Chapter 5 explores how technical ingenuity featured in the act of religious dedication in ancient Greek religion. Two epigrams (describing the Bes rhyton and the Lykon thēsauros) are taken alongside descriptions of pneumatic inventions in Philo of Byzantium and Hero of Alexandria’s technical manuals. Though not typically read together, Hellenistic epigram, and Philo and Hero’s texts all describe pneumatically enhanced dedications, and demonstrate, within the confines of their genres, how religious awe and technological capabilities were co-constructed and mutually reinforcing. The chapter then turns to the material record, examining traces of technically enhanced dedications in practice. Two examples are explored: wheeled tripods and articulated figurines. Both categories of votive objects show different ways in which the mechanical, human, and divine were configured. Both also stretch further back chronologically than the discussion of preceding chapters, allowing for discussion of texts including Iliad 18 on Hephaistos’ tripods, and Prometheus Bound, to think about the (mythic) prehistory of the phenomenon at hand.

Clement of Antioch is only attested in John Malalas. He wrote a chronicle that was based on Eusebius, but had a distinct focus on Syria. He positioned the start of the Christian era in AM 6000.

The sophist Heliconius composed a chronological history that summarised events from Adam until Theodosius I. Although Heliconius was a Christian, extant fragments signal secular interests.

Itios is a corrupt name for an author in John Malalas. We consider the possibility that it is a garbled reference to the Hellenistic historian Berossus.

The fifth-century Latin author Gennadius of Marseille lists a chronicon among the works of Jacob of Nisibis. This is certainly a pseudepigraphic work, probably composed in Syriac. It had an anti-millennarianist intention.

Theophilus is only attested in John Malalas, as a chronographer who defended a Christian era starting in AM 5916 or 5967. The fragments show an interest in Greek literature and myth, and a knowledge of Julius Africanus and Eusebius of Caesarea. He wrote from an Alexandrian perspective, probably in the fifth century.

In the Greek, Latin, and Armenian traditions, there are dispersed references to a chronicle by Epiphanius of Salamis (fourth century). This is certainly a sixth-century work that probably was created in the late sixth-century controversy about the date of Christmas. It defended, like Annianus, a start of the Christian era in AM 5500.

Chapter 6 turns to ritual processions or parades (pompai) which formed part of ancient Greek religious festivals. On the evidence of the Great Dionysia of 309/308 BCE organised by Demetrius of Phalerum, Ptolemy II’s ‘Grand Procession’ shortly thereafter, and Herodes Atticus’ Panathenaea of 143 CE, large, self-animated machines, known as automata, became a feature of Hellenistic processions. Automata were effective as processional equipment because they enhanced existing features of religious procession: narrative, synaesthesia, and the call–response relation between worshippers and the deity. Automata in procession attest to the new technological capabilities of the Hellenistic period and are harnessed within new religious and political realities including the development of ruler cult, but their effective deployment was based on existing theological structures. The chapter also looks in detail at the only extant technical text dedicated to the construction of automata: Hero of Alexandria’s On Automata.

Isidore the deacon is a probably sixth- or seventh-century chronographer, of whose work a single fragment is preserved. It records an episode from the life of John Chrysostom.

Inspired by his Old Testament exegesis, Diodore of Tarsus composed a chronicle, which corrected the chronology proposed by Eusebius.

This book shows that the development of Greek chronicle writing from the fourth to the seventh century was not linear. Whilst the impact of the chronicle of Eusebius of Caesarea was great, subsequent writers corrected his errors and incorporated the third-century chronographies by Hippolytus and Julius Africanus into the framework shaped by Eusebius. As a consequence, chronographies and not chronicles dominate in Greek literature. One innovation of the fourth century was to link computus (the calculation of the Easter date) and chronography, first visible in the work of Andreas, brother of Magnus (352), and later in that of Annianus (412). The direct impact of Annianus has been overestimated: unique in some of its core ideas, his work resurfaced only in the 560s, in the context of Justinian’s attempt to impose the Christmas date of 25 December on the church of Jerusalem. This controversy caused a flurry of works of chronography and computus to be written in the early seventh century. Besides this tradition, the book also uncovers a tradition of chronicles with a local focus, which shaped the chronicle of John Malalas. We argue that the source indications of Malalas deserve more credit than they are usually granted.

The first example of mechanical epiphany that the book sets forth is that of the well-known ‘god on the machine’ (deus ex machina) employed in the ancient Greek theatre. Moving beyond interpreting the theatrical crane as a plot device, this chapter forefronts the mēchanē’s material qualities to explore the theological potential of the object as a mode of visual epiphany. Vital to the success of this mode of epiphany was the challenge to the viewer to recognise divine intervention as well as the mechanics that constructed and enabled it. The evidence of Old Comedy, both fragmentary and the fuller plays of Aristophanes, help demonstrate how uses of the comic crane (kradē) undercut the interpretative symbiosis between man, machine, and divine agency on which tragedy was predicated. The chapter closes by exploring how the theatre as a form of mass media made it fertile ground for development and exploration of theological ideas, not just a reflection of literary norms.