Poetic, literary and philosophical dreams of automata in the ancient world tended to focus on humanoid or at least mammalian entities. Yet when automata are realised in practice, they are considerably different in quality.This chapter explores the gap between the automata of ancient fantasy and reality, in terms of their physical nature and the concepts and categories with which they were implicated (statues, slaves, theatre, the divine).  It asks how far the sense of wonder that is associated with automata changed over time and how far it (ever) depended on a naturalistic or realistic reproduction of the body, human or animal. I argue that although the earliest known automata seem to have made gestures towards naturalism, both in terms of movement and other activities (if not in how these effects were realised), interest rapidly moved towards mechanical wonder (as Hero of Alexandria suggests) and theatrical wonder rather than any kind of naturalistic wonder. Perversely, the more technically sophisticated ancient automata became, the less the interest in mimicking human or animal bodies. The explanation may be sought partly in the non-naturalistic nature of ancient mimesis and partly in the changing status and sophistication of ancient mechanics. As a result, the path from ancient automata to modern notions of the robot or android is not at all straightforward.

The second chapter focuses on a key and highly contested figure of European legal modernity: Robert Joseph Pothier. A visionary whose legal creativity was wholly projected into the future for some, and a lucid and pragmatic seventeenth-century mind for others, Pothier, working with preexisting materials facilitated the conceptual leap from medieval divided dominium to modern property as unitary and robust dominium.

This chapter explores two scripts of thauma (marvel/wonder) regarding the interior of the human body: the first derives from the Aristotelian idea that a purpose can be assigned to virtually everything in the world, our interior organs included; as soon as the design within our bodies has been figured out, our interior instantly enters the realm of the beautiful. The second script of marvel pertains to the idea that there are little ‘machines’ and ‘sub-machines’ inside of us, with their own complex structures and their own distinctive power to make us marvel at their artistry and efficiency. Considerable attention has been paid recently on the reevaluation of the presumed polarity between teleology and mechanics in ancient Greek philosophy and medicine. Rather than assume a mutually exclusive relationship between the two, scholars argue that the two models can be seen as converging and combining with each other in a number of significant ways. An organ which looks like a machine is still working with a specific purpose; in fact, its machine-like design can be adduced as a confirmation of the fact that nature did everything in wisdom. Differences, however, persist, and one of them relates to the important issue that teleology ascribes the purpose of things to an invisible force, whereas a mēchanē has a human constructor. To argue that the body can be figurally understood in analogy with a machine can thus be seen as opening, among other things, new avenues concerning the question of how we look at and appreciate the body’s marvellous properties: kallos in this case, while still being thought to ultimately derive from a superhuman designer, is simultaneously more concretely understood and appreciated in practice with direct reference to the inventiveness of the human mind.

In several works and passages, Galen reports on the model of the heart as developed by Erasistratus. Already in 1995 (published in 1997), Heinrich von Staden pointed to the parallel between Erasistratus’ model and the force pump. This technical device, which belongs to the technical apparatus developed in the frame of ancient water-supply systems, was indeed codified in textual and probably even diagrammatic form for the first time by the contemporary Ctesibius during the third century. This chapter first revisits Galen’s reports to define Erasistratus’ model of the heart technically and precisely. Subsequently, it analyzes a series of ancient works and fragments from the Hellenistic period until the second century to establish the extent to which such parallelisms are historically justified on the level of the scientific reflections of the time. In the background, the analysis of archeological findings of periods are considered to show that, contrary to what is usually assumed, the realm of practical activities and engineering might have been strongly influenced by the anatomic knowledge of antiquity.

Giovanni Baptista Morgagni (1682–1771), Professor of Anatomy at Padua, produced the most important studies in the eighteenth century on the De Medicina of the Roman encyclopediast A. Cornelius Celsus.  Morgagni’s intensive reading of Celsus combined his own medical experience with philological emendation.  Morgagni contextualized Celsus’ text within a theoretical framework of an empirically ordered transhistorical investigation of the structure, function, and pathology of the human body.  Here ancient and modern disciplinary authorities engaged with the same evidence available to the senses.  Morgagni’s argument in part contrasted Celsus’ humoralist evidence that bladder stones originate in the substance of the urine with Friedrich Hoffmann’s (1660–1742) argument that bladder stones originate in the iatromechanist action of the kidneys.  Morgagni’s emendations continue to mark our own contemporary editions of Celsus’ Latin text.

The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that Theophrastus, in De ventis 56, employs material principles to explain certain features of both living beings and inanimate things, and that the unknown author of Problemata physica 1.24, having been influenced by Theophrastus, uses these same principles but in a different way, treating the parts of certain artifacts as models of, or analogous to, parts of the human body. Special attention is given to both Theophrastus’ discussion of Notos, the south wind, and to De ventis 56–58, in which he deals explicitly with the effects of winds on the human condition. (A revised version of Mayhew’s edition of the text of De ventis 56, with a detailed apparatus criticus, is included in an appendix.)

The idea of the body as a machine constitutes one of the central analogies in early modern Western thought. From Descartes’ Treatise of Man (written in the 1630s) to the Iatromechanist School of medicine, and from La Mettrie’s Man a Machine (1747) and de Vaucanson’s automata to science fiction’s fascination with cyborgs, robots and androids, mechanical models have been employed to reproduce and mimic one aspect or another of life itself. One of the aims of the present collection of essays has been to show that the conceptual origins of this early modern body–machine concept can be traced back to texts, scientific theories and ideas of classical antiquity. The technological artefact – be it a simple device or a more complex machine – in the texts and authors which we have been exploring does not stand in isolation from the flesh, bones, fluids and organs that make up the human body; on the contrary, they intersect with the latter in a number of significant ways.

While there are some studies on medical tools in antiquity, none of them deals with medical machines. These are mainly depicted in two treatises of the Hippocratic corpus that deal with bone reduction. The texts, On Fractures and On Articulations, which are two of the oldest works in the Hippocratic corpus, are premised on the idea that the body’s treatment is better achieved with rational, practical means that build a relationship of trust between the physician and the patient. Accordingly, the function and use of the Hippocratic machines by physicians is critically approached with a view to investigating the way medical machines interact with this leading doctrine of Hippocratic medicine. By differentiating between Hippocratic bone machines and simple medical tools used in bone reductions, the chapter concludes that bone-reduction machines, in contrast to simple medical tools, are mainly identified through the great amount of power they can release, which could be both beneficial and harmful for the patient, depending, in most of the cases, on the way the physician uses the machine. Moreover, the use of machines, by enhancing the physician’s craft, jostles it; mechanical bone reduction depends less on the physical power of the physician’s body (hands etc.), his knowledge and skill and more on the power of the machine.

This chapter proposes that the myths of Hephaistos, the ancient Greek god of metalwork and the only physically impaired member of the Olympic pantheon, can provide insights into ancient inspirations for and understandings of assistive technology. It explores the range of different types of assistive technology that impaired and disabled individuals used in classical antiquity to facilitate their physical mobility, covering staffs, sticks, crutches, corrective footwear, extremity prostheses, conveyances, equids, bearers, and caregivers. It notes the frequent association of impairment and technology in classical antiquity. It argues for a reassessment of the suitability of the Medical Model for use in relation to impairment and disability in classical antiquity under certain circumstances.

The aspirations to autonomy, independence, and equality that had so effectively boosted the discourse of modern dominium were never realized. The rationalization and expansion of the economy generated enormous wealth inequalities between the propertied classes and the large class of propertyless wage laborers. The latter experienced oppression rather than autonomy, material dependence rather than the independence, and exclusion instead of equality. The “social question” prompted social reformers of all stripes to interrogate the role of property law (in the emergent industrial world. The new political and intellectual climate ushered in by the “social question” transformed the ideological discourse about property, the concerns of the jurists, and, to an extent, the doctrines of law of property. Alternative conceptualizations of property focused on social relations, redistribution and cooperation, started appearing in the writings of philosophers, economists and pamphleteers. And a new generation of jurists, interested in functionalist and consequence-based approach to property, gained power in law faculties around Europe, Latin America and beyond.

The chapter charts the emersion of a powerful rhetorical attack on fedual property in revolutionary and post-revolutionary France, a powerful combination of critiques that would become one of the standard tropes of the modern property discourse well beyond the boundaries of Europe. To this fabricated negative archetype, French jurists juxtaposed the modern idea of Roman absolute dominium enshrined in the Napoleonic Code. Neither Roman nor absolute, the new law of property was a collection of prexisting doctrines couched in the lnaguage of a hyerbolic individualism.

The nineteenth-century theorists of modern Romanist dominium, the great French treatise writers and the German Romanists, embarked in a quest for coherence, aspiring to develop a body of property law that was both normatively and conceptually coherent. These jurists sought to build an architecture of logically interrelated property doctrines informed by the unifying commitment to maximizing the owner’s freedom of action. Yet, this coherence was illusory. Far from being coherent, modern property was riven with tensions that could hardly be disguised. This chapter examines the jurists’ attempts to deal with four doctrines that threatened to strain the coherence of the property system: emphyteusis, possession, the limits on ownership and common ownership. While ultimately unsuccessful, these attempts are nonetheless worth exploring. For one thing, these failed attempts opened rifts in the apparently solid edifice of modern dominium, rifts that, a couple of decades later, the social critics will be quick to exploit. Most importantly, the jurists’ efforts to ease these tensions throw into sharp relief a diversity of ideological and methodological views that hardly surfaces in the nineteenth-century property treatises.