On Automata, or Self-Moving Machines

that servants would not otherwise be necessary, if looms, saws, and other instruments obeyed of themselves the commands of their Masters, as did the devices of Daedalus. It is to be believed that from these first inventors, taking increase little by little, these arts reached posterity. Nevertheless, because these arts are founded upon mathematical reasons, it is to be believed that they grew as much as those sciences were refined from day to day. Whence, these sciences having taken a most notable increase in the times of Plato—when the Oracle of Delphi stirred all Greece to these studies with the proposal of the duplication of the cube—the excellence of this art also grew to a marvel. And hence it is that Archytas the Pythagorean philosopher, he also one of the doublers of the cube and most famous among mathematicians, fashioned (as Gellius writes) a wooden dove which flew, being stirred, as he says, by the breath of the spirit which he had enclosed therein. Eudoxus likewise, his contemporary, delighted greatly in the wonders of these arts; Plutarch saying in the Life of Marcellus that Archytas and Eudoxus transferred mathematical contemplations from things that were subject only to the intellect to the examples of corporeal things and those subject to the senses, adorning (as he says) Geometry with various sculptures. Plato, nonetheless, was indignant—if we believe the same author—that a most noble science, known to none other than philosophers, should be communicated to the common people, and that the most secret and hidden mysteries of philosophy should be in a certain manner revealed. Wherefore he rebuked those two and turned them from the thought of working marvelous things; whether this was well done—that is, whether the zeal of Plato was good or not—this is now neither the time nor the place to determine. It suffices that from