190 Chapter 9
The purpose of the cells is unknown; some suggest a medical function,
while others propose a magical or ritual use. In Craddock’s speculative
scenario, if the jars were really electrical cells and were hidden and ac-
tivated somehow inside a metal statue, the figure would seem charged
with mysterious life and power. Anyone who touched it would be awed
by a sensation of warmth, a strange buzzing vibration, and perhaps even
a subliminal blue flash of light in a darkened chamber. 21
Between the third century BC and the first century AD, fluctuating notes
that imitated birdsong were made to issue from the beaks of realistically
painted models of birds designed by Philo and Heron, famed inventors in
Alexandria, Egypt, whose works are further described below. But even
earlier, people were excited by an artificial bird capable of flight. This au-
tomaton was attributed to a philosopher- scientist- ruler named Archytas
(ca. 420– 350 BC), an associate of Plato. Archytas lived in Tarentum, a
colony founded by Greeks in the heel of southern Italy. 22 Admired for his
intelligence and virtue, Archytas was elected to the office of strategos, gen-
eral, and he is thought to have influenced the idea of philosopher kings in
Pla to’s Republic. Aristotle refers to Archytas’s theories in several treatises,
but Archytas’s own writings no longer survive except in scraps. 23
Horace addresses a poem to Archytas (Ode 1.28, “the Archytas ode”),
and many ancient sources discuss Archytas, but a work by Aulus Gellius
(writing in the second century AD) is the only extant text to describe the
first self- propelled flying machine in the shape of a dove. What Archytas
“devised and accomplished is marvelous” but not impossible, comments
Aulus Gellius (Attic Nights 10.12.9– 10). Aulus Gellius quotes “the philos-
opher Favorinus, a studious researcher of ancient records,” who stated
that Archytas “made a flying wooden model of a dove in accordance with
mechanical principles.” The Dove was “balanced with counterweights
and moved by a current of air enclosed within it.” The bird flew some
distance, but “when alighted it could not take off again.” Here, I’m sorry
to report, the passage breaks off, and the rest of the text is lost.
Archytas’s pathbreaking work on mechanical mathematics, cubes,
and proportions allowed the creation of scale models. Much has been
written by modern philosophers and historians of science on Archytas’s