On Automata, or Self-Moving Machines

that he made such a thing, or if he did, it was not judged worthy by that most grave and prophetic Writer to be named; for he attended to grave and divine matters, and this, being a thing that seems to serve for amusements. In the writings of the Pagans, most ancient is Vulcan, son of Juno and grandson of Cretan Saturn. Now it is manifest that Vulcan delighted beyond measure in the art of iron, and practiced it with marvelous industry, as is gathered from the authority of all the most ancient Poets Greece possessed; nor is any thing narrated worthy of wonder for its craftsmanship that is not attributed by them to Vulcan: such as the invisible net with which he captured Mars; the chair with hidden snares that he gave to his Mother, whereby she, as Pausanias writes in the Attica, remained bound; the arms of Achilles; the bow of Diana; the watering trough of Neptune's horses; the most famous scepter of Jove; and the Shield of Hercules, of which Hesiod writes marvelous things. Homer, nevertheless, the most ancient among the other Greek Poets, bears witness that he was very skillful in these self-moving [semoventi] contrivances; because, besides having given him in the XVIII book of the Iliad the golden handmaidens fashioned by him, which served him no less than if they had been animate and rational beings, he adds mention of those Tripods which, moved by means of wheels, went of themselves to contend among them, and then of themselves likewise returned home. The verses of the Poet where he introduces Thetis having gone to his forge to entreat from him the arms for Achilles, are these:

He found him, all in sweat, moving
About the bellows; for he
Had fashioned twenty tripods,
Only to place them around the walls
Of his lofty, well-built dwelling,