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.

In a well-known passage (Juv. 13 (7).473a15–474a24), Aristotle preserves a fragment of Empedocles’ poem dealing with respiration, in which the clepsydra is used as a model for breathing. Although there is a substantial literature on this subject, most scholars have focused on explaining Empedocles’ account of the mode of operation of the clepsydra as well as on assessing the extent to which Aristotle’s interpretation does justice to Empedocles’ fragment. What has received little attention is the fact that Aristotle begins his criticism of Empedocles by offering a specific counterproposal of his own, one that rests on the idea that the mechanism of respiration can be explained in a much clearer fashion through the analogy of a forge bellows. References to bellows are actually already traceable to Homer. At the same time, the bellows–lungs analogy continued to be used for centuries after Aristotle. The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the existing literary and archaeological evidence about bellows in Greek antiquity in order to build a complete picture of its function and hence clarify Aristotle’s theory of respiration.