The Androids of Hephaestus: Between Human and Machine in the <em>Iliad</em>

Abstract

The description of Hephaestus’ workshop in Iliad 18 presents several kinds of fanciful automata. Contrary to several previous treatments of this topic, this paper argues that it is not anachronistic to think of these figures as “robots”—i.e., as having some kind of inner-workings, even though Homer does not explicitly say what they are. This discussion helps to situate the Homeric poems within the pre-history of Greek natural philosophy.