and surpassing natural life “by means of what might be termed biotechne, ‘life through craft.’”[3] In a 2016 essay she had gone further, writing of “what ancient Greeks called bio-techne”, and in a 2019 podcast she called it “a Greek word that means life through craft”.[5][6] The standard dictionary of ancient Greek, Liddell–Scott–Jones, has no entry for it. The nearest real word, the Modern Greek viotechnia, means small-scale industry and is first recorded in 1856.[7] A search of every surviving Greek text would be needed to rule out a stray late use, but nothing supports the claim that the Greeks had a concept by that name. It is Mayor’s label, and a good one, but it is hers; the leading academic review of the book calls it the art “which she terms biotechne”.[8]
What Homer says, and what he leaves out
The oldest artificial beings in Greek literature are in the Iliad, probably composed in the seventh or late eighth century BC. In book 18 the sea goddess Thetis visits Hephaestus, the lame smith of the gods, to ask for new armour for her son Achilles. She finds him at work. In A. T. Murray’s translation:[9]
he was fashioning tripods, twenty in all, to stand around the wall of his well-builded hall, and golden wheels had he set beneath the base of each that of themselves they might enter the gathering of the gods at his wish and again return to his house, a wonder to behold.
Then his servants come to help him:
there moved swiftly to support their lord handmaidens wrought of gold in the semblance of living maids. In them is understanding in their hearts, and in them speech and strength, and they know cunning handiwork by gift of the immortal gods.
A few lines later he turns his twenty bellows towards the fire “and bade them work”, and they blow as he wishes.[9] The Odyssey adds gold and silver dogs that Hephaestus made to guard the palace of King Alcinous, “immortal were they and ageless all their days”, and the ships of Alcinous’ people, the Phaeacians, which have no pilots or steering oars because “of themselves” they “understand the thoughts and minds of men, and they know the cities and rich fields of all peoples”.[10][11]
These passages are remarkable, and they are the strongest support for Mayor’s case. The golden maidens are made of metal by a craftsman, yet they have noos, understanding, along with voice and strength. Two classicists, Genevieve Liveley and Sam Thomas, have gone so far as to sort Homer’s devices on a scale from “weak” to “strong” artificial intelligence, and to point out that every one of them is a servant.[12]
But Homer says what these things do, never how. The word translated “of themselves” is automatoi, the root of “automaton”. In Homer it means “of their own accord”: the same Iliad uses it for the gates of heaven, which open by themselves for Hera’s chariot, and Hesiod uses it for the diseases that come to people unbidden.[13][14] Nothing in the text mentions gears, springs or hidden fluids. The tripods move “at his wish”, the bellows when he tells them, and the golden maidens know their crafts “by gift of the immortal gods”, not by any mechanism. Mayor herself notes that “the inner workings and power sources of automata are not described but left to our imagination”.[3]
Some of the popular version goes beyond the text. In the podcast Mayor described the tripods as “self-driving carts” that “brought nectar and ambrosia to the gods and goddesses at their banquets”, and later as “driverless carts and automated garage doors”.[6] The Iliad says only that they go to the gods’ gathering and come back, and it describes them as unfinished: the handles have not yet been attached.[9] The Phaeacian ships, too, are rowed; what they lack is a navigator, not a means of propulsion.[11]
One giant, several versions
Talos is the book’s first and best case, and the ancient sources do not agree about him. The question that matters most for Mayor’s thesis, whether he was made or born, gets different answers in different texts.
Mayor’s strongest point survives this. Whoever made him, Talos has an engineered weakness: a single vein, sealed at the ankle, whose failure drains him. In Apollodorus Medea kills him by promising to make him immortal and then pulling out the nail, “so that all the ichor gushed out and he died”.[16] Even the most critical review of the book grants that his breakdown is “Mayor’s strongest piece of evidence”.[8]
Two parts of the popular version are weaker. Talos was not “programmed”: that is Mayor’s own modern word, in her essay (“programmed to guard the island”) and her interviews, not the sources’.[5] And he was not “first mentioned around 700 B.C. by Hesiod”, as a Stanford news story put it.[18] The surviving works of Hesiod do not name Talos. They describe a race of bronze men born from ash trees, the race Apollonius later made him the last of.[14] The irony of the fullest version is that the most mechanical body in Greek myth is brought down by the least mechanical weapon, Medea’s evil eye: “with her hostile glance she bewitched the eyes of Talos”.[2]
Medea links Talos to the book’s second theme, enhancement. Her offer of immortality is the bait in Apollodorus, and in Ovid she makes Jason’s old father young by draining his blood and filling “his ancient veins with rich elixir”. She then uses the same promise to trick the daughters of King Pelias into killing him, after showing them an old ram turned into a lamb.[19][16]
A specification, written by the sender
Pandora is the figure Mayor pushes furthest. In the book she is “the evil fembot created by Hephaestus”; in her 2016 essay, “the gods’ AI Agent”; in a Stanford interview, a being whose “only mission was to infiltrate the human world and release her jar of miseries”.[3][5][18]
Hesiod tells the story twice. In the Theogony she has no name and no jar. Zeus wants “an evil thing for men as the price of fire”, and Hephaestus “formed of earth the likeness of a shy maiden as the son of Cronos willed”. Hesiod calls her a kalon kakon, a “beautiful evil”. Even her crown is decorated with “wonderful things, like living beings with voices”.[20]
In the Works and Days the making becomes a production line. Zeus orders Hephaestus “to mix earth with water and to put in it the voice and strength of human kind” — the same pair, voice and strength, that the golden maidens have in the Iliad. Athena teaches her weaving, Aphrodite gives her grace and “cruel longing”, and Hermes is told “to put in her a shameless mind and a deceitful nature”; the Greek for “shameless mind” is literally “the mind of a dog”. She is named Pandora, “because all they who dwelt on Olympus gave each a gift, a plague to men who eat bread”. She lifts the lid of a great storage jar, a pithos, and the evils fly out; only Hope stays inside.[14] The “box” comes much later, a change usually attributed to Erasmus in 1508.[21]
What makes this the most modern of the stories is not that Pandora is artificial; Prometheus’ first humans were moulded from earth too. It is that every trait she has was installed, one by one, by someone with a purpose, and the purpose was to deceive. The danger in the story is not that the made woman escapes her makers’ control. It is that she does exactly what the sender intended.
The “fembot” reading also has a cost. Hesiod’s story is first of all an account of why women exist, told with open hostility: from her, he says, comes “the race of women”, a misery to men.[20] Reading Pandora only as an AI parable can make that hostility look like a warning about technology.
Statues that had to be tied down
By the time of classical Athens, the statues of Daedalus, the legendary craftsman, had become a proverb. In Plato’s Meno, Socrates says they “if they are not fastened up they play truant and run away; but, if fastened, they stay where they are”. He uses them as an image for true opinions, which are worth little until they are tied down by reasoning.[22] In the Euthyphro he jokes that he must be a cleverer artist than Daedalus, his supposed ancestor, because he makes other people’s arguments move as well as his own.[23]
The other references are just as playful. In a fragment of a lost satyr play by Euripides, someone reassures a frightened old satyr that Daedalus’ statues only seem to move and see, so clever was their maker.[24] Aristotle mentions a comic poet who claimed Daedalus made a wooden Aphrodite move by pouring quicksilver into it, but he does so to mock the philosopher Democritus’ theory of the soul.[25] Pindar praises the craftsmen of Rhodes, whose streets “bore works of art like living, moving creatures”, which most readers take as praise of lifelike sculpture.[26]
These passages show that the idea of a statue that moves was familiar enough to joke about. They do not show that anyone thought Daedalus had built machines, and Plato, who uses the legend most, is plainly not asking to be taken literally. The contrast cases in the book are clearer. In Ovid, Pygmalion’s ivory statue comes to life because Venus answers his prayer, not because of his craft.[27] Prometheus “moulded men out of water and earth”, but how they came alive the sources do not say; one reviewer found this example “still seems pretty supernatural”.[16][28]
The first argument about automation was an argument for slavery
The most quoted ancient passage on self-working machines is not a myth. It comes from Aristotle’s Politics, written in the fourth century BC, in William Ellis’s translation:[29]
for if every instrument, at command, or from a preconception of its master’s will, could accomplish its work (as the story goes of the statues of Daedalus; or what the poet tells us of the tripods of Vulcan, ‘that they moved of their own accord into the assembly of the gods’), the shuttle would then weave, and the lyre play of itself; nor would the architect want servants, or the master slaves.
It is often quoted as a prophecy of automation. In context it is the opposite. Aristotle is explaining why slaves are necessary: tools cannot work by themselves, so a household needs people to serve as its tools. The self-moving tripod is the impossible case that proves the rule. The classicist Martin Devecka has argued that in fourth-century Greek thought the automaton served as a fantasy substitute for slave labour, and Liveley and Thomas read Homer’s golden maidens the same way.[30][12]
That makes the passage more relevant, not less. Aristotle saw that the question raised by a self-working tool is not what it can do but who stops working, and who owns what it produces. Twenty-three centuries later Keynes made the opposite bet, that machines would free people for a fifteen-hour week; what happened instead is that machines took over tasks while the work was reorganised around them.[a]
When the wonders were built
The last chapter of Mayor’s book is the most solid, because its machines existed. They were built in the Greek kingdoms that followed Alexander, above all in Alexandria, from the third century BC.
The first known engineer of the line is Ctesibius, who worked there in the early to mid third century BC and is best known for the fire-pump, the water organ and an improved water clock.[31] None of his writings survive, but the Roman architect Vitruvius describes his clocks, in which a rising float drives gears “by which figures are made to move, cones are turned round, stones or oviform bodies are ejected, trumpets sounded”.[32] From the start, keeping time and making figures move were the same craft.
In the 270s BC Ptolemy II staged a grand procession through Alexandria. An account by Kallixeinos of Rhodes, preserved in a later anthology by Athenaeus, describes a cart drawn by sixty men carrying a statue of the nymph Nysa, about 3.7 metres tall, that “could rise up automatically without anyone putting his hands to it, and after pouring a libation of milk from a gold saucer it would sit down again.”[33] How it worked is not recorded. It was, in the words of a recent editor of Greek automata texts, “a combination of propaganda, entertainment and the element of wonder”.[31]
Philo of Byzantium, writing around 200 BC, describes a figure of a maidservant holding a jug: put a cup in her hand and she pours wine, then water to mix with it.[34] The description survives only in Arabic and Latin translations of his Pneumatics, a text known to have picked up later additions, so how much of it is Philo’s is uncertain.[31]
The fullest surviving work is by Hero of Alexandria, who was active in the second half of the first century AD; a lunar eclipse of AD 62 that he describes falls in his lifetime.[31] His treatise on automata opens with shrines that “move forward by themselves and stop at certain defined locations”, with figures inside that act out a story, and notes that “former generations used to call those crafting such automata ‘wonder-workers’”.[31] In 2007 the roboticist Noel Sharkey reconstructed one of Hero’s carts: a falling weight unwinds a cord wrapped around the axle, and the way the cord is wound, with pegs to reverse it and slack loops to pause, sets the cart’s route in advance. “His method of programming is unique in the history of robots,” Sharkey wrote. “It relied on string.”[35] “Programming” is fair here in a narrow sense: a fixed sequence, set by hand for each performance, with no stored instructions and no choices. Hero’s Pneumatics adds a temple vessel that dispenses holy water when a five-drachm coin is dropped in, temple doors that open when a fire is lit on the altar, and a ball spun by steam, which he compares to the toy “dancing figures”.[36]
Two other famous devices need caveats. The flying wooden dove of Archytas, a friend of Plato’s, is known only from a writer of the second century AD, about five hundred years later, who calls it “so improbable a story” and reports that the dove was “moved by a current of air enclosed and hidden within it”; it was not, as Mayor once wrote, “steam-propelled”, and scholars doubt it flew freely.[37][5][31] The Antikythera mechanism, recovered from a wreck of about 70–60 BC, is a hand-cranked astronomical calculator; thirty of its bronze gearwheels survive. Its researchers call it survive. It is, “a mechanical computer of bronze gears” in its researchers’ phrase, but nothingldquo;a mechanical computer of bronze gearssurvive. It is, “a mechanical computer of bronze gears” in its researchers’ phrase, but nothingrdquo;, but nothing in it moves by itself.[38]
What were these machines for? Not, on the evidence, for work. They opened temple doors, poured libations, sold holy water and astonished crowds at royal festivals. Aristotle’s weaving shuttle never arrived; the self-moving figure served worship, spectacle and royal display. One automaton-like device in the sources was used for cruelty: the Greek historian Polybius, no friend of the Spartan ruler Nabis, describes a mechanical likeness of Nabis’ wife with iron nails hidden under her dress, which crushed those who would not pay, and adds “if one can call such a thing a machine”.[39]
The same dream, elsewhere, and later
Mayor’s book also gathers stories from China and India. They are among the most striking in it, and among the hardest to date.
The earliest Chinese example is a dispute about usefulness. In the Mozi, a text of the fourth or third century BC, the craftsman Gongshu carves a magpie from bamboo and wood that flies for three days without coming down. Mozi is unimpressed: a linchpin he can cut in a moment from three inches of wood bears a load of fifty dan, and “what benefits people is called skilful; what does not benefit people is called clumsy”.[40]
The most vivid story is in the Liezi, set in the reign of King Mu of Zhou, nearly three thousand years ago, but compiled around AD 300–400.[41] An artisan, Yan Shi, presents the king with a figure that walks, sings and acts, “so that any one would have taken it for a live human being”. When it winks at the king’s concubines, the king in a rage orders Yan Shi’s death, and the artisan takes the figure apart to show that it is “merely a conglomeration of leather, wood, glue and paint”, with every internal organ artificial. Remove the heart and the mouth cannot speak; remove the liver and the eyes cannot see. The king asks: “Can it be that human skill is really on a par with that of the Creator?”[42]
The Babylonian Talmud, compiled around AD 500, tells in a few lines how the sage Rava “created a man” and sent him to Rabbi Zeira, who spoke to him and got no answer. “You were created by one of the members of the group,” Zeira said. “Return to your dust.”[43] In both stories the test of an artificial person is speech.
The Indian legend that summaries of the book most often repeat is the latest of all. In it, robot-makers live in a western land called Roma-visaya; an artisan’s son steals their plans and builds mechanical guardians for the Buddha’s relics, which defend them until the emperor Ashoka disarms them. Mayor tells it vividly and suggests it may echo contacts between Ashoka’s India and Ptolemaic Egypt in the third century BC.[44] But its main source, the Pali Lokapaññatti, was written in the eleventh or twelfth century AD, in Burma.[45] Mayor is candid about this: “Most scholars assume it arose in medieval Islamic and European times. But I think the story could be much older.”[44] A better-dated Indian parallel is the eleventh-century treatise of King Bhoja, which describes wooden figures worked by “holes, pins and strings”, among them guards for a palace gate.[46]
The word “robot” itself is a century old. Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R., written in 1920 and first staged in January 1921, gave the name to artificial workers made not of metal but of synthetic flesh; it comes from robota, the forced labour of serfs.[47] Čapek later said the word was his brother’s. Stuck for a name, he asked Josef, who was painting: “‘Then call them Robots,’ the painter muttered, brush in mouth, and went on painting.”[48] The first robots, in other words, were forced labourers, closer to Aristotle’s living tools than to Hero’s carts.
What the critics say
Most reviews were warm. Kirkus called the book “a collection of wondrous tales that present ancient myths as the proto–science fiction stories they are”.[49] The criticisms come in three kinds.
The first is scholarly, and it goes to the heart of the thesis. In the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Clara Bosak-Schroeder, who works on the same material, praised Mayor’s “masterful retelling of ancient tales” but disagreed with the main claim: she and other scholars think that “at least the earliest automata, including the self-moving tripods and golden maids created by Hephaestus in Homer’s Iliad, were probably understood as magical.” Hephaestus, she notes, was “at least sometimes, understood as a magician”. She worries that setting ancient stories beside modern technology “overdetermine[s] Mayor’s claim that ancient devices are like modern ones”, and points out that the most mechanical-looking Talos comes from a poem written in the third century BC, when real automata already existed.[8] Apollonius worked in Alexandria, the city where those machines were being built. Her verdict is that the book “reinvigorates, rather than settles, debates about how ancient magic relates to other crafts.”
The second is about scope. Peter Thonemann, an Oxford historian, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “many of the Greek myths she explores really have very little to do with artificial life”, that the Chinese and Indian material is “rather halfheartedly shoehorned in”, and that the book “feels rather like a punchy magazine article that has been stretched out far beyond its natural length”.[50] Ed Simon found that it relies “a bit too much on ‘perhaps,’ ‘maybe,’ ‘sometimes,’ ‘seemingly,’ and ‘possibly’”, and that her warning against projecting modern assumptions sits oddly in a book built on modern comparisons.[28] Michael Buozis noted the “rather capacious definition of technology”: anything “made, not born” counts.[51]
The third is about the modern half. A reviewer in Science wrote that Mayor “does little to demonstrate an understanding of modern AI, neural networks, and machine learning”, and Publishers Weekly found the parallels with modern gadgets “somewhat obvious”: the Phaeacian ships remind her of GPS.[52][53]
Put together with the texts, the reviews suggest a simple test for any claim that begins “the ancient Greeks imagined…”:
None of this undoes the book’s central observation, which is sound: Greek poets could imagine a made thing that moves, serves, guards, deceives and knows. The disagreement is over whether they imagined it as engineering or as a divine wonder, and the honest answer may be that, before engineering existed, the two were not separate.
What the old stories get right, and what they could not foresee
Mayor’s epilogue turns to deep learning, and that is where the comparison needs the most care, because the machines we have ended up with are made in a way the myths never imagined.
Every artificial being in Greek myth is designed. Its maker decides what it is for and puts each capacity into it: wheels for the tripods, a single vein for Talos, a dog’s mind for Pandora. Its inner workings are a mystery to the audience, but not to Hephaestus. A large language model is the reverse. Engineers design the architecture and the training procedure, but the model’s abilities and character are learned from vast amounts of human text and then shaped by feedback;[b] nobody writes them in, and its inner workings are opaque to its makers as well as to us. As argued in Grown, Not Built, such systems are closer to grown than to built. They are neither born nor made in Mayor’s sense, and her opposition does not quite fit them.
Some things in the myths carry over all the same.
The myths are a poorer guide in other ways. In the old stories the body comes easily and speech is the test: Rabbi Zeira unmasks Rava’s man because he cannot answer, and Yan Shi’s figure falls silent when its heart is removed. Our machines arrived the other way round, fluent in speech first, with bodies that still lag far behind.[e] They imagine minds received whole from a god, where ours are learned from the writing of millions of people, with their virtues and their faults. And they are cautionary tales by genre: the culture that told of Talos also told of Icarus and Phaethon, and a story about overreaching usually ends badly whatever the technology.
What the stories show most clearly is the oldest part of the problem. Before anyone could build a self-moving machine, people asked what it would be for, whom it would serve, who would send it among us and with what purpose, and where its weak point was. Mayor is right that those questions were thinkable long before the technology. The difference now is that the technology arrived in a form the questions did not anticipate: not a bronze guard with one vein that its maker understands, but a system that its makers grew and are still learning to read.
This essay was researched and written with Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic): human specification, editorial direction and critical review; machine research and drafting. Anthropic, the maker of the tool, builds the kind of system discussed in the last section. The ancient passages were read in public-domain or openly licensed translations, named in the sources, and the key Greek words checked against the original on Perseus; the translation from the Mozi is from the Chinese. Quotations from Mayor were checked against the publisher’s excerpt of her introduction, her essays and the podcast transcript, not against the full book; reviews were read in full except the Wall Street Journal and Science reviews, quoted from the excerpts at Book Marks. The dates of the Lokapaññatti and the Liezi come from encyclopedia summaries of the specialist literature, and the mechanism of Philo’s maidservant from a museum description. The absence of “biotechne” was checked in the standard lexicon, not in a full search of Greek texts. Figure 1 is the author’s compilation. Cover: detail of the Talos krater, photograph by Forzaruvo94, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped.
Authored by: Luis Matos Ferreira — Physicist, Developer, Writer
Ideas this essay uses without stopping to explain them, and where this blog does. The letters in the text point here; the links go straight to the section.
- Grown, Not Built — why AI systems are grown rather than programmed, and who is responsible for them.
- How a Language Model Learns — the training that replaced the craftsman’s design.
- The Body Problem — why robots in the physical world lag behind AI in text.
- The Fifteen-Hour Week — Keynes’s bet that machines would free our time.
- “Talos”, Wikipedia, on the Talos krater (Jatta National Archaeological Museum, Ruvo di Puglia, c. 400 BC), the related vases and the coins of Phaistos, en.wikipedia.org.
- Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 4.1638–1688, translated by R. C. Seaton (Loeb, 1912), theoi.com.
- A. Mayor, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Princeton University Press, 2018, Introduction, “Made, Not Born”, pp. 1–6 (publisher’s excerpt), assets.press.princeton.edu.
- Princeton University Press, Gods and Robots, book page (hardcover 27 November 2018; paperback 2020); chapter list from library catalogue records, press.princeton.edu.
- A. Mayor, “Bio-techne” (“Replicants and robots: what can the ancient Greeks teach us?”), Aeon, 16 May 2016, aeon.co.
- S. Carroll, “Episode 40: Adrienne Mayor on Gods and Robots in Ancient Mythology”, Mindscape podcast, 1 April 2019, transcript, preposterousuniverse.com.
- Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek lexicon (no entry for biotechne); the Modern Greek viotechnia (“small-scale industry”, first attested 1856) as given at lsj.gr, lsj.gr.
- C. Bosak-Schroeder, review of A. Mayor, Gods and Robots, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2019.08.09, bmcr.brynmawr.edu.
- Homer, Iliad 18.368–421 and 468–473, translated by A. T. Murray (Loeb, 1924), with the Greek text, perseus.tufts.edu.
- Homer, Odyssey 7.91–94, translated by A. T. Murray (Loeb, 1919), perseus.tufts.edu.
- Homer, Odyssey 8.555–563, translated by A. T. Murray (Loeb, 1919), perseus.tufts.edu.
- G. Liveley and S. Thomas, “Homer’s Intelligent Machines: AI in Antiquity”, in S. Cave, K. Dihal and S. Dillon (eds), AI Narratives, Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 25–48, research-information.bris.ac.uk.
- Homer, Iliad 5.749, the gates of heaven “self-bidden” (automatai), translated by A. T. Murray, perseus.tufts.edu.
- Hesiod, Works and Days 47–105 (Pandora) and 143–155 (the bronze race), translated by H. G. Evelyn-White (Loeb, 1914), theoi.com.
- Suda, s.v. “Sardonios gelos” (sigma 124), citing Simonides (fr. 568 PMG), Suda On Line, cs.uky.edu.
- Apollodorus, Library 1.7.1, 1.9.26–27, translated by J. G. Frazer (Loeb, 1921), theoi.com.
- [Plato], Minos 320c, translated by W. R. M. Lamb (Loeb), perseus.tufts.edu.
- A. Shashkevich, “Ancient myths reveal early fantasies about artificial life”, Stanford News, 28 February 2019, news.stanford.edu.
- Ovid, Metamorphoses 7.159–349, translated by Brookes More (1922), theoi.com.
- Hesiod, Theogony 570–612, translated by H. G. Evelyn-White (Loeb, 1914), theoi.com.
- “Pandora’s box”, Wikipedia, on the change from pithos to box usually attributed to Erasmus, Adagia 1.1.31 (1508), en.wikipedia.org.
- Plato, Meno 97d–98a, translated by W. R. M. Lamb (Loeb, 1924), perseus.tufts.edu.
- Plato, Euthyphro 11b–e, translated by H. N. Fowler (Loeb, 1914), perseus.tufts.edu.
- Euripides, Eurystheus, fr. 372 Kannicht, in W. A. Ribeiro Jr., “Eurystheus, a Satyr Play by Euripides”, Nuntius Antiquus 14.1 (2018), pp. 207–232, periodicos.ufmg.br.
- Aristotle, On the Soul 1.3, 406b, translated by J. A. Smith, classics.mit.edu.
- Pindar, Olympian 7.50–53, translated by D. A. Svarlien (1990), perseus.tufts.edu.
- Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.243–297, translated by Brookes More (1922), theoi.com.
- E. Simon, “Gods and Robots”, Orbiter, republished by Big Think, 22 October 2019, bigthink.com.
- Aristotle, Politics 1.4, 1253b33–1254a1, translated by W. Ellis (1912), Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
- M. Devecka, “Did the Greeks Believe in their Robots?”, Cambridge Classical Journal 59 (2013), pp. 52–69, cambridge.org.
- F. Grillo, Hero of Alexandria’s Automata: a critical edition and translation, including a commentary on Book One, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2019, theses.gla.ac.uk.
- Vitruvius, On Architecture 9.8.2–5, translated by J. Gwilt, LacusCurtius, penelope.uchicago.edu.
- Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 5.198f, quoting Kallixeinos of Rhodes, translated by C. B. Gulick (Loeb, 1928), LacusCurtius, penelope.uchicago.edu.
- Aquincum Museum, “Philo of Byzantium”, on the automatic maidservant of Philo’s Pneumatics, aquincum.hu.
- N. Sharkey, “The programmable robot of ancient Greece”, New Scientist, 4 July 2007 (read via the Internet Archive), newscientist.com.
- Hero of Alexandria, Pneumatics, chs. 21, 37 and 50, translated by B. Woodcroft (1851), Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
- Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 10.12.8–10, translated by J. C. Rolfe (Loeb, 1927), LacusCurtius, penelope.uchicago.edu.
- T. Freeth et al., “A Model of the Cosmos in the ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism”, Scientific Reports 11, 5821, 12 March 2021, nature.com.
- Polybius, Histories 13.7, translated by W. R. Paton (Loeb, 1925), LacusCurtius, penelope.uchicago.edu.
- Mozi, ch. 49, “Lu wen”, Chinese text on Wikisource; the translation here is from the Chinese, zh.wikisource.org.
- “Liezi”, Wikipedia, on the compilation of the received text around the fourth century AD, en.wikipedia.org.
- Liezi, ch. 5, translated by L. Giles, Taoist Teachings from the Book of Lieh Tzu (1912), terebess.hu.
- Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 65b, William Davidson translation, Sefaria, sefaria.org.
- A. Mayor, “Robots guarded Buddha’s relics in a legend of ancient India”, The Conversation, 13 March 2019, theconversation.com.
- “Relics associated with Buddha”, Wikipedia, citing J. S. Strong, Relics of the Buddha (Princeton, 2004), on the date of the Lokapaññatti, en.wikipedia.org.
- V. Raghavan, Yantras or Mechanical Contrivances in Ancient India, Indian Institute of Culture, Bangalore, 1952, on Bhoja’s Samarangana Sutradhara, iiwc.in.
- “R.U.R.”, Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org.
- K. Čapek, “About the Word Robot”, Lidové noviny, 24 December 1933, translated by N. Comrada (archived copy), web.archive.org.
- Review of Gods and Robots, Kirkus Reviews, kirkusreviews.com.
- P. Thonemann, “Gods and Robots review: men, myths and machines”, Wall Street Journal, December 2018, quoted from the excerpt at Book Marks (the original is paywalled), bookmarks.reviews.
- M. Buozis, review of Gods and Robots, Lateral 9.1 (2020), csalateral.org.
- S. Olson, review of Gods and Robots, Science, October 2018, quoted from the excerpt at Book Marks, bookmarks.reviews.
- Review of Gods and Robots, Publishers Weekly, publishersweekly.com.
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