On Automata, or Self-Moving Machines

Beneath the base of each he had placed gold
Wheels, so that of themselves into the sacred assembly
They might go; and from there likewise
Return (a marvel) back to the dwelling.

Thus he says, showing that he spoke of nothing else than these artifices, making manifest mention of Automata and of wheels placed beneath the base. Vulcan, as we said, was born of Juno, and Bacchus of Jove. Bacchus was the husband of Ariadne, and she the daughter of Minos, King of Crete, by whose order Daedalus made the Labyrinth; whence it is concluded that between Vulcan and Daedalus there was no distance of time; and that therefore Daedalus might learn from Vulcan the art of these Self-moving Machines. And that this is true is drawn from the verses of Homer in the same place, where he says that Daedalus had made for Ariadne works similar to those of Vulcan, in which works there were youths and maidens who, offering one another their hands, went about dancing. A work of the same Vulcan was that animated golden dog (as Dionysius, a most ancient interpreter of Homer, writes) which was stolen in Candia from the Temple of Jove by one Dionymus, and given into the keeping of Tantalus; whence followed the ruin of the said Dionymus, and of his wife and daughters. Julius Pollux makes mention of this same dog, except that he says it was not made of gold, but of Monesian metal. From this dog (as he writes) they fabled that the Molossians descended. Of the works of Daedalus, Plato made mention in his Dialogue entitled Meno, the images of which he says were made with such artifice that, if they were not bound, they fled away; and Aristotle, in the first of the Books of Politics, where he reasons concerning servants and defines them as animate instruments by which inanimate ones are moved, writes that