Chapter 1 - More Than a Thing

Summary

This chapter starts by exploring the familiar scene at the end of Iliad 18, where the Homeric poet describes a sequence of artefacts that Hephaestus has manufactured: first the self-moving twenty golden tripods that he is in the process of completing, now fitting them out with ‘ears’, then the golden girls, automata, who are filled with ‘voice and strength’, then twenty self-blowing bellows that keep the fire strong, and finally Achilles’ wondrous shield, filled with individuals, animals and other elements that move, speak, sing and grow before our eyes for all (as the poet takes pains to remind us) that they are metal-forged. The Odyssey introduces another set of Hephaestus-forged animated metal goods, the guard dogs standing on the threshold of Alcinous and described in book 7.91–4. The second part of the chapter explores some of the vivified objects that populate archaic hexameter poetry, hybrids that stand at the interstices between the living and inanimate and among which the Hesiodic Pandora claims a place together with several other Hesiodic beings. The discussion’s second half focuses on the late archaic and early classical period, and on a number of figures that appear in Pindaric poetry.