128 Chapter 6
rattling feathers that are “thin blades of iron and copper” and “beaks
like swords,” the birds swoop down on young Gesar, who fells them with
three arrows. 45
Mechanical birds were actually constructed as early as the fifth and
fourth centuries BC in Greece. There was a bronze eagle that flew up to
signal the start of the horse races at the Olympic Games (described by
Pausanias 6.20.12– 14) and a flying dove model was attributed to the sci-
entist Archytas. As noted in chapter 1, Apollonius would have observed
numerous automata and self- moving devices in Ptolemaic Alexandria
(see chapter 9 for these and other historical inventions). 46
Zeus’s Eagle, fabricated by the god Hephaestus, would not be the
only artificial animal created expressly as a killing or torture device in
Greek myth and history, as the following chapters reveal. Throngs of
animated devices and creatures “made, not born” fill out Hephaestus’s
stellar résumé of ingenious artifices and automated devices. Some are
laborsaving, but others are deliberately intended to inflict harm.