Hephaestus' Golden Girls
What Can the Iliad Tell us About Artificial Intelligence?
This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. Don’t forget about Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things. Here is its amazon page. here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page.
Last year I did a few posts about artificial intelligence and Homeric epic, highlighting some recent research and then sharing the results of a workshop I organized. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what Homeric epic might have to say about it on a cultural or metaphorical level. Turns out, Homer applies to everything.
When Thetis knocks on Hephaestus’ door, the narrator invites us to look inside his workshop and gives the audience a fantastic surprise:
Homer, Iliad 18.417-21
“He took the wide scepter and went limping to the door.
The handmaidens when supporting their lord,
Golden ones who look like living young women.
In each of them was a mind among thoughts, and each had
A voice and strength—indeed, they know the works from immortal gods
They were all busy around their master. But he was limping.”… ἕλε δὲ σκῆπτρον παχύ, βῆ δὲ θύραζε
χωλεύων· ὑπὸ δ’ ἀμφίπολοι ῥώοντο ἄνακτι
χρύσειαι ζωῇσι νεήνισιν εἰοικυῖαι.
τῇς ἐν μὲν νόος ἐστὶ μετὰ φρεσίν, ἐν δὲ καὶ αὐδὴ
καὶ σθένος, ἀθανάτων δὲ θεῶν ἄπο ἔργα ἴσασιν.
αἳ μὲν ὕπαιθα ἄνακτος ἐποίπνυον· αὐτὰρ ὃ ἔρρων
It is becoming something of a trend to mention Hephaestus’ statues in the Iliad as one of the first instances of artificial intelligence. Why this is attractive is certainly understandable from this passage. The golden statues of women are certainly artificial (they are made by Hephaestus) and the narrator here takes pains to emphasize that they are intelligent: they have noos in their thoughts–which probably means that they have understanding of their perceptions and reactions–and they know how to do and make thanks to the gods themselves.
But how does this passage relate to other inanimate and made things in the Homeric tradition? I suspect that the answer to this and the information in this passage can help to outline some of the assumptions that go into our own approach to artificial intelligence.
Homer, Iliad 18.478-473
“So he spoke and he left her there and went to his forges.
He turned those towards the fire and ordered them to start working
All twenty of them began to blow into the melting bins,
Releasing every kind of well-directed breath,
They were by his side when he was rushing here, and at another time over there,
Wherever Hephaestus desired and was completing his work.”῝Ως εἰπὼν τὴν μὲν λίπεν αὐτοῦ, βῆ δ’ ἐπὶ φύσας·
τὰς δ’ ἐς πῦρ ἔτρεψε κέλευσέ τε ἐργάζεσθαι.
φῦσαι δ’ ἐν χοάνοισιν ἐείκοσι πᾶσαι ἐφύσων
παντοίην εὔπρηστον ἀϋτμὴν ἐξανιεῖσαι,
ἄλλοτε μὲν σπεύδοντι παρέμμεναι, ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖτε,
ὅππως ῞Ηφαιστός τ’ ἐθέλοι καὶ ἔργον ἄνοιτο.
In general, I think that Hephaestus’ workshop says more about the depiction of Hephaestus and the tension between able-bodied gods and the one disabled divinity more than anything else. The golden statues support him physically and their actions are described in close proximity to Hephaestus’ stilted movement. They are both a physical prosthesis for him and an extension of his own mental activity. Amy Lather has written well in describing the automata in his shop as an extension of his will. Note how their movement is related both to his physical limitations and his craft.
I have written before about how Greek epic presents bodies and have used insights from disability studies to help explain tensions between fitness of body and fitness of mind. There is a lengthy bibliography already about Hephaestus’ body, the tension between intelligence and force, and the exploration of action and outcomes through heroes of the body and the mind. Hephaestus supports and confirms a system that endows disabled bodies with compensatory gifts. He does not appear with these assistants in Greek art, but he is typically depicted as seated, with a staff, or riding on a mule when the other gods walk. I think that understanding automata in Homer as prostheses, especially in conjunction with Hephaestus, is really useful. But I don’t think it tells the entire story.
Let’s start with other automata. Hephaestus may be the only Greek divinity who engages in conventional physical labor without it being a punishment (leaving aside pastoral activities). But how he does that labor matters. The cloud garages of the gods described in the Iliad or the metal dogs created by Hephaestus for Alkinoos in the Odyssey (7.91-94). The former are like the labor assistance in Hephaestus’ forge. Divine automata function to support the lives of ease that Homer creates for the gods. Actual labor is for the most part reserved for humans. “Artificial Intelligence” serves to support a distinctly Olympian lifestyle. Alkinoos’ dogs are a kind of cybersecurity, a watchful unwavering fantasy of safety that cannot be suborned.
But this line of thinking takes me back to the golden girls described above. The dogs and tripods aren’t said to have intelligence or voice. The artificial object that is shaped like a human girl gets voice and intelligence unlike the dogs and tripods. Is it significant that the statues crafted to assist Hephaestus and endowed with thought are coded as women? Can we make a connection between that shaping and the female voice given to most AI speakers or the woman-coded bodies that are typical of our ‘androids’? The gendered nature of the fabricated laborers is part of a cultural system of subordinated and exploited labor. Outside of this forge, blacksmiths and their helpers are generally male in Greek myth. The gender choice here is marked and meaningful.
In addition, consider the nature of the intelligence. The tripods are part of what Lather calls Hephaestus’ “extended mind”. The golden girls have a mind and thoughts in them, but I wonder if we consider these qualities as necessarily connected to the works they know/have learned from the gods. These golden statuettes have only service and replicative knowledge. They are not generating knowledge or tasks, but ‘think’ and operate only in reference to their creators and their functions. Truly intelligent artificial life would have aesthetics, intentions, and knowledge of their own.
One of the things that concerns me about AI in the modern era is the lack of imagination that attends its use. First, we don’t actually have artificial intelligence; we have predictive models that anticipate the kinds of things human users expect as outputs (like the tripods and the golden girls). But, second, our AI is being used in the service of creating a life of ease for some by appropriating the products and labors of others. Generative AI in being “trained” on our writing and art and then sold back to us as services will eventually generate a massive transfer of wealth back to those who had the political and financial means to create it and ‘own’ it.
Apart from the prosthetic and aesthetic value of thinking about Hephaestus’ androids, then, there is political insight as well. Homer’s artificial intelligences function to support those whose lives are already easy and they rely and perpetuate cultural patterns of labor exploitation based on physical attributes. Homer’s robots–like generative AI–don’t create anything new but, when pressed, can tell us a lot about what already is. Our adoption of technology from the industrial age through to the information age and the artificial intelligence age is following similar patterns. Rather than being applied for the good of all humankind, AI is using public resources (energy, water) and the collected production of human minds (language, literature, and art) to benefit a small number of people.
Short bibliography on Hephaestus’ automata
Faraone, Christopher A.. “Hephaestus the magician and near Eastern parallels for Alcinous' watchdogs.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, vol. XXVIII, 1987, pp. 257-280.
Gerolemou, Maria. Technical automation in classical antiquity. Bloomsbury Classical Studies Monographs. London ; New York: Bloomsbury, 2023..
Lather, Amy. “ The extended mind of Hephaestus: automata and artificial intelligence in early Greek hexameter.” The Routledge handbook of classics and cognitive theory. Eds. Meineck, Peter, Short, William Michael and Devereaux, Jennifer. Routledge Handbooks. London ; New York: Routledge, 2019. 331-344.
Mayer, Adrienne. 2019. Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology. Princeton.
A short bibliography on Disability Studies and Homer
Brockliss, W. 2019. “Out of the Mix: (Dis)ability, Intimacy, and the Homeric Poems.” Classical World 113: 1–27.
Burkert, W. 1997. “The song of Ares and Aphrodite: on the relationship between the Odyssey and the Iliad,” in G.M. Wright and P.V. Jones, eds. and trans., Homer: German Scholarship in Translation. Oxford: 249–262.
Caldwell, R. S. 1978. “Hephaestus: A Psychological Study.” Helios 6: 43–59.
Christensen, Joel. “Beautiful Bodies, Beautiful Minds: some applications of disability studies to Homer.” Classical World, vol. 114, no. 4, 2020-2021, pp. 365-393. Doi: 10.1353/clw.2021.0020
Davis, L. 1995. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. New York.
Detienne, M. and Vernant, J.-P. 1978. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Chicago.
Dolmage, J. 2006. “‘Breathe upon Us an Even Flame’: Hephaestus, History, and the Body of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 25 119–140.
Dunkle, J. R. 1987; “Nestor, Odysseus and the Mêtis-Biê Antithesis: The Funeral Games, Iliad 23.” The Classical World 81: 1–17.
Garland, R. 1995. The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Greco-Roman World. Ithaca.
Grmek, M. D. 1991. Diseases in the Ancient Greek World. Baltimore.
Johnson, R. L. 2011. “Introduction: Health and Disability.” Health and History 13: 2–3.
Kelley, N. 2007. “Deformity and Disability in Greece and Rome,” in H. Avalos, S. J. Melcher, and J. Schipper, eds., This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies, Atlanta: 31–46.
Laes, C., C. Goodey, and M. L. Rose. 2016. Disabilities in Roman Antiquity: Disparate Bodies a Capite Ad Calcem. Leiden.
Laes, C. 2011. “How does one do the History of Disability in Antiquity?” One thousand years of case studies. Medicina nei secoli , N. S., 23(3), 915–946.
Linton, S. 1998. Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. New York.
Lowry, E. R. 1991 Thersites: A Study in Comic Shame.
Marks, Jim. 2005. “The Ongoing Neikos: Thersites, Odysseus, and Achilleus.” AJP 126:1–31.
Mitchell, D. T. and S. L. Snyder. 2000. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependency of Discourse. Ann Arbor.
Noel, Anne-Sophie. “« Prosthetic imagination » in Greek literature.” Prostheses in antiquity. Ed. Draycott, Jane. Medicine and the Body in Antiquity. London ; New York: Routledge, 2019. 159-179.
Penrose, Walter D. 2015. “The Discourse of Disability in Ancient Greece.” The Classical World, 108: 499–523.
Porter, J. L. ed. 1999. Constructions of the Classical Body. Ann Arbor.
Postlethwaite, N. “Thersites in the Iliad.” Greece & Rome 35: 83-95.
Rankin, H. D. 1972. “Thersites the Malcontent: A Discussion,” Symbolae Osloenses 47: 36–70.
Rose, M L. 2003. The Staff of Oedipus: transforming disability in ancient Greece. Ann Arbor.
Stiker, H.-J. 1999. A History of Disability. Trans. by W. Sayers. Ann Arbor (=Corps infirmes et sociétés. Paris, 1997).
Thalmann, W. G. 1988. “Thersites: comedy, scapegoats and heroic ideology in the Iliad.” TAPA 118:1-28.
Thomson, R. G.. 1997. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York.
Vernant. J.-P. 1982, “From Oidipous to Periander: Lameness, Tyranny, Incest, in Legend and History”, Arethusa 15, 1992, 19-37.
Wills, D. 1995. Prosthesis. Stanford.