‘Technical Divination’ and ‘Technologies of Divination’

When it came to ascertaining the will of the gods, ancient Greek worshippers were spoiled for choice of technique. The worshipper could gaze into a mirror, a lamp, or a bowl, cast dice and match the throw to a pre-inscribed list of oracular responses, or pose a question and draw lots for the answer. At times, they received divine answers through manifestations of the natural world; at other times, the divine was mediated through an inspired human being, either an ordinary individual via dreams or through the figure of a prophet(ess).Footnote ¹

This is by no means an exhaustive list, and already in antiquity there was a desire to sift through these techniques and to categorise them. Plato, then Cicero, divided the heterogeneous divinatory methods available to the ancient worshipper into two separate groups: the ‘enthusiastic’ and the ‘technical’.Footnote ² The former worked through the possession of a human by a supernatural power, the latter through the interpretation of signs. Plato in his Phaedrus distinguishes linguistically between divinely inspired prophecy (mantikē) and human interpretation of augurs (oiōnistikē); Cicero tells us that two kinds of divination existed, one dependent on art (ars), the other on nature (natura). Both authors profess their own views on which category was more likely to provide direct access to the gods, but we should beware of taking these overtly intellectualised and elite statements as representative of broader religious attitudes. The enthusiastic–technical divide as it is presented in the ancient sources, coupled with Protestant approaches to theology, did, however, encourage modern scholars, for a time at least, to privilege the enthusiastic. Further influenced no doubt by Herodotus’ Histories, the divination of Delphi’s Pythia was seen as the method par excellence Greek worshippers used for divine advice and approbation.Footnote ³

Even at Delphi, however, there are clear (if exceptional) cases where sortition was used alongside enthusiastic prophecy.Footnote ⁴ Dodona – the other sanctuary mentioned by Plato as the quintessential place for enthusiastic manteia – also had a system of lots using lead tablets for divinatory enquiry, as recent work has shown.Footnote ⁵ A truly accurate picture of divination at Dodona should also include mantic interpretations of the unique soundscape of the oracular site in the combination of the rustle of the sacred oak, singing of doves, and ringing of bronze.Footnote ⁶ A similar case for the pluralism of operators, techniques and organising principles could be made for divination at Claros and Didyma.Footnote ⁷ Large, institutionalised oracular sites including Delphi, Dodona, Claros, and Didyma existed alongside ‘independent’ diviners known as manteis and chrēsmologoi. Recent research into these figures, and the array of techniques that they employed, has helped to recalibrate the picture of ancient divination, leading to the general acceptance that both institutionalised oracles and their independent counterparts offered an array of techniques to access the divine.Footnote ⁸ Any strict delineation between technical and enthusiastic methods of divination, then, becomes fuzzy outside of the testimonia of Plato and Cicero.Footnote ⁹

Nevertheless, the terminology, if redefined, proves useful for the task at hand. All ancient divinatory techniques were perceived to involve cooperation between gods and mortals, yet some forms undeniably relied more on human input than others. While the ancient category of ‘technical’ divination relates to the teachable skill of decoding signs, I take the liberty of misappropriating the term and refer to ‘technical divination’ and ‘technologies of divination’ to stress the human application of technē to construct and validate divinatory methods. Indeed, in an expanded sense, all communication relies on technē since language and voice are also technai. The focus of this section, then, is on the intensification of technicity in human–divine communications, rather than the introduction of a completely alien concept. I pull out examples from the subset of techniques of divination that relied on and, at times, specifically revelled in humanly fashioned technologies by which to access divine knowledge, and which thus served to manifest divine presence. In this, I redirect attention away from the questions and answers of ancient divinatory contexts (issues that are already well covered in scholarship, as we shall see) to the objects, techniques, and technical knowledge that were involved. I wish to interrogate what the human hand’s intervention in constructing access to divine knowledge meant, both theologically and in terms of religious experience.

The very definition of divination, and the role it played in ancient Greek culture and society, has been much debated by scholars.Footnote ¹⁰ While traditionally divination is described as a quest to ascertain the future (in most cases to quell anxiety), some scholars have highlighted the ways that divinatory practice can conversely be used to make sense of and justify occurrences in the present and even the past. Divination has been seen as a public act concerned with community and politics, or as an intimate act of self-knowledge. In almost all instances, studies on ancient divination focus on the questions posed, answers received, and the interpretative moment – ‘making sense’ of the divine response either from a sociopolitical or a religious perspective. I turn instead to the act of divination itself and, above all, to the processes, techniques, and environments involved. I interrogate the humanly constructed, divinely authenticated channels which allowed human questions to secure divine answers. Divination redirects information – and usually information that is perceived to solve problems – between the everyday, human world and the supernatural world. The insertion of specialised technē into the process of bridging the worlds to begin with is a way to bring divine knowledge into the realm of human knowledge and human control. Rather than defining divination as about the future, or about making sense of the past, or as a means to solve human anxieties – all of which put the emphasis on the divine answers – I intentionally draw attention to the techniques and technical knowledge in place to achieve contact with the divine and to make the supernatural manifest. In other words, standing in opposition to an unsought epiphany, divination may be described as a quest for epiphany through humanly manufactured techniques and media.

Understanding divination as a quest for epiphany is perhaps easiest when we think of the possessed Pythia at Delphi, or of Amphiaraos appearing in a dream to tell the Athenians what to do with Oropos.Footnote ¹¹ It is less obvious in cases where divination is undertaken according to processes of randomisation and rationalisation through objects, as in the case of astragalomancy (casting dice) or catoptromancy (prophecy through mirror reflections), for example. Analysis of these methods of ‘technical divinations’ as quests for epiphany allows us to ask what role the objects have in mediating with the divine sphere, and with making the divine present. This brings us once more to an understanding of the potential of objects to be social actors and to have agency and, in this context, a particular kind of agency which allows the object – the knucklebone, the bronze – not to be the divine (as in the case of the cult statue), but to shape the human–divine interaction by acting as a mediator between two worlds. I will argue, perhaps counter-intuitively, that human intervention in ‘technical divination’ increased the authenticity of the divine encounter by setting up effective channels for transmission of divine sēmata that boosted the clarity of the ‘signal’ and lessened the impact of interfering ‘noise’.

Shaping the Dice: Astragalomancy and Mathematical Probability

Both regularly shaped six-sided dice (kyboi) and irregularly shaped four-sided knucklebones (astragaloi) were used in divinatory contexts all over the ancient Greek and Roman worlds.Footnote ¹² In their natural state, astragaloi were unevenly shaped rectangular prisms with two rounded ends, meaning that they only ever had four sides on which to land: two of these sides were narrow, and two were broad. One of the narrow sides was concave, the other convex, and the same was true of the broad sides. Finds of astragaloi in their natural state are plentiful in the archaeological record, as are those which have been pierced, flattened, embellished, inscribed, or replicated and monumentalised in other materials such as bronze or ivory. Humans clearly took an interest in these objects beyond their existence as sacrificial waste and sought to invest them with a different ontological status through various interventions. Crucially for this discussion, manipulating the mathematical potential – both combinatorial and probabilistic – of astragaloi was one such intervention.

It is not entirely clear how astragalomancy worked and there is a great chance in any case that practice varied over time and place. In general terms, different rolls of astragaloi corresponded to answers which were delivered either by pre-inscribed inscription, or possibly by a pronunciation given in the moment.Footnote ¹³ A well-studied case of the former comes to us through a unique series of inscriptions recording a set of prescribed answers at an Anatolian site of astragalomancy.Footnote ¹⁴ We will return to this site in a moment, but for now it suffices to note that in his analysis, Fritz Graf focuses on how the act of rolling the dice or astragaloi makes randomising integral to the divinatory moment. I will instead place emphasis on the (complementary) act of regularising the shape of astragaloi prior to the roll in order to see what this might tell us about objects, gods, and technical knowledge.

Given the polysemantic nature of astragaloi ranging from (and switching between) weights to toys to objects involved in sacrifice, dedication, and prophecy, it is not always easy to determine whether finds of knucklebones at sanctuaries had a strictly mantic function. Aside from the Anatolian site where the epigraphic evidence provides unique assistance, Alan Greaves has made a good argument for the connection of the site of Branchidai-Didyma to astragalomantic practice during its Archaic existence.Footnote ¹⁵ Similarly, the Korykeion Cave near Delphi where around 23,000 astragaloi were recovered, of which around 4,000 bones had been modified in some way, is a site that lends itself well to possible conjectures of astragalomancy.Footnote ¹⁶

Various components affect the mathematical probability of the rolls of ancient astragaloi. The first is, quite simply, their natural shape, which is determined by the animal from which they were sourced. Astragaloi were made from the bones of sheep, goats and pigs. The knucklebones of these animals naturally have more evenly spread rolls than the bones of cows, buffalos, asses, and horses.Footnote ¹⁷ The common use of sheep, goats, and pigs in sacrifice, and thus the availability of these knucklebones for repurposing, should be taken into account, yet it is striking that the bones of another common sacrificial animal, cows, are excluded. Their larger size may have been a contributing factor, but the uneven distribution of rolls of bovine astragaloi was possibly at stake too. In this case, it seems that ancient Greek practitioners of astragalomancy were aware of the mathematical probability of the rolls and how to affect these. Even with the preselection of species, two sides of an unaltered astragalos are far more likely to appear than others. Though astragaloi could be modified in various ways, there are two interventions that specifically impacted the probabilities of the throws: shaving part of the bone, and filling in the concave portion, both of which essentially aim to flatten and even out the sides. Archaeological evidence shows that there was no standardised way to flatten ancient astragaloi and, indeed, the degrees of flattening vary incredibly in the material record.Footnote ¹⁸ We are left with a curious picture: the modifications to the astragaloi appear mathematically informed as they are effective in spreading the odds of the rolls more evenly than prior to intervention. At the same time, this never quite achieves the exact 25 per cent per side.Footnote ¹⁹

The inscriptional evidence allows us to deduce that at the astragalomantic site in Anatolia, five astragaloi were rolled at once, and each of the fifty-six possible rolls would match up to a pre-formulated oracular answer. These same fifty-six oracles could also be consulted if three (six-sided) dice were rolled. The sophistication of the combinatorial knowledge that the Anatolian site exhibits is noteworthy.Footnote ²⁰ When we add to this the manipulations of individual astragaloi for more consistent rolls, we see in the ancient practice of astragalomancy not just an erudite use of mathematical combinations, but also an interest in and manipulation of the frequency of the appearance of the individual faces which constitute these multi-dice combinations. Worshippers wanted to arrive close to equal probability for the rolls on each individual dice before these objects were deemed effective media for the transmission of divine will and subsequently placed into combinatorial sequence for interpretation. There is a real attempt here of regularising the randomising, of mathematically containing the uncontainable breadth that was the entirety of divine will.

Siegert’s notion of cultural techniques, introduced earlier in the book, is again useful at this juncture.Footnote ²¹ If, as we have seen, claims like ‘counting existed before numbers’ are integral to the theoretical profile of cultural techniques, then we might like to think of the way that games of chance as a cultural technique preceded gambling.Footnote ²² Further, Siegert stresses that operations (e.g. counting or writing) always presuppose technical objects which are ‘capable of performing – and to considerable extent, determining – these operations.’Footnote ²³ This helps us to see how dice existed before probability and that the former are cultural techniques that perform and determine the media concepts subsequently generated. From the point of view of media theory, then, the regularising of knucklebones helps to set up an effective channel for transmission of divine sēmata that ‘tunes’ the clarity of the ‘signal’ without any interfering ‘noise’, as it were. It is a technological intervention that effectively effaces itself in the service of neutrality. From the point of view of the worshipper, regularising dice is a way for the human worshippers to increases the ‘objectivity’ of these media to communicate divine will. Tampering with the mathematical probability of astragaloi is a peculiar theological statement: being supreme as they were, why could the divine not simply affect the dice as needed despite the object’s natural bias? Shaping the astragaloi is both an acknowledgement that divine–human communication remains imperfect, as it relies on constraints imposed by the human world, and an attempt to reduce the impact of these constraints. At the same time, the fact that the throws are still not equally distributed anticipates and justifies – mathematically and materially – the possibility of miscommunication or misinterpretation.Footnote ²⁴ Lest this all sound too serious or intellectualised, we might like to remember that alea is a fundamental category of play too. Regularising is thus a way to uphold the illusion of parity in the interaction between the two parties, but the aleatoric element stands as a reminder of the indeterminacy of divine will which in other contexts might just be termed ‘chance’.Footnote ²⁵

Two main conclusions can be drawn. First, this case study brings to the fore the counter-intuitive notion that human involvement does not decrease religiosity and chance but increases it. Second, the fact that astragaloi remain probabilistically uneven – and that they coexist with rather than being replaced by regular six-sided dice – can be explained theologically as manifesting the religious realities of Greek supernatural entities whose knowledge will always be difficult to apprehend perfectly in the human realm, but which comfortably uses technical (here, mathematical) knowledge and intervention to get as close to it as possible.Footnote ²⁶ There is a lot of work still to be undertaken in the study of astragaloi in general, as well as their use in divinatory contexts specifically, but if what I suggest is correct, it helps us to understand the theological underpinnings of an otherwise obscure practice as derived from the technical modifications on religious objects involved in the ritual.

Divine Reflections: Catoptromancy and Architectural Epiphanies

Mirrors are another common, yet commonly misunderstood, medium of human–divine communication in ancient Greek religion. Not only were they frequent votive dedications, they were also used for divination and erected in sacred spaces to increase religious aura. Mirrors make a particularly interesting case study for the subject at hand because we are able to put the anecdotal evidence for the use of mirrors in religious contexts into conversation with technical texts on the science of reflection (catoptrics) to gain insight into the intended effect of reflection on the viewer.Footnote ²⁷ In doing so, it becomes apparent that mirrors are theologically useful in ancient Greek religion neither for their ability to produce glare or iridescence, nor for their potential to reflect an image accurately, but, on the contrary, for their capacity to create optical illusion.Footnote ²⁸ This was in part inherent within the materiality of the ancient mirror, where the lens made of slightly curved bronze resulted in reflections that were both less clear and less accurate than those of modern glass mirrors. The natural obscurity and distortion of the ancient mirror was, however, further manipulated to great effect through the application of catoptric knowledge, as ancient scientific manuals make clear. The various ‘trick’ mirrors described in these technical texts speak directly to instances where mirrors were used in ancient divinatory contexts, as well as to enhance the religiosity of the temple space. In both contexts – which are united if we see them as cases of sought and unsought epiphanies, respectively – it was the ontological gap between the real and reflected image that enabled the ancient Greek worshipper to connect with the ever-distinct realm of the supernatural.

Greek catoptric manuals are chiefly concerned with how a variety of visual experiences can be manufactured and manipulated according to the reflection of rays. The arrangement of three types of mirrors – plane, convex, and concave – are used to exploit the difference between the real image and its reflection in a number of creative ways including magnification, multiplication, and omission in the technical texts of Euclid, Pseudo-Hero, and Ptolemy, for example.Footnote ²⁹ The Heronian author, in particular, gives insight into the catoptric ‘programme’, or the practical ways to use geometrical optics. He explains that reflection gave humans a way to observe what was not typically observable, whether this was a human body in unexpected form, something happening behind you, or what your neighbour was doing across the street.Footnote ³⁰ In other words, catoptric knowledge allowed for the human production of the ontologically slippery thing that was reflection and, further, according to the vocabulary of the ancient text, this provoked wonder.Footnote ³¹ Given such an understanding of reflection, it comes as little surprise that mirrors were harnessed in ancient religious contexts. We have touched on this tangentially already in the context of catoptric epiphany in Dionysiac mystery cult and now turn our attention to evidence for the uses of reflection in Greek religion more broadly.Footnote ³²

The practice of mirror divination in ancient Greece is attested in a variety of sources from the lampooning of catoptromancy using a well-oiled shield in Aristophanes, to the serious sanctuary description of a mirror suspended over water in Pausanias, to the unease of Iamblichus and Clement of Alexandria regarding the mirror’s ability to access divine truth.Footnote ³³ Exactly how ancient Greek catoptromantic rituals were undertaken, or according to what paradigm the mantic message in the reflection was decoded, is not clear, likely due to the fact that there was no real consistency. Fortunately for us, however, this does not impede an understanding of why reflection was theologically compelling. Alongside the use of mirrors in the context of specific divinatory (and mystery) rituals, reflections were also a generally effective way to manufacture or enhance divine presence within sacred space thanks to their capacity for creating an ontological ‘other’. Plenty of the mirror arrangements described in Pseudo-Hero could have been used for this purpose but two are remarkably persuasive given complementary anecdotes elsewhere. The first is a mirror termed a ‘multi-view’ (polytheoron or multividum) which comprised two bronze, rectangular, plane mirrors connected along one side with a hinge.Footnote ³⁴ From this fairly simple catoptric arrangement, a mirror of exciting visual potential ensued which, the author explains, could animate unexpected iconographic forms from a three-headed Zeus to dancing victories, to Athena being born from the brow of Zeus, and distorted bulls’ heads. A similar use of mirrors for the projection of distorted images in a temple in Smyrna is preserved in Pliny.Footnote ³⁵

The second example of common ground between technical and religious content is the description by Pseudo-Hero of a mirror which was constructed ‘so that everyone who approaches will see neither himself nor someone else, but only whatever image (imaginem) someone has chosen in advance’.Footnote ³⁶ We can extract from this a clear expectation on behalf of the individual to see themselves reflected when they approach a reflective surface, and thus a sense of cognitive dissonance when this is subverted. According to an often-cited description by Pausanias, it appears that exactly this kind of mirror was erected in the Temple to Despoina at Lykosoura.Footnote ³⁷ There, the worshipper saw not themselves reflected, but images (agalmata) of the gods and thrones instead. Without wanting to press the language too hard, one does wonder whether the imago of the medieval Latin was originally Greek agalma, which would further help in contextualising the Heronian mirror and thus strengthen its association with a religious context. In any case, the argument that I would like to make is that beyond relating mirrors to Greek religion in non-specific terms, as is often done in scholarship, we can perhaps be more nuanced in describing the place that optical tricks facilitated by mirrors as embodiments of catoptric knowledge held in ancient religion. This in turn allows us to talk about elements such as distortion, visual illusion, and paradox as part of the lived experience of ancient Greek religion, and especially of epiphany.

Properly situating mirrors and catoptric knowledge within ancient Greek divination and epiphany also speaks to and extends scholarly explorations on the interior of temples. There is an obvious point for comparison with the use of water or oil at the foot of cult statues, for example, known to have been used in the temples of Athena Parthenos and Zeus at Olympia, as well as in the temple to Asklepios at Epidauros. Scholars have noted that such use of reflections would ‘enhance the religious atmosphere’ (vel sim.) of the temple, but the problem with these sorts of statements is that, though they may well be right, they are intuitive and as such rest on modern preconceptions of what is theologically enchanting.Footnote ³⁸ My focus on mirrors uses catoptric manuals to sidestep this methodologically dangerous formulation in order to better understand what was religiously compelling about reflections from an emic point of view. The answer from these technical texts is the capacity of catoptrics to play with the gap between the real and the reflected, and thus to play with ontology.

Further productive comparisons may also be drawn from thinking about how catoptrically induced epiphany worked with other architectural elements that capitalised on visual manipulation, such as so-called epiphany windows in Hellenistic temples.Footnote ³⁹ Christiana Williamson has recently explored the way that Greek temple doors functioned as portals of epiphany especially via visual access to the cult image.Footnote ⁴⁰ Williamson’s analysis considers both main temple doors as well as curious door-like apertures in a number of temple pediments, notably in Asia Minor, which can be explained if considered as spaces for epiphanies and their re-enactments. Epiphany windows speak quite directly to staged epiphanies looking both back to the deus ex machina of Part I, and forward to the discussion of Lucian’s Alexander in Part III. Somewhere like the Hellenistic Temple to Apollo at Didyma is a unique case which inverts many of the expected features of religious architectural technē to great theological effect.Footnote ⁴¹ In many ways it is the exception that helps to prove the rule. Archaeological remains from the site reveal a colossal 14-metre-high door which, instead of giving an epiphanic glimpse of the cult statue within, took worshippers into a pronaos where their physical and visual trajectory was then unexpectedly thwarted by a 1.46-metre-high wall above which was a large rectangular ‘window’ 5.63 metres in height. Entrance to the inside of the temple was instead through steep, claustrophobic, vaulted tunnels which stood on either side of the pronaos and which allowed only one person abreast. The temple’s architecture also subverted expectations of light and dark where instead of progressing from brightness towards a darkened cella, the peristyle of the Didymaion was densely colonnaded while the innermost court was open-air, containing an oracular spring and sacred laurel grove. Thinking through the lens of lived religious experience, of how the worshipper would have navigated the space, and how the space would have navigated the worshipper, we get a nice sense of how the technē of architecture at the Temple to Apollo at Didyma was consciously manipulated to speak to theological realities concerning access to the divine. At this site, access to Apollo and his mantic advice was anything but direct and straightforward: openings ended up being dead ends and less-than-monumental spaces in fact led to light and epiphany. A theological analysis of Greek temple architecture helps to enrich the picture of technically enhancing divine presence.Footnote ⁴² It allows us to situate the mechanical miracle within a range of technical strategies used to manifest the gods in ancient Greek religion, rather than to dismiss the phenomenon as an outlier.

Trophonios, Tunnels, and Underground Temple Architecture

Staying with the use of technical knowledge to increase the religiosity of sacred settings, but coming back to the specific context of divination from which we have strayed, we turn now to the oracle to Trophonios at Lebadeia in Boeotia, and to its construction of a unique, artificial divinatory setting. Consulting Trophonios was an overtly manufactured experience where human technē was essential to achieving a connection with the divine, creating a particular(ly Greek) religious experience and containing particular(ly Greek) theological presuppositions.

The oracle is known to have been in use as early as the sixth century BCE. Herodotus records instances when it was consulted, including by Croesus in his famous ‘testing’ of the oracles.Footnote ⁴³ Pausanias mentions that the oracle gave a pronouncement about the battle of Leuctra of 371 BCE, and it appears that Celsus was also urging visitors to go there at a similar date to Pausanias’ own visit to the site.Footnote ⁴⁴ This well-known religious site of Panhellenic importance evidently had a long life. The curious method of divination practised at the site has not come down to us in descriptions earlier than the second century CE, yet the terrifying nature of a Trophonian consultation was familiar enough to a fifth-century BCE Attic audience for it to be the source of a joke in Aristophanes’ Clouds.Footnote ⁴⁵ Moreover, though it is now lost to us, we know that a pupil of Aristotle’s wrote a two-book treatise entirely dedicated to the descent to the Trophonion.Footnote ⁴⁶ Four extant accounts are of particular interest because they are extensive in their treatment of the oracle and its descent: Pausanias 39.9.5–14, Plutarch’s On the Sign of Socrates 589F–592E, Philostratus VA 8.19–20, and Maximus of Tyre 14.2. All of these are much later than the bulk of the evidence we have used up to this point in the book which, on the one hand, fits with this chapter’s mission of extending the historical span of the case studies covered, and, on the other hand, points to the enduring problem of trying to understand Greek religion through the lens of much later texts.

Albert Schachter and Pierre Bonnechère – two of the leading scholars on Trophonios – agree that there were undoubtedly changes in almost every area of the oracle over time.Footnote ⁴⁷ All the same, one of the main contentions of Bonnechère’s monograph is that there is a large amount of continuity from our Classical sources through to the Roman sources in regards to the oracle’s relation to myth, the nature of the consultation, and the manner of revelation. Leaning foremost on Pausanias’ detailed eyewitness account, and supplementing where necessary, we are able to reconstruct more or less how a consultation at the Oracle of Trophonios would have proceeded.

In preparation for their descent, the worshipperFootnote ⁴⁸ stays a number of days in a sacred lodging, abstaining from hot baths, but indulging in meat from the multitude of sacrifices made to Trophonios, his children, Apollo, Cronus, Zeus, Hera, and Demeter. An initial act of divination is undertaken through inspection of entrails to ensure that the worshipper will be well received by Trophonios. This must then be reconfirmed by the sacrifice of a ram. Once these preliminaries have been undertaken, the worshipper is taken at night (sources are unanimous on this point) by two hermai (thirteen-year-old, citizen boys) to the river to be anointed and washed. There, the worshipper drinks from two fountains (one of Lēthē ‘Forgetfulness’ and the other of Mnēmosunē ‘Memory’), prays to a cult statue supposedly made by Daedalus, and subsequently heads to the oracle itself, described at length by Pausanias, and to which we shall return shortly. Within the sacred enclosure is an artificially constructed chasm. The worshipper is brought a ladder in order to be able to descend into this cave. They must then lie down, holding barley cakes in their hands as gifts to the god, and are pulled feet first into the depths. In this inner sanctum (adyton) they experience the divinatory moment revealed by either sight or hearing – sources agree on the fact that the worshipper is the direct medium of divine knowledge. They come back out of the Trophonion feet first and after the ascent are taken by the priests to recall all that they learned below, specifically termed thaumasia in Plutarch’s version. The inquirer is seriously emotionally inhibited after the experience, but a few more days in the initial lodging and the power to laugh returns to them. The whole experience is sealed with an obligatory dedication of a tablet recording what the enquirer learned.

Scholars have largely abandoned the original interpretation of the descent into the Trophonion as an incubatory experience as there is no evidence that dreams were involved.Footnote ⁴⁹ Instead, owing to the traumatic nature of the event according to the sources, it has been seen as closer to an initiatory ritual with an oracular element. Quite a lot has been made in scholarship of the preparatory rituals (particularly as they link to sensory deprivation and a heightened state of anxiety inducing an altered state of consciousness), the notion of descent as a re-enacted katabasis, and the suppression of laughter at the end, but not much has been made, theologically speaking, of the construction of the oracle as an artificial chamber of religious experience.

By virtue of features of landscape or topography, natural sites can carry and propagate an innate sense of religious aura. Delphi’s spectacular location is an obvious example, or Didyma’s mythic status as a place of paradigmatic wilderness.Footnote ⁵⁰ Caves too, even when not particularly remarkable or unique, are always thought of as sacred, at least to the nymphs.Footnote ⁵¹ The description of the location of Trophonios’ oracle, however, is overtly manufactured and this is what leads to its sense of the numinous. Pausanias’ description is weighed down by specific dimensions, details of construction, materials used, and their colour. Even the size of the enclosure is described in relation to the technical – ‘about that of the smallest threshing-floor’ – further associating this sacred site to manual activities and to the human taming of nature.Footnote ⁵² Later too the cave is described not by assimilation to a natural grotto, but as being kribanos, ‘in the shape of a bread oven’.Footnote ⁵³ This cave is overtly not natural (ouk automaton) but made with technē and harmonia after the most accurate masonry.Footnote ⁵⁴ This is perhaps extra fitting for a god who himself was trained in architectural technē: Trophonios and his brother, Agamedes, are said from very early on in the mythic tradition to have built parts of Apollo’s first temple in Delphi, for example.Footnote ⁵⁵ Innately bound up with Trophonios’ mythological tradition is the idea that without artificial technē, there would be no access to the gods. The Trophonion is fashioned so that the worshipper needs a ladder – a man-made, purpose-specific mechanism – to descend and have this divine encounter. This was not, in fact, about replicating nature, but about creating a religiously compelling environment and manufacturing a religious epiphany which enabled the worshipper to become the vessel for divine knowledge as part of this religious experience.

The exact method by which the worshipper is pulled through the chamber is controversial, but ancient authors agree that the worshipper was reclining. If we are to believe Pausanias – and, incidentally, the scholia to Aristophanes’ Clouds – about the feeling of being pulled through as if being sucked into a vortex, it is possible that the person descending was lying down on a platform on tracks which got pulled feet-first into the abyss. If this is the case, it is difficult not to see this rolling platform as a sort of ekkyklēma, particularly fitting given the theatricality of the whole manufactured divine encounter. The Trophonion has been constructed as an artificial ‘set’ and since costuming made for more authentic role-playing, we should not be surprised to find that detail of the worshipper’s attire is something on which all our sources also dwell. The katabasis, apart from being a re-enactment into the underground chamber which Trophonios was mythically conceived to inhabit after being swallowed by the earth, can also be read as an intentional inversion of the deus ex machina. Instead of the god descending upon the human realm to orchestrate affairs, the person descending is going to the god (Trophonios is explicitly referred to as a theos, and not as a hero)Footnote ⁵⁶ thanks to the machine, in order to experience a direct encounter with the divine which will in turn help to orchestrate affairs back in the human realm.

What does the descent to Trophonios’ oracle tell us about the way that the cosmos was thought to have functioned? The transit between realms of divine knowledge and human knowledge is achieved through the application of humanly engineered mēchanai. The gods in general, and Trophonios in this specific instance, were considered ontologically distinct from humans, which is why Trophonios’ prophecies only come through a confronting experience of altered consciousness. The worshipper becomes, according to Maximus of Tyre, a prophetic enunciator to others. But the worshipper’s role as divinatory medium was enabled by a manufactured religious experience. They are guaranteed to be an authenticated medium of divine knowledge because they have gone through a process arranged and overseen by human technical knowledge. At the same time, the divine realm was evidently considered to be geographically accessible – the worshipper is confronted not with a prophet, but with Trophonios himself – and mechanical knowledge, mechanical skill, were imperative in bridging this gap.

Artificial subterranean religious experiences were not exclusive to Trophonios. At Claros, for example, there also existed an oracular cave (specus) of some sort as well as a labyrinth structure in its foundations.Footnote ⁵⁷ There too the combination of drinking from a spring and descending into a cave provoked mantic inspiration in the human visitor. Herodotus records for us the puzzling tale of Salmoxis – possibly a god, possibly a man – who uses subterranean architecture to stage his resurrection.Footnote ⁵⁸ Archaeologically, the prominent tholos (or thymelē) structure at Epidauros provides another example of an underground labyrinth used to shape religious experience in some way, possibly by enhancing acoustics integral to ritual performance, according to one interpretation.Footnote ⁵⁹ Excavations from the site of ancient Corinth reveal a fifth-century temple nestled close to a spring which has an underground tunnel connected to it, big enough for a man to crawl through. Access to the tunnel, which ran under the shrine, was possible thanks to a hidden door camouflaged as a metope.Footnote ⁶⁰ The temple appears to have had a dual priesthood to Dionysus and Apollo,Footnote ⁶¹ and it has been suggested that the structural peculiarities of this small Corinthian temple can be accounted for if we understand them as mechanisms built to allow not for prophecy, but for the manufacture of the Dionysian miracles of producing wine spontaneously from the earth, or turning water to wine.Footnote ⁶² Such quintessential Dionysian feats – richly attested in ancient literature, as discussed in relation to the Bacchae in Part I – would have reliably invoked the presence of Dionysus in the temple space.Footnote ⁶³ The orchestra floor of the fifth-century theatre in the sanctuary of Apollo at Cyrene had various incisions in the rock floor of its orchestra. One is a large pit (1.70 × 0.81 m) which, it has been suggested, was probably used for staging apparitions from underground.Footnote ⁶⁴

Far from being at odds with the religious, techniques and technical knowledge were in fact necessary to a functioning cosmological order which included both divine and mortal bodies, and divine and mortal knowledge. While nature and the divine is a well-rehearsed theme in scholarship on ancient religion, it appears that there is more to be done to interrogate the relation between the artificial and the divine. Religious technologies not only allow and organise access to the transcendental, but their use tells intriguing tales about what the ancient gods were thought to be able to do, and the use to which mechanical epistemology was put in antiquity. The very fact that humanly manufactured objects (as opposed simply to the natural world) were vehicles for divine knowledge is part of the theological underpinnings of ancient Greek religion and deserves to be better acknowledged in scholarship on ancient Greek divination. That this is constantly being navigated in different ways – by regularising the shape of knucklebones, fashioning optical illusions, creating artificial spaces for divine encounter, for example – reveals the manifold ways in which technical epistemologies were integral to divine communication. It shows the ways that ancient religious media were constantly and self-consciously being ‘tuned’ to improve the signal that they transmitted. This is important because when we turn, in Part III, to the Roman reception of the phenomenon of technologically manufacturing religious aura, it must be seen against this backdrop. ‘Rational’ scientific knowledge was not deemed counterproductive for divine–human relations in ancient Greek religion but, on the contrary, helpfully supported ‘technical’ divinatory practices and mechanical epiphany in a host of ways.

With the exception of unwrought stones, bones, or other natural curiosities, nearly all objects found in Greek sanctuaries could loosely be labelled ‘inventions’ in that they are the products of human craft. From Herodotus to Pausanias, sanctuaries of the ancient Greek world overflowed with extraordinary objects made of gold, silver, and bronze such as weapons, statues, cauldrons, and tripods.Footnote ² These are also the kinds of objects recorded with the highest priority in temple inventories though in reality, the archaeological record confirms that ancient temples contained all sorts of ‘mundane’ dedications too. The aim of Part II is to uncover what ingenuity ‘does’ in the reciprocal charis relationship that organised religious acts, and especially dedication, in ancient Greece.Footnote ³ In this, I seek to ascertain not what was at stake when dedicating something expensive, but what we can infer theologically when dedicating something mechanically ingenious.Footnote ⁴ While colossal offerings, and those of rare and intricately worked materials such as gold and ivory, could also be the objects displaying the most technologically sophisticated craftsmanship, a focus on these precious objects risks skewing the historical question underpinning my investigation by introducing muddying issues of wealth. The divide between expense and ingenuity is evidently not clear-cut, but in the subsequent discussion I try to isolate examples which involve an element of the mechanical as a clear feature of the dedication, regardless of the expense involved, in order to better pinpoint the value of ingenuity in (literally) forging connection with the divine. There is a difference too between dedicating a symbolic embodiment of technical or mechanical expertise – a lyre, a nail, a votive tablet with a representation of technical profession, for example – and dedicating something that has been enhanced by mēchanēma ‘mechanical contrivance’ such as self-rotating wheels, pneumatically enhanced vessels, wheeled tripods, or hinged figurines, the case studies presented here.

Hellenistic Epigrams and Technical Manuals

Hellenistic epigrams and mechanical manuals are two types of texts concerned with objects, words, and the constructive power of both.Footnote ⁵ Epigrams are imaginative, and revel in their own use of poetic language to enhance the allure of the objects to which they are (or once were, or are imagined to be) attached. Technical manuals are theoretical and seek, through precise prose, to present objects via their constituent components of construction put together according to the scientific principles therein. Both expect and incite a cognitive, emotional, even somatic reaction to the objects they describe – both, therefore, should be considered ekphrastic – but while epigrams typically harness the ambiguities of poetics to their advantage in order to dictate affect, technical manuals aim to disambiguate, placing mechanical knowledge front and centre to create epistemological advantage for their author and reader.Footnote ⁶ In Gellian terms, when put side by side, epigrams and manuals, respectively, capture for the modern reader the enchantment of technology and the technology of enchantment.Footnote ⁷ Most interestingly for present purposes, both text types have an interest in objects dedicated to the gods and thus by unpacking how these two genres work separately and in conversation, we are able to uncover intriguing histories about object agency, ingenuity, and religious dedication in the Hellenistic world.

Wheels, Worshippers, and Ilinx

The oldest surviving text on mechanics attests to the use of technology to enhance objects placed in temples. The Mechanica, as we have seen, forms part of the Peripatetic corpus and can probably be ascribed to his school in the opening decades of the third century. The treatise presents and explains various mechanical contradictions manifest in everyday life. Physical principles and mechanical systems are elucidated through practical examples based around recognisable conundrums. Questions range from ‘why is a moving object easier to move than an object at rest?’ and ‘how do pulleys pull great weights?’ to ‘why are pebbles at the seashore rounded?’ and ‘why is it necessary in order to stand up to first make an acute angle between calf and thigh, and between thigh and torso?’.Footnote ⁸

Before setting out the ‘Problems’ proper, the text offers a short introduction in which the properties of the circle are described, with a focus on the fascination that these properties provoke. According to the Mechanica, the circle is the source of all mechanical advantage (the origin of the balance and the lever on which the pulley, wheel, and axle and cogwheel then depend), and as a result it is the first of all thaumata, ‘marvels’.Footnote ⁹ The circle is something marvellous (thaumastos) that creates things even more marvellous (thaumasiōteros) by the fact that it combines the most marvellous (thaumasiōtatos) quality of the union of opposites (ἐκ μὲν γὰρ θαυμασιωτέρου συμβαίνειν τι θαυμαστὸν οὐδὲν ἄτοπον, θαυμασιώτατον δὲ τὸ τἀναντία γίνεσθαι μετ᾿ ἀλλήλων.).Footnote ¹⁰ The categories of opposites that the circle combines are: moving and stationary (i.e. the centre point remains stationary while the circumference rotates), and thus, relatedly, slower and faster motion (if one considers the trajectories of different points on the radius), as well as forward and backward motion. This final observation leads the author to describe rotating wheels placed in temples.

In the explanation of the temple wheels, the mechanician’s privileged knowledge and practical skills are put to use to elucidate the constructs of a seemingly inexplicable thauma harnessed specifically for religious effect:

It would be disingenuous to present the Mechanica as a text interested in describing objects which might find a place in a temple. On the contrary, the marvel of circular motion is what leads the author, utterly incidentally, to describe these wheels. Moreover, even in those technical texts where a number of objects are described for the purpose of religious dedication, their style remains frustratingly laconic, above all in relating aesthetics and context. Fortunately for us, however, the Mechanica is relatively forthcoming with details of the location, material, size, use, and effect of the self-rotating wheels. We learn that these wheels were small, dedicated in temples, and made of bronze and steel. Still, the precise ritual in which the wheels were involved, the deity to whom they were dedicated, and the intention behind their rotation are all elements which remain unknown from this text alone.

Figure 5.1

Rotating wheels as described in the Peripatetic Mechanica (a) single (b) multiple.

Figure 5.1 Long description

Diagram a shows a single wheel with point A moving to the right and point B moving to the left, indicating clockwise rotation. Diagram b illustrates multiple interconnected wheels. The left wheel has point Γ moving left and point Δ moving right, while the two connected wheels show point A moving right, point B moving left, point E moving left, and point Z moving right. This setup demonstrates how motion is transferred and reversed at contact points between wheels which the Peripatetic author describes in relation to wheels used in temples.

The later pneumatic texts of Philo of Byzantium and Hero of Alexandria describe comparable wheels, which help not so much to fill gaps in the Mechanica account, but to gain a broader picture of the phenomenon at hand. Philo of Byzantium (c.280–220 BCE) wrote a compendium on a variety of mechanical subjects in nine books entitled Mēchanikē Syntaxis. Of this Hellenistic work, only the fourth book (Belopoeica) and parts of the seventh (Parasceuastica) and eighth (Poliorcetica) are preserved in Greek, while book five (Pneumatica) is preserved in medieval Arabic with a partial Latin translation. In this latter book, the installation of a bronze, hydraulic, self-rotating, and whistling wheel for ablution and purification ‘placed in the vicinity of a mosque or a temple’ is described (Figure 5.2).Footnote ¹² It is also reported that ‘the ancients used many wheels of this kind’. Whether this was an authentic comment by Philo, pertaining to religious custom prior to the third century BCE, or whether it is a later interpolation by the medieval Arabic translator as with the mosque, we cannot be sure, but both cases would, albeit in their own way, imply that wheels of this sort were more common in Greek religious contexts than has hitherto been acknowledged. The wheels also offer obvious parallels with other religious traditions, notably with Buddhist mantra wheels, or ‘prayer machines’ as they were called by early nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries.Footnote ¹³ Comparison both helps to unearth some interesting points of similarity through the use of parallel religious technologies in vastly different religious contexts, and serves to elucidate what was particularly enchanting about the ilinx provoked in the Greek case and how it related specifically to aspects of Greek theology.

Figure 5.2

Artistic reconstruction of a self-rotating wheel for purification used in temples after Philo, Pneum. 63.

Figure 5.2 Long description

On the left, a man engages a large circular wheel mounted on a wall, triggering the release of water into a basin. On the right, a cutaway view of the internal mechanism reveals the technical setup. Water flows from an upper container labeled alpha into compartments arranged around a rotating wheel labeled delta and epsilon. The rotation of the wheel is powered by fluid dynamics and weight distribution from descending cups like beta. The handle shown at gamma initiates the rotation, enabling a measured water flow for ritual purification. This invention reflects early engineering ingenuity in automating temple functions using gravitational and hydraulic principles.

(Image Y. Nakas.)

Buddhist prayer wheels, especially common in Tibet, come in various forms.Footnote ¹⁴ The handheld kind are made of a cylinder of wood or metal that revolves on an axis and contains within it many copies of thin paper with written mantras used in prayer. There also exist larger pillared versions erected at temple sites which can be turned by hand, wind, water, or fire. The pneumatic link is already a curious parallel to note, and, as with Philo’s purificatory wheel, the prayer wheel in the Buddhist tradition is innately linked to purification of the individual as well as of the place where it is installed. Both handheld and temple ‘mantra mills’ function according to the idea that with a single rotation, hundreds (or even thousands or millions) of Buddhist mantras were sent out into the world. Thus, part of the purpose of the Buddhist prayer wheel is replication and accumulation of religious energy (karma), and the technology here amplifies the noise of the message by sending out an exponentially greater number of mantras through a single gesture. At the same time, by allowing those who are illiterate to participate in ‘reading’ the sutra, Buddhist prayer wheels also transmute the signal and in doing so, extend its reach and boost its efficacy. In this, mantra mills help to create religious community by propagating the dharma, by introducing and perpetuating motion throughout the worshipping group, and by leading pilgrims collectively around the temple complex in the case of the pillared wheels.

There is little doubt that the technology of the prayer wheel in the Buddhist tradition creates theological community, and the comparison thus raises the question of collective worship in the Greek context too. A crucial difference, however, is the now well-rehearsed fact that ancient Greek religion had no creed or doctrine. Thus, if religious community is formed thanks to the religious technology of the rotating wheel in the Greek case, it is not on the same grounds. Rather than spreading a shared religious message, Greek wheels might be said to generate religious community by manufacturing a sense of the miraculous which offered a common basis for worshippers to confirm divine presence. Buddhist prayer wheels always go from stationary to spinning, aiming towards a state of perpetual rotation. There is no such consistency in the Greek examples. Mechanical texts in fact attest that there were multiple ways for the confirmation of divine presence to take place through the use of wheels in temple contexts. The Buddhist case relates to a theology of equilibrium and eternal harmony: the Buddha is said to have set the ‘wheel of dharma’ in motion when he delivered his first sermon. The Greek case, I suggest, has more to do with the awe-inspiring potential of the circle that we have seen explained in Mechanica, and the temporarily discombobulating power of ilinx that is subsequently invoked.

Philo’s rotating wheel for purification introduced earlier is different to the multiple wheels described in the Peripatetic text in that the former consists of a single miniature water wheel in constant motion which momentarily stops turning following the worshipper’s interaction:Footnote ¹⁵

Though not specified in the text, this kind of rotating wheel would need a source of running water: a central component mentioned in a number of Philo’s other pneumatic inventions.Footnote ¹⁷ Philo explains that the water carried by this wheel was sprinkled onto the clothes of the worshipper who proceeded to touch the wheel for purification. The regular rotation and whistling which accompanied the motion served, according to the author, to mark out the presence of the object in the temple. Tantalised by the constant motion, and quite literally called forth by the marvellous object, the worshiper first dips their fingers into the water and then brings the hard, rotating bronze to a momentary halt. The marvel of circular motion unites the Peripatetic and Philonian examples, certainly, but the involvement of the human body is inverted. In the former, the worshipper introduces motion and the chain reaction of the multiple wheels pressed together and consequential dynamism is felt to extend beyond the worshipper’s body into inanimate matter. This works more or less in accordance with the haptic theology of the Buddhist wheels where touch also aims at the ‘production’ of something. In the Philonian case, however, the worshipper temporarily interrupts motion – and accompanying sound – marking out their intervention (as well as subsequent integration) into a different kind of space.

Hero of Alexandria describes two comparable designs in his text on pneumatics. The first invention opens with the remark that in the porticoes of Egyptian temples bronze wheels were supposedly placed which were spun upon entrance by worshippers ‘in the belief that bronze purifies’ (διὰ τὸ δοκεῖν τὸν χαλκὸν ἁγνίζειν),Footnote ¹⁸ and that beside these wheels were utensils with which worshippers could sprinkle themselves with lustral water (perirrantēria) (Figure 5.3).Footnote ¹⁹ These twin observations on ritual practice lead Hero to devise a wheel which releases lustral water when rotated. Hidden in the entrance of the temple was a vessel of water to the base of which were attached two perforated tubes, one inside the other. A wheel was attached to the front end of the tubes so that in spinning the wheel, worshippers would unknowingly align the perforations, thus letting water pass from the vessel into the tube and out of the main hole.Footnote ²⁰ Hero’s lustral wheel essentially combines the ritual acts of the Philonian wheel but follows the Peripatetic model, where the worshipper instigates the action. Both Hero’s and Philo’s inventions could conceivably be read in terms of ritual economics, collapsing two ritual moments together in a single object. Beyond pragmatics, however, these inventions and the intention behind them also tell a theological story: interacting in ritual is, at its base level, a way to transition from secular to sacred. In the Heronian case, for example, the unexpected sprinkling of water would act as an affirmation that this transition has been successfully accomplished, while with the Philonian wheel, it is the re-establishment of sound and motion which affirms divine presence to the worshipper. In the case of the Buddhist mantra mills, the theological work of the temple wheel as ‘religious machine’, and specifically in the human input of the energy into the spinning, is based on unidirectionality: from human action to the accumulation of good karma. In the Greek cases, the theological work happens in the effect, where the spinning or halting is confirmatory of the divine, a two-way channel capable of sending a signal back into the human realm.

Figure 5.3

Artist reconstruction of wheels placed in temple porticoes after Hero Pneum. I.XXXII Schmidt = 31 Woodcroft.

Figure 5.3 Long description

The illustration displays an artistic reconstruction of an ancient hydraulic mechanism used in temple porticoes, described by Hero in Pneumatica. On the right, a worshipper is shown rotating a control disk that activates the water-dispensing process into a basin for purification. To the left, a technical diagram illustrates the mechanism’s components. Water stored in an upper vessel labeled alpha, beta, gamma, delta flows downward when the wheel labeled theta is rotated, triggering the alignment of internal components within a shaft below the vessel. This sequence causes water to pour down a tube labeled zeta, through the hole labeled pi and out a spout labeled mu. The elegant setup reflects ancient Greek innovation in using mechanical components as part of ritual practices like purification.

(Image Y. Nakas.)

Hero’s second invention which helps to exemplify themes relevant to the current discussion is called an hagnistērion, slightly obscure ‘instrument of purification’. It consists of a thēsauros (‘sacred offertory box’) equipped with a single bronze wheel which worshippers were accustomed to spin upon entering a temple (Figure 5.4).Footnote ²¹ Hero’s construction aims, he tells us, for this spinning to set off the sound of a black-cap warbler singing and rotating from the top of the device. If the wheel is still, he adds somewhat redundantly, the warbler will neither make a sound nor rotate. Again, the worshipper’s ritual interaction with the object instigates the miracle and confirms divine presence, this time by transferring somatic energy into both a visual and auditory marvel that imitates the natural world in an overtly artificial manner. The technological animation of the little bird relies, paradoxically, on the worshipper’s human body transferring force into and thus channelling itself through a pneumatic invention to confirm the ephemeral divine. The circle’s essence which ‘combines opposites’ makes it particularly suited to manufacturing miraculous effect across these ontological boundaries.

Figure 5.4

Artist reconstruction of a wheel for use in temples which sets off the singing of a little bird after Hero Pneum. II.XXXII Schmidt = 68 Woodcroft.

Figure 5.4 Long description

In the illustration, a person is shown turning a wheel mounted on a small shrine. The mechanism inside the shrine includes a system of gear wheels, a rope wound around an axle, and a water vessel. As the wheel labeled theta kappa is turned, it rotates gear mu, which drives a connected gear tau. This motion is transferred through an axle labeled lambda, which operates the piston-like mechanism labeled gamma inside the water chamber labeled pi. Water displaced by gamma moves upward, forcing air through a hidden pipe labeled zeta. The air flow produces a whistling sound mimicking bird song. This clever design shows how ancient engineers used pressure, fluid movement, and gear wheels to create animated effects for enhancing the temple experience.

(Image Y. Nakas.)

Temple wheels are not the only time that ilinx and religion come into close contact in the Greek tradition. Spinning tops were common votive offerings to the gods and instead of labelling these simply as ‘toys’ whose dedication signalled a ‘rite of passage’ (vel sim.) out of childhood, it is perhaps worth stressing the way their spinning captured a sense of the marvellous as described in the Mechanica with the acknowledgement that this was clearly harnessed in other religious contexts too. After all, among the toys that were able to distract infant Dionysus – toys which subsequently become symbola of the god in Mystery contexts – were the rhombos ‘bull-roarer’ which whirled around on the end of a string and the kōnos ‘spinning top’, as well as sphairai ‘balls’ and golden apples, both of which could also roll or spin.Footnote ²²

Some conclusions can be drawn from the discussion thus far. First, that circular motion invoked a sense of marvel in the ancient Greek mind not because of its ability to perpetuate divine energy as in the Buddhist tradition, but due to the wonderful and dizzying effects of spinning which confirmed divine involvement in the human realm. Less specifically, and this will be expanded upon in the following sections, there existed such a category as the ‘pneumatic miracle’ which worked to invoke the supernatural in temple contexts in the Hellenistic world. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, there was no single model for how these objects would have used their pneumatic properties to affect the viewer-worshipper. Rather, authors were creative in how they used mechanical knowledge to achieve the ultimate goal of manifesting divine aura. The Peripatetic example capitalises on the capacity of multiple wheels pressed together creating counter-intuitive, simultaneous motion; Philo’s invention harnesses the waterwheel’s ability to produce constant sound and motion; Hero’s models use pneumatic ingenuity to create the element of surprise, a key component of experiencing mechanical thauma, as we shall see presently.

*

While the texts of Philo and Hero proved vital in placing the objects described in the Peripatetic text into a wider cultural matrix, and the comparisons with the Buddhist tradition helped to pinpoint what was unique about the Greek use of the wheel in etic terms, evidence from the Mechanica offers a detailed explanation of what is at stake in viewing the thauma from an emic point of view. As the analysis so far has foreshadowed, the author specifies that the movement of these temple wheels is inexplicable (one source of energy animates multiple objects), counter-intuitive (they rotate in opposite ways),Footnote ²³ and simultaneous (they all turn at once). In addition to the purificatory nature of the bronze conditioning the worshipper’s response to these objects, the wheels are considered marvellous for the way in which their mechanical component – essentially a simple series of (cog)wheels pressed hard togetherFootnote ²⁴ – enhances the object’s incomprehensibility:

Thanks to the cryptic power of the dēmiourgos’ knowledge applied to the manufacture of this organon, the thauma is visible, the archē hidden, the aition unknown. The choice of language here perhaps deserves to be gently pressed given that determining exactly what constituted the archē of life was contested among early Milesian philosophers. If nothing else, the language puts mechanical texts into an active intellectual discourse of philosophical thinkers not just on ‘wonder-making’, as explained by Karin Tybjerg, but also on the origins of the cosmos.Footnote ²⁶ The Mechanica makes a point of elevating the mechanic to a privileged position: someone who understands the archē of miraculous movement, deliberately demystifying the workings of the wondrous. Herein lies an important distinction between the mechanic and the spectator-worshipper. Since ‘only the marvel of the mechanical device is visible’ (‘τοῦ μηχανήματος φανερὸν μόνον τὸ θαυμαστόν’), the worshipper is left to revel in the manifest presence of the divine force within the temple which the mechanics have engendered. At the same time, the text raises (and leaves open) the question of whether the thauma effect wears off with time or with familiarity, an issue which we will see return in full force in Part III. This perhaps helps to explain, however, why the Greek models, unlike the Buddhist wheels, offer a variety of different ways to provoke a miracle based on ilinx.

For the Peripatetic author, the power of mechanics lies in its ability to confound and to exceed the limits of human understanding. This speaks to Gell’s enchantment of technology quite explicitly as the viewer comes under the spell of the ‘coming into being’ of the object, failing to understand quite how it works.Footnote ²⁷ Yet there is a point at which understanding no longer matters, for even a mechanic is sometimes a spectator. As Berryman points out of the present-day ‘mechanical philosopher’, the mechanician may also, despite technical knowledge, attribute some of the wonder he has created to divinely inspired technē.Footnote ²⁸ At the heart of the construction of the machine is the unfathomable and the marvellous which work to endow the object with an agency over its viewers. In the same way that an irregularity in nature or the natural order is often considered in ancient Greece to be the divine manifesting itself, animation of the non-human – particularly in religious contexts such as the temple or the festival – evokes supernatural presence.Footnote ²⁹ The unique characteristic of the technological thauma is that it will always also be an invocation: the technology of enchantment has as its reflex condition the enchantment of technology.

As we have seen in the introduction, the Mechanica opens with an extensive discussion of nature and technē, and places thauma and mēchanē within the matrix.Footnote ³⁰ It is worth re-examining this passage in light of the present discussion on wonder:

This is a very clear statement not just of the coexistence but of the interdependence of mechanics and wonder. According to this text, at least, the tantalising gap that exists between the natural and technical can be bridged by a specific part of technē termed mechanics.Footnote ³³ The mēchanē as object is something which rescues the viewer from the state of aporia caused by the disjunct between the natural and the man-made. This is what makes it such a useful tool in solving the problem of divine presence in the human realm. The Peripatetic text urges the reader to move beyond a simple binary between technē and physis by placing mechanical objects right at the centre of that otherwise cognitively difficult juncture.

Returning to the use of wheels in temples, and by tempering the rationalising and anthropocentric aspects of Gell’s theory as well as considering contemporaneous approaches to mechanical wonder, we are able to offer one last reflection on how these wheels worked to create a sense of the divine. A recurring feature in the description of the wheels is the worshipper’s haptic connection to the bronze. The worshipper’s initial intervention gives life force to the object which is subsequently absorbed – through the help of the mechanical – within the object to propagate movement, produce sound, distribute holy water, in short, to manifest the miraculous. The very essence of the thauma of the wheels, then, lies in the carefully engineered combination of material, status as a technical object, and existence as an embodied object. The human subject does not stand in opposition to the manufactured object, but the body’s energy becomes entangled within its very workings, producing miracles which create a sense of divine aura. We might then take this one step further to consider how the ‘assemblage’ of human worshipper and the sanctuary apparatus thereby generated seems to suggest a broader context of pilgrimage in which such encounters must have taken place.Footnote ³⁴ Unlike the deus ex machina – a mechanical prosthesis for the actor embodying a god but which remains firmly out of reach of the spectator – here the worshipper is drawn in and obliged to interact with the technical in a search for religious purification that is inherently linked to object and to place. Contact with the bronze mechanical wheels creates the miraculous movement and provokes the epiphanic presence of the supernatural which presumably was available at a select number of religious sites. Decentring the human, we see how the wheel itself forces the human worshipper to undergo the sacred act of purification, making it both instigator of religious action and, thanks to the mechanics, confirmation of religious presence. The material, functional, and embodied qualities of the mechanical wheels work with the enchantment of technology to create a divine aura.

Trumpeting Rhyta

The discussion in the preceding section has demonstrated how technical texts encode objects in a specific way, and their (more or less detailed) instructions of construction which privilege the mechanician’s knowledge help us to understand the agency ascribed to the objects beyond the pages of the manuals. Scholars working on ancient technology have, in the past twenty or so years, become more interested in demonstrating the ways that technical knowledge was wrapped up in all sorts of forms and literary genres.Footnote ³⁵ By observing technical content through a new materialist lens, I seek to extend the approach of scholars who look at science and technology in its cultural and material context.Footnote ³⁶ I turn now to Hellenistic dedicatory epigram and the way that the mechanical is thematised there to continue the exploration of how dedicated inventions might have worked to create and sustain a sense of the sacred.Footnote ³⁷

This section centres itself around the ways that Hellenistic mechanics has informed epigrammatic poetics in two dedicatory poems: one by Hedylus and the other from the ‘new’ Posidippus epigrams. A third poem, Callimachus’ Nautilus epigram, offers a useful entry point into various issues pertinent to the discussion:

Kathryn Gutzwiller has shown the complex ways in which scientific knowledge is used as the basis for cultural truths that inform poetic voice in this poem.Footnote ³⁹ The reworking of (pseudo)scientific information – presented in Aristotle’s Historia Animalium, for example – does not inhibit the poetics of the poem, but instead creates space for metaphor. To this I would add the way that Callimachus’ Nautilus epigram captures the important overlaps between religion and play – in this case specifically between dedication and toys – and places science in the picture too.

The poem ventriloquises a nautilus shell that has been dedicated to Aphrodite-Arsinoe, describing both its past life at sea as well as its new-found status as paignion ‘plaything’ of the goddess.Footnote ⁴⁰ Gutzwiller’s analysis demonstrates the way that Callimachus manipulates the complexity of the symbol of the shell through ambiguity in gender (between sailor and womb), combination of its public and private significance (where Aphrodite offers general protection of those at sea, and personal assistance to navigate the potentially tumultuous waters of marriage), as well as through the paradox of the lifelessness of shell contrasted with the fertility of the dedicant. But even without delving into the realm of the symbolic, the poem triangulates the very existence of the Nautilus shell between various cultural registers: the scientific, the playful, and the religious. Not only does this speak to archaeological votive evidence where objects are both purpose-built and repurposed for votive occasion,Footnote ⁴¹ but it also helps in offering a paradigm through which we should perceive the polyvalence of dedicatory objects. There is a dialectic – and one not lost on ancient worshippers themselves as the Nautilus epigram exemplifies – between the object’s past life and its new-found life as a dedication. This is an issue that will arise again when looking at the religious use of articulated figurines or ‘dolls’.Footnote ⁴² What unites votive objects on the ‘receiving’ end is their status as agalmata intended to delight the divine, making them pleasure objects, or ‘toys’, of the gods. Seen in this light, it makes sense that mechanics should be used to enhance the delightful, surprising, mimetic, agonistic qualities of dedicatory objects – all qualities that define play and playthings too.

Hedylus, who lived in Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, composed a variety of epigrams, mostly to do with food and drink, twelve of which are preserved for us. In one of these, Hedylus describes an offering of a trumpeting rhyton, ‘drinking horn’, dedicated at the temple of the deified queen Arsinoe Philadelphus in the form of the Egyptian god Bes:

Religious revelry and awe are here intertwined with pneumatic knowledge and engineering capabilities. The poem opens by addressing the young men present as drinkers of neat wine (zōropotai) which, given good Greek sympotic conduct in antiquity, implies that they were heavy drinkers.Footnote ⁴⁴ Furthermore, the rhyton was associated with the East and particularly with Scythians and their ‘barbaric’ drinking habits. The initial exhortation might thus have set up the viewing of this ‘marvellous’ vessel as nothing more than the result of an inebriated condition, but the poem makes very sure to demystify the workings of the miracle for its audience. Critically, this is not in order to reduce the enchantment of the object but, on the contrary, so that they might revere it in the temple properly as it deserves. When the liquid runs through the cup, the horn is activated and the object mimics the narrative of the gushing flow of the divine Nile and the associated ‘discovery’ of sacred song. The pneumatic description of how this is achieved is, in fact, unnecessarily laboured in the epigram, so that while the author might have relied on the power of poetics on the human imagination, the Bes rhyton trumpets forth ‘when the spout is opened in response to the flow’ (κρουνοῦ πρὸς ῥύσιν οἰγομένου). Breaking the poetic conceit, the genitive absolute explicitly brings pneumatics in as an explanatory framework for what the spectator-worshipper has just experienced. What makes this votive rhyton stand out from its ‘ordinary’ counterparts is its capacity to make a trumpeting sound uncharacteristic of such an object, and it is precisely thanks to the pneumatic trick that the object assimilates itself more closely with its religious purpose.

That the pneumatic explanation forms part of what is an overtly festive epigram is telling, thematising the ludic once again alongside religious technologies. This rhyton sounded not to announce battle but to indicate merriment and festivity (κώμου σύνθεμα καὶ θαλίης) – vocabulary characteristic of the joy of festivals and of the revel involved in festival processions in particular. On the most superficial level, technical knowledge and religious celebration are here tied up in a way that has yet to be explored in scholarship. We will see in Chapter 6 how festival processions in the Hellenistic period made particularly avid use of this connection and politicised it. That the sound of the rhyton was ‘no signal for war’ refers to the trumpet’s use in military contexts, but also alludes to the mechanician’s role in devising machines of war, and thus serves both as an assurance that, in this context, technical knowledge was meant for playful ingenuity and religious zeal, and as a reminder of the presence of the mechanician’s involvement in the object’s existence. Pressing the full semantic range of the verb in his imperative tiete, the poem asks listeners to observe the cup in order both to revere it as a religious object, and simultaneously to judge its material value as a clever toy.Footnote ⁴⁵ The existence of this rhyton as votive offering, object of play, and pneumatic invention – and the modes of viewing that the object consequently engenders – are forcibly and deliberately intertwined. This speaks quite directly to the multivalent poetics of Callimachus’ Nautilus epigram, but the focus here is explicitly on mechanical knowledge, rather than the natural sciences that inform viewership in the Nautilus poem. Hedylus’ epigram helps to characterise ancient religion as lively rather than sombre, and, in the process, sheds light on the way that invented dedications, in Hellenistic Alexandria at least, functioned theologically thanks to their status both as a dedication and as an invention.

The Bes rhyton reproduces for the initiates (mystai, another loaded religious term) the ancestral song from divine water which the personified Nile is said to have ‘invented’ (heure). This might be seen to play into the river’s ancient relationship with technical expertise especially as it relates to irrigation. It may be a reference to Bes’ trumpet mimicking the sound of water rushing into a Nilometer, a device used to measure the height of the river in flooding periods.Footnote ⁴⁶ Even given these associations between the Nile and the technical, the verb is rather striking – one might expect the Nile ‘to command’ or ‘to engender’, not necessarily ‘to invent’. The choice of vocabulary serves equate the Lord Nile and the named engineer Ctesibius, consequently elevating the human and his clever invention (sophon heurema).Footnote ⁴⁷ Pneumatic advantage allows for religious advantage, not only because it is through his knowledge that the engineer is able to create a votive dedication for the divine Arsinoe at all, but also because the pneumatic trick enables the dedication to mimic the noise of the great Nile, and to contain and pour forth divine song. Just as we saw with the temple wheels, nature, technē and the sacred are intertwined in complex, mutually reinforcing ways and this was not something which was contained only to ‘philosophical’ or ‘technical’ texts. Authors of epigram too were clearly conscious of and incorporating the same entanglements into their work. This helps to destabilise any firm boundaries not only between (what we classify as) different literary genres, but also in the ways that cultural understandings of material objects seeped into and impacted texts.

The Bes rhyton was pneumatically devised and then religiously dedicated. According to the epigram, however, it was not meant simply to sit in the temple but invited a moment (repeated moments?) of embodied interaction between deity, object and worshipper. It was a hyper-sensorial, one might even suggest synaesthetic, votive. The feel of the curved horn in the hand brought the smell of the wine closer; the touch of the rim of the horn on the lips joined with the rush and gurgle of the liquid down into the throat; the taste of the wine intermingled with the piercing sound of the horn which the intake released; the unexpected trumpeting prompted the worshipper both to revel and to revere. Fashioned by the human hand and passed into the hand of the worshipper-dedicator, the non-human horn then performs and provokes intention of its own. As in the case of the wheels, we see the way that technical knowledge served to create and sustain religious aura associated with dedication and that, further, the human (be it inventor/dedicator/worshipper) becomes decentred by the rhyton’s own agency once the object has been dedicated.

The dedicated invention captured for us in Hedylus’ epigram finds various counterparts in Hero of Alexandria’s treatise on pneumatics. There are three drinking horns described in Hero’s Pneumatica, all of which perform a ‘miracle’ of some kind. Two of the rhyta unpredictably (for the user) dispense either water or wine;Footnote ⁴⁸ another has a bent siphon inserted within it so that the thauma lies in the liquid being carried upward para physin.Footnote ⁴⁹ Elsewhere, Hero explains what is essentially the principle behind the Bes rhyton: that (flowing) liquid can displace air which, when forced through a mouthpiece and bell, can make a trumpeting sound.Footnote ⁵⁰ He later embeds this principle not within a rhyton but within a lagynos, a particularly Hellenistic pitcher with a narrow neck, the very same vessel being carried by the so-called Drunken Hag sculpture.Footnote ⁵¹ These are the sorts of cultural cues we can only pick up when the materiality of the objects described in technical literature are taken seriously, a methodological approach which, I contend, helps us to understand and give life to these underappreciated texts.

In composing the Pneumatica, Hero was writing in an established tradition where certain wondrous items described had become ‘old tricks’ by the first century CE. Hero alludes to this fact in the introduction to his work, where he says that he will first bring into good order what has been handed down to him by former writers (τὰ παραδοθέντα ὑπὸ τῶν ἀρχαίων εἰς τάξιν ἀγαγεῖν) and from there add to it his own discoveries (ἃ ἡμεῖς δὲ προσευρήκαμεν).Footnote ⁵² It is unfortunate for the history of pneumatics that Hero does not make clear what is new and what is old material once he begins describing the objects and explaining their respective pneumatic properties. We can deduce, however, that just as Philo’s work formed a model for Hero’s On Automata, so Ctesibius’ pneumatic creations, on the evidence of Hedylus, were incorporated into Hero’s repertoire too, or rephrased to draw a wider cultural picture beyond a few ‘genius’ figures, we see how the types of drinking horns made around the turn of the third century remained popular enough to be preserved and remodelled three centuries later. This presumably reveals a wider trend of dedicating technologically enhanced wonders in Hellenistic Alexandria, and though it is difficult to estimate the quantity of similar objects that would have been dedicated, we have come some way in understanding the quality of the technological thauma which dedicated inventions embody.

One final piece of evidence brings together both the quality of technological thauma, and the quantity, not of objects, but of potential viewer-worshippers. This picks up from a different angle the relation between technological marvel and religious community presented in the discussion on wheels and worshippers. While we may never know how many dedicated inventions existed in Graeco-Roman antiquity, we may have a way into knowing how popular technological thauma was judging by its capacity to incite religious tourism. The Colossus of Memnon and its twin statue were originally part of the fifteenth-century BCE temple of Amenhotep III. Over time, possibly due to an earthquake, possibly due to an attack by Cambyses’ troops, the statue broke and from the top of the exposed torso a sound was heard every day at sunrise. The statue and its sonic thauma are described, in detail or in passing, with respect, curiosity or incredulity, by a number of ancient sources from Strabo and Pliny to Pausanias, Lucian and Philostratus.Footnote ⁵³ Individual literary agendas aside, the auditory nature of the marvel is consistent in all the descriptions but the type of sound changes between them: melodic, percussive, a creak, or a human voice. Memnon’s sonic epiphany was in fact likely caused by the warmth of the sun heating the statue base and causing the cooler air in the inner compartments to be pushed out, accompanied by a droning sound. The same principle is at work in one of Hero’s pneumatic inventions. There, when a globe filled with water and fitted with a bent siphon is struck by sunlight, the heat also drives liquid upward and outward, turning the sphere into an autonomous fountain.Footnote ⁵⁴ The Memnon Colossus is not too far removed from another of Hero’s devices, a self-playing organ which relies on wind power to produce flute sounds through pipes.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Colossus of Memnon differs to the Heronian objects, and to the other pieces of evidence examined in this book, because it is an unintentional technology. It is only because the statue broke that this auditory marvel can be heard and as such, the Colossus of Memnon has a different relation to nature and artifice, physis and technē. Intentionally or not, however, our evidence when taken together points to a category of the miraculous in the ancient mind where science and religion worked together rather than being at odds. What we are able to discern from the Memnon Colossus is that, at least by the Imperial period, technological marvels could draw a crowd.

Uniquely, the Memnon colossus survives to this day along with the inscriptions left by hundreds of visitors.Footnote ⁵⁶ The inscriptions reveal that by the time of Hadrian, the site was popular among religious pilgrims as well as Roman soldiers, emperors, and high-ranking administrators who may have been visiting the site less out of religious persuasion and more out of curiosity. If it remains difficult to ascertain any notion of the historical number of visitors to the temples that held dedicated inventions (whether described in technical manuals or epigram), the Colossus at Memnon offers, for a similar but not identical kind of object, one kind of answer. The religious fervour that surrounds the cult of Glykon and its mechanical image as described in Lucian’s Alexander provides another kind of answer. That text will be dealt with much more fully in Part III, but suffice it to note here that Alexander is depicted as being in the business of religious tourism as a vendor, and the prophesising techno-snakehead is portrayed as a reason to travel to Abonoteichos-Ionopolis from surrounding regions, as well as from Italy.Footnote ⁵⁷ The inscriptions left on the Colossus of Memnon not only give an idea of the popularity of the site, then, but they also offer a perspective into the idea of experiencing a technological miracle. The visitors, like the ancient authors whose descriptions survive, struggled to define the nature of the sound, most often, however, believing that they were hearing the voice of the god.Footnote ⁵⁸ As we might predict, the language of thauma is common in the descriptions which otherwise place varying levels of importance on the sun’s rays, the statue’s stone, and the divine voice, and how these work together to create the miracle.

Zoomorphic Narratives

Hedylus’ epigram, we noted, overtly describes the scientific principles at work in the Bes rhyton and how this induces a religious response in the viewer-worshiper. We now turn to a more enigmatic example of an ‘invented dedication’ preserved in Hellenistic epigram to see how it might function in tradition with technical texts and technical knowledge, and how this in turn endowed religious agency upon the dedication. The section known as the Anathematika of the so-called New Posidippus papyrus, attributed to the third century BCE, consists of six epigrams which describe dedications.Footnote ⁵⁹ One of these dedications is a sacred vessel (thēsauros) in the shape of a wolf’s mouth into which the dedicant is urged to place a deposit:

A thēsauros, we will recall, also formed part of one of Hero’s dedicated inventions.Footnote ⁶¹ This strengthens the earlier suggestion that we should make more of the vessels chosen by technical authors to demonstrate mechanical principles given how these objects have contextual and material connotations which enrich our understanding of the cultural life of the objects, and the texts within which they are embedded. It also suggests that the cultural coherence of the objects constructed were as important as the technical principles demonstrated, and that these were not ‘armchair inventions’ as certain scholars have suggested in the past.Footnote ⁶²

In Hero’s invention, the thēsauros is but one element in the composite construction of the hagnistērion, where it is the rotating wheel, and subsequent miracle of the singing, rotating bird which take centre stage. The focus is different in the Posidippus epigram, where the vocabulary of a thēsauros allows the author to allude to the votive’s existence both as a treasure itself (a precious dedication) and as an object for treasure (with a gaping mouth for donation). In the Bes rhyton, Hedylus uses technical description to create a dual – and co-constituted – appreciation of the object as pneumatic and religious marvel. Here, the dedication also has a dual function thanks to its existence as treasure and treasure box: open mouthed, it voices the epigram and obliges the worshipper – with some trepidation – to approach and donate.Footnote ⁶³ The triple play on the word lykos takes on an important role in the epigram’s ludic polyvalence. It begins by describing the object itself, which takes the shape of a lykos (wolf) and links the object through its zoomorphic shape to the (original?) dedicant whose name, it seems, was Lykos. The proverb of disappointed hope (λύκος ἔχανεν) then works with the repeated imperatives (ἔμβαλε … μηδὲ φοβηθῆις … πεύθεο̣) as an appeal to the current dedicant-viewer-reader-worshipper not to let the wolf stand with its mouth open in vain, but to engage with the dedicatory object.Footnote ⁶⁴ The object, thanks to the epigram’s clever language, has a function and connection with the divine both in the past and in the present. It is an object that has been religious dedicated by Lykos and the epigram endlessly re-performs that initial religious act while simultaneously reanimating the object in its current votive function every time a subsequent worshipper is convinced to place an offering in the wolf’s gaping mouth. The epigram’s last line, though fragmentary, seems to suggest that in doing so, the donation will offer the worshipper a ticket to an oracular consultation with the god and thus the ‘dedication-cum-money box’ works as an ever-present gatekeeper to epiphanic intervention.

Whether or not this sort of object (or indeed any dedication described in epigram) existed, we will never know. Regardless, the epigram tells a story about object agency in religious contexts: that the purpose of religious dedication was for the votive offering to participate in mnemonic re-performance, and that the gods received votive offerings in this highly interactive way. At most, we can imagine a category of objects which were purposefully built in order to bring to life this imaginative intention, which is what contemporary technical texts also purposefully describe.

The lykos votive works in a less overtly technical way than the Bes rhyton, but it still raises a number of relevant issues. First, it continues to reconfigure the types of objects we conceive of as dedications in Greek temples, perhaps especially in the Hellenistic period. Second, it re-emphasises the point initially raised by the Nautilus epigram and followed through in the Hedylus epigram that objects of dedication are by their nature polyvalent, existing always at least as manufactured and religious objects and that these statuses did not stand in opposition to each other, but worked in harmony to create divine aura.Footnote ⁶⁵ Lastly, the zoomorphic shape of the speaking lykos votive and the lifelikeness this engenders finds parallels with animal figurines described in technical manuals.Footnote ⁶⁶

Zoomorphic inventions are common in pneumatic texts, playing, in their own ways, with ideas of mimesis recurring in epigram focusing around ideas of the living and breathing object.Footnote ⁶⁷ The clean sound of air, or the gurgle of water and air, pushed through a small pipe offered technical writers almost endless opportunities for auditory marvels which are encased in animal bodies to ‘animate’ them in some way.Footnote ⁶⁸ The inventions described tend to capitalise on the running water that the temple context offered, and then devised ways to ‘randomise’ the sounds of the animals, especially birds (Figure 5.5). Mammal figurines were also constructed with a siphon hidden within them so as to appear to be drinking water ‘with thirst’.Footnote ⁶⁹ These pneumatic inventions are notoriously difficult to contextualise and even those where a temple setting is explicitly stated push to its limit what we can consider a religious dedication. They do, however, encourage us to contemplate the broader ways that pneumatics and mechanics – as well as catoptrics and mathematical probability as discussed earlier – were used in order to create a general sense of divine aura in sacred settings through animation of the inanimate. In this case, the animal figurines, termed zōa, create an ontological ‘mid ground’ not only in the sense that animals are often used as a category to define and navigate the very categories of humans and gods,Footnote ⁷⁰ but also thanks to the status of the zōon as both ‘living animal’ and ‘image’. Pneumatics – or the science of pneuma, ‘breath’ if we are to be very literal about it – is used to exhibit this ontological instability quite overtly and, at least in certain cases, this pneumatic performance unfolded in sacred contexts.

Figure 5.5

Owl and bird display described in Hero Pneum. I.XVI Schmidt = 15 Woodcroft.

Figure 5.5 Long description

The artistic reconstruction shows a mechanical display described by Hero of Alexandria where an owl and bird are used to create an animated temple scene. Water flows from a lion-head spout (labeled A) into the pedestal table labeled B, C, D, E. The pedestal has a siphon at K allowing water to drain and collect in a bucket below labeled W. The bucket also has a siphon labeled Z. Water in the bucket increases in weight pulling on a chain labeled Q that runs around pulleys labeled T and F. This chain mechanism is connected to a rotating owl on a post, causing it to turn. A counterweight labeled Y on the other end helps return the system to its original position. The owl perches beside the animated bird statues, which are set among artificial trees with internal pipes that connect to the pedestal at L so that air forced out of the pedestal by the rising water level will pass through the pipes with a whistle. The mechanism cleverly uses the weight of accumulating water and the mechanical advantage of pulleys to animate the owl’s movement without direct human involvement.

(Image Y. Nakas, copyright T. Bur.)

The inventions described in technical manuals and the curiosities captured in dedicatory epigram reveal for us some of the ways in which ingenuity functioned in the context of religious dedication. To see these objects as ‘advertisements of scientific achievements’ of the Hellenistic period is to miss half the point.Footnote ⁷¹ Scientific knowledge was not lauded for its own sake, it did not mystify the uneducated masses or render atheist the educated few; rather, it endowed the objects with characteristics which provoked a non-human agency understood through the framework of supernatural involvement in the human world. This, I suggest, is the essence of the technological marvel.

Tripods and Hephaistos

Temples in antiquity were treasure troves of a wide variety of objects, some shiny, some matte; some colossal, some miniature; some simple, some intricate. When it came to depositing votive dedications to the gods, ancient worshippers evidently had many choices influenced by many factors: the deity receiving the dedication, for example, the occasion or intended outcome, the location and nature of the sanctuary, the means and gender of the dedicant, to name but a few. With the help of technical manuals and epigrams we have so far formed an idea of where technology and ingenuity might fit within the matrix of choices, and we have seen that the technical component of a dedication, at least in the Hellenistic period, was not hidden, but on the contrary worked productively to manufacture the marvellous and thus to enhance the object’s potential to create numinosity. In what follows, we turn to the material record, examining traces of technically enhanced dedications in practice and using this evidence to ask what it might add to an historical picture of the phenomenon at hand. Two examples will be explored: wheeled tripods and articulated figurines. Both categories of votive object show different ways in which the mechanical worked to create divine presence and expand our understanding of the vocabulary of mechanical epiphany in ancient Greek religion. Both examples also stretch far further back chronologically than the discussion has done so far and serve to unearth a kind of prehistory of the interaction between mechanical technē and the sacred.

Tripods are one of the most common and oldest recorded gifts to the gods.Footnote ⁷² In certain cases, they were dedicated after having had a life as instruments for cooking or as prizes for athletic victory; in others, they were constructed with the sole purpose of dedication, in miniature or monumental size, for example.Footnote ⁷³ Their symbolic significance as votives – or, perhaps we should be looking for the range in their symbolic meaning – remains difficult to interpret.Footnote ⁷⁴ What we can tell from the material record is that tripods were not just more or less ornamented, they were also more or less ingenious, and tripods with wheels attached to the legs appear surprisingly early in the archaeological record.Footnote ⁷⁵

From the temple to Dictaean Zeus at the Cretan site of Palaikastro, and dated between the seventh and fifth centuries BCE, for example, the bottom of a tripod leg with a square shaft was found together with a wheel that fits within the shaft.Footnote ⁷⁶ Even earlier, dated to the eighth century BCE, a wheeled tripod was excavated at the Polis Cave in northern Ithaca with at least thirteen other elaborate but non-wheeled tripods.Footnote ⁷⁷ Scholars have been quick to note the way that this group of tripods from the Polis Cave speaks to Odysseus’ Homeric arrival at Ithaca.Footnote ⁷⁸ While specific connections to the Odyssey, and the relation of the archaeological site with hero worship, are of less relevance to us, the Homeric tradition does throw broader cultural light on the phenomenon at hand and helps us to understand why wheeled tripods deserve to be considered as objects which manifest divine presence precisely thanks to their mechanised aspect. The tripods also allow us to engage in the conversation on the ‘mechanistic conception’ in antiquity and to ask diachronic questions about our source material.

Dedicated either to the Nymphs or to Odysseus himself, the wheeled tripod of the Polis Cave would have measured almost a metre in height and had a wheel at the base of each of its three legs, set in parallel and thus running on a single axis.Footnote ⁷⁹ Though this would have made manoeuvring a full cauldron slightly tricky, the twist in the extant leg fragment indicates that the wheels were not just decorative, but that the tripod had been used prior to dedication. By their very presence, the wheels on this large, bronze tripod implied a potential for movement – a possibility for animation of the inanimate even if never enacted before the worshipperFootnote ⁸⁰ – which would have rendered the object unique in comparison to its non-wheeled counterparts. Some contemporary, eighth-century tripod legs from Delphi and Perachora have wheels as decorative motifs on the legs, possibly playing into this tradition of the animated tripod.Footnote ⁸¹ Further, however, the ‘real’ wheels attached to the legs of the Polis tripod would have served to associate it specifically with the known mythic tradition of self-animated tripods made by the god Hephaistos, the earliest known mention of which is in book 18 of the Iliad.Footnote ⁸²

The self-animated, wheeled tripods appear in the Homeric epic at the point when Thetis goes to ask Hephaistos to make armour for Achilles:

Animated and controlled by divine will, Hephaistos’ tripods did not need the mechanical advantage that wheels offered: the divine craftsman could presumably have made the tripods meander over to the divine assembly regardless of how they were constructed. Yet in Homer’s description the tripods explicitly possess wheels (kykla) which first enable the movement to the assembly and back again, and, subsequently, provoke wonder (thauma idesthai).Footnote ⁸⁴ For all that Hephaistos’ tripods are products of divine technē, the text makes clear that they are also the outcome of hard work, sweat, and functional construction: alongside the golden wheels, Hephaistos will also attach handles properly secured by bindings. Human and divine technē, are not, then, differentiated by manufacturing technique.Footnote ⁸⁵ There might be a difference in quality or skill – possibly also one of superior knowledge in design – but not one of production. This is important because it keeps divine and human technē at a bridgeable distance. Since Prometheus first handed mankind the tools to build this bridge (πᾶσαι τέχναι βροτοῖσιν ἐκ Προμηθέως),Footnote ⁸⁶ technology in the ancient mind was always Promethean, and thus divine, and, because of Prometheus, human. This is the fundamental paradox that Prometheus Bound stages and it is to that play that we now turn in order to enrich further our understanding of the early connection between technē and the divine in emic terms.

Prometheus, Technē, and Mēchanē

In the Hesiodic tradition Prometheus is by no means the complex protagonist that he will become in Prometheus Bound. Both in the Theogony and in Works and Days, the focus is on Prometheus’ foolish transgression of giving fire to mortals and, above all, on his due punishment by the mightier force of Zeus.Footnote ⁸⁷ The author of Prometheus Bound both re-characterises Prometheus’ relationship with Zeus and vastly expands the role of Prometheus as champion of the human race, placing the transfer of a long list of technai from divine prerogative to immortal ability at the core of this transgressive relationship.Footnote ⁸⁸ For the purposes of the current discussion, Prometheus Bound is most useful for showing two things. First, the tragedy writes a history of technology as one that is, from its inception, both inherently human and divine. Second, it presents the figure of Prometheus as a technophile and theomach who goes up against Zeus with at least some chance for success. The latter will be picked up in Chapter 8, which considers the role of technology in theomachy. We turn for now to unpacking the critical role of technē, and mēchanica as part of this, in the relationship between mortal and divine as it features in the fifth-century Prometheus Bound.

The tragedy deployed a unique stage arrangement and exactly how the typical elements (skēnē, theologeion, mēchanē, ekkyklēma) worked together remains most uncertain.Footnote ⁸⁹ It is highly likely that for almost the entire duration of the play, Prometheus was somehow tied up against a surface meant to represent a cliff face, and that the protagonist thus observed the action of the play from a completely static, bound position. The tragedy ends by Prometheus being swallowed by the ‘rock’ to which he is attached.Footnote ⁹⁰ There are then two other moments in Prometheus Bound where stage machinery could have been used: the first choral entrance which sees the Oceanids apparently aloft in a winged chariot (135 f.), and Oceanus’ entrance, which is described as upon some winged creature (284 f.). In what follows I am not going to assume that either used the mēchanē so as not to risk a circular argument. Instead, I hope that the case is strong enough on its own, relying simply on the far less contested staging of Prometheus himself. I leave it to the reader to decide whether they are persuaded by my interpretation and, if so, I suggest that it would only be further strengthened through the additional use of the mēchanē in the play.

Prometheus Bound begins with Kratos and Hephaistos leading Prometheus to be brutally affixed to the rock face. Kratos’ opening speech swiftly establishes context:

In an utterly inhospitable land, Hephaistos has been tasked, on Zeus’ orders, with tying up Prometheus as punishment for the latter’s theft of fire from him. Anthos and selas work together in connoting brightness to link what was Hephaistos’ most glorious possession to the literal spark of fire as ultimate assistant to all technē: the pantechnos. Introduced in the opening lines of the play, this idea is re-emphasised at various other points so that we come to understand that, contrary to the Hesiodic tradition, Prometheus’ wrongdoing does not stop at the theft of fire but has further repercussions in enabling other technai to develop. As it is described elsewhere in the play, fire is a great resource (megas poros) that enables subsequent human knowledge in a variety of fields by being the teacher of every technē.Footnote ⁹² In giving fire to humans, Prometheus was made into the ultimate philanthroposFootnote ⁹³ to the extent that, as in Hesiod, it pitches him as a theomach against Zeus and the gods. As a penalty, and again in line with the Hesiodic myth, Prometheus is to be tied with unbreakable fetters to the rocky cliffs of this desolate land. If the images of Prometheus nailed to a rock and left to grill under the hot sun were not brutal enough, we understand the intended violence of the action through Kratos and Bia, Might and Strength personified, who are sent by Zeus to ensure that Hephaistos duly undertakes this task he so resents having been assigned.Footnote ⁹⁴ There is huge emphasis in the opening scene of the play on Hephaistos physically tying up Prometheus, with Kratos watching over for quality control. The audience is walked and talked through every nail and wedge in the binding process used to secure Prometheus’ arms, armpits, chest, and legs tightly.Footnote ⁹⁵ Hephaistos works just as hard to firmly hammer the fetters into the rock as he does in his workshop in the Iliad to make the self-animated tripods.

The precise definition of technē undergoes further elaboration in the stichomythia between Hephaistos and Kratos when the former is bemoaning the task he has been set by Zeus. The dialogue allows for related terms to be defined against each other:

Hephaistos’ use of cheirōnaxia, with its etymological links with the hands, emphasises the physicality of the work not, for example, the knowledge or the specialist skill which Kratos’ technē instead picks up. Hephaistos is being very literal about the fact that he resents having to tie up a friend and kinsman.Footnote ⁹⁷ Kratos’ answer takes the opportunity to make an abstract comment about the fact that technē itself has no moral value and that this is instead determined by the use to which it is put. This looks to the tension between theoretical technē and its practical ‘banausic’ applications as it appears more widely in ancient Greek cultural discourse.

It has now been long shown (though not necessarily long recognised) that this is not a true dichotomy when it comes to Greek cultural uses of technology. On the one hand, there was plenty of manual, technical activity in Classical antiquity whose development, knowledge transfer, and innovation trajectory disprove the assumptions of ‘blocage’ theorists who saw the Classical world as technologically stagnant.Footnote ⁹⁸ On the other hand, the theoretical conversation around the value of technē was far more nuanced than the philosophical distinctions between abstract theory and actual practice.Footnote ⁹⁹ This comment in Prometheus Bound points precisely to the cultural problematics in explaining the origin of technē and the uneasy relation between its usefulness and moral ambiguity.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ According to the play, this is not ‘just’ a human problem but is something that emerges from the earliest chapters in technology’s history. Part of the inherent predicament behind what Prometheus has done is that he has given humans a divine privilege and it is precisely through this sharing that he bridges the gap between human and divine. Prometheus has ‘robbed the gods of their prerogatives (gera) and handed them over to humans’Footnote ¹⁰¹ but the inherent complexities in how to put technē to use, in what contexts, and to what ends, are not issues which evolved after the transaction but are questions that pertain to technology as a divine tool too. Even Hephaistos, we see, is compelled to put his divine technē to distasteful use.

If these are general comments on technē, what use is Prometheus Bound for understanding the precise relationship between humans, gods, and mēchanica? The answer lies in the way that the play links mēchanai as ‘stratagems’ to mēchanai as physical mechanical devices. To get at this, we need to consider the meta-theatrical dimension of the use of mēchanē/mēchanēma vocabulary in the play which self-referentially points out the way that Prometheus himself is ingeniously tied up thanks to a literal and metaphorical mēchanē. Kratos first hints at this early by telling Hephaistos to secure Prometheus well since ‘he’s very clever at discovering ways out of impossible situations’ (δεινὸς γὰρ εὑρεῖν κἀξ ἀμηχάνων πόρον), linking without doubt the physical binding and Prometheus’ reputation as a devious trickster.Footnote ¹⁰² Since he is in fact tied so firmly, however, Prometheus will need to look elsewhere for help to free himself according to Kratos’ parting sneer:

There is hardly a doubt that this should be taken meta-theatrically, on the one hand pointing to the poetic technē that recasts Prometheus in a different light to the Hesiodic tradition, and, on the other hand pointing out the very stage machinery that is somehow pinning him in a crucifix for the audience to see. The use of ekkylindō is carefully chosen to invoke the rolling capacity of the ekkyklēma, an iconic piece of fifth-century stage machinery. The premise of Prometheus Bound, then, is how Prometheus will find his way out of his current plight which has been thrust upon him both by the new story the playwright has invented and by the physical mēchanai that hold him in place. Poetics and mechanics are the two technai that Prometheus needs to extricate himself from, and there could be no place better suited than the tragic stage to watch this unfold.

In a famous pair of speeches, Prometheus explains in full the different technai that he gave to mortals which range from using their senses (i.e. aesthesis and philosophy) to architecture, meteorology and astronomy, mathematics and poetry, husbandry, nautical engineering, medicine, divination, and mineralogy.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ He ends by pointing out the irony of his current situation: he invented all these mēchanēmata for humans, and yet he is currently stuck without means to free himself (τοιαῦτα μηχανήματ᾿ ἐξευρὼν τάλας βροτοῖσιν αὐτὸς οὐκ ἔχω σόφισμ᾿ ὅτῳτῆς νῦν παρούσης πημονῆς ἀπαλλαγῶ).Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Mechanics are, in fact, a technē that can and will bring mortals and divine (back) into contact, as prophecy does too. At the same time as the rocky cliff is engulfing Prometheus, the stage machinery is presumably lowered ‘releasing’ Prometheus from his position of torture. The abrupt climax of the ending demonstrates in one swift manoeuvres, Zeus’ divine will in enacting the cataclysm, the power of mēchanē in facilitating such, and Prometheus’ human allies ‘unbinding’ him thanks to mēchanica.

Hand in hand with the meta-theatrical use of mēchanē vocabulary is the distinct characterisation of Zeus in Prometheus Bound. Part of the uniqueness of the story of the tragedy is Prometheus’ knowledge that Zeus will lose his pre-eminence if he chooses a union with Thetis. This creates a very particular dynamic between an unapologetically violent Zeus and an arrogant Prometheus. We hear in the play that as Zeus was apportioning divine privileges, he took no account of mortals and in fact wanted to kill them and create a new race.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The Zeus of Prometheus Bound is a kind of neo-Zeus who is noted as being unusually harsh because he is new to power.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Yet, ultimately, this Zeus who hates ingenious mēchanai and is all for ruling through biaFootnote ¹⁰⁸ will learn that, both as stratagems and as machines, mēchanai ultimately offer advantages that brute strength cannot.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Prometheus predicts a time where the rash autocrat has come to see the benefit of mēchanai, presumably the ‘kind’ of Zeus familiar to a fifth-century audience.

*

The Iliad 18 passage featuring the self-animated tripods lies at the heart of conversation on the ‘mechanistic conception’ in antiquity, a scholarly debate which is largely polarised into two distinct camps: those who interpret this and similar scenes as pure ‘magic’, and those who instead read this type of evidence as proof of mechanics informing conceptions of the world.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The more sophisticated arguments to date are those that in effect combine the two in some sort of diachronic progression, though exactly when the shift from ‘irrational’, ‘magical’ viewing to ‘rational’, ‘mechanical’ occurred, and how widespread among the population the ‘rational’ was, is not always consistent.Footnote ¹¹¹ Certain scholars such as Sylvia Berryman, Clara Bosak-Schroeder, and Maria Gerolemou, for example, argue that Hellenistic mechanics were the watershed, while others think that the shift did not occur until later – some, such as Minsoo Kang, arguing for as late as the mid seventeenth century. Yet the world is rarely, if ever, seen in binaries, and the duality set up between ‘mechanistic’ and ‘non-mechanistic’ is, I think, inadequate when it comes to describing observations and understandings of the world and its constituent parts. My suggestion is that, as we have seen in the epigrams and technical texts of the Hellenistic period, the two modes of viewing were not mutually exclusive; rather than think in terms of moving from a magical to a mechanical mode of understanding the world, we should see ideas of the mechanical as cultural techniques informing religious visuality from as early as the eighth century BCE.Footnote ¹¹² Hephaistos’ tripods are able to function as religiously wondrous objects in the human world thanks to their association with the (divine) craftsman who first put wheels on them.Footnote ¹¹³

Hephaistos’ self-animated tripods made a vivid and long-lasting impression on the ancient Greek imagination: Aristotle uses them as examples in a discussion on labour, objects, and enslavement,Footnote ¹¹⁴ and much later in the second century CE, Philostratus describes self-animated Pythian tripods ‘advancing like the Homeric ones’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In all cases, however, these are not ‘just’ magical objects. They are everyday objects which have the capacity to engender a sense of the divine by virtue of their aetiological link with divine technē, but which humans have the capacity to construct by virtue of divine and human technē sharing a common ground first extended by Prometheus. In the context of dedicated inventions, this helps with the cognitively difficult jump in the worshipper’s mind from these being Hephaistos’ self-moving tripods to their being just like Hephaistos’ tripods. Either case is wondrous because in either case human and divine technē coalesce within this object which now lies before the worshipper’s eyes. As scientific knowledge and court culture become entangled through patronage relationships in the Hellenistic period, the human engineer (e.g. Ctesibius, in the case of the Bes rhyton) takes on a more visible role in this process, but mechanics and religious wonder were inextricably linked since much earlier in Greek history.

Figurines and Hinges

We turn now to an example from the archaeological record of a type of dedication that is not associated to a specific mythical figure: the articulated or jointed figurine. Unlike wheeled tripods which, for whatever reason, have a short life in the archaeological record, articulated figurines are manufactured from at least the tenth century BCE well into the Roman period. These objects provide a good case study because though they are not necessarily expensive, they are an elaboration on a familiar object of dedication: the static statuette. I use these as an example of a ‘technical version’ of a figurine, standing beside – and in certain assemblages this should be taken quite literally – their less ‘technical’ counterparts. I highlight their synchronic existence, therefore, to think laterally across assemblages and do not necessarily at this stage want to make any diachronic suggestions about the articulated figure as a ‘proto-automaton’.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Articulated figurines have long been interpreted as children’s dolls or toys given predominantly to goddesses (especially Artemis) in association with coming-of-age rituals, or used in the burials of young and adolescent girls.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Once thought to be confirmed by a single poem in the Greek Anthology, this reading, based on an incorrect emendation of the text, has now been discredited.Footnote ¹¹⁸ More recent discussions ascribe a broader significance to articulated figurines, particularly for what Roman versions betray about notions of the female body.Footnote ¹¹⁹ An early and eminently sensible discussion by Gladys Davidson and Dorothy Burr Thompson argued for the apotropaic power of the dolls as dancers, and subsequently, Maya Muratov has systematically studied articulated figurines and their meanings.Footnote ¹²⁰ As well as being commonly found in graves, articulated figurines have been found at temples all over the Greek world, at sites sacred to Artemis, but also as dedications to Aphrodite, Athena, Demeter, Amynos, and Apollo.Footnote ¹²¹

While it is surely right to move beyond simply ascribing the label of dolls to the figurines as a way to explain (away) their presence in temples as objects related to ‘rites of passages’, we should not lose sight of the importance of play in ancient Greek religion. Not only are toys of all sorts found as votive dedications across the Greek world, but humans were themselves conceived as playthings of the gods. This is explicitly described in Plato’s Laws and already in the Iliad, for example, we hear of Apollo tearing down the wall of the Achaeans and rendering them his playthings (athurmata) with the ease and frivolity of a boy who stomps on sandcastles at the beach.Footnote ¹²² In this sense, there is thus a certain logic behind dedicating an object representative of the relationship between humans and gods in an act which seeks to forge a connection between the two realms. The fragility of many articulated figurines complicates possible scenarios of play prior to dedication, but this does not stop them having a definitive playful quality. I would like to suggest that in their role as votives, the articulated statuettes’ movable parts do not ‘just’ invoke childish entertainment, but that they are playful objects that do two important things in terms of religious potential.Footnote ¹²³ First, they bestow upon the object a capacity to imitate ritual movement in order to please and entertain the god. We will see, in fact, that a uniting feature of otherwise stylistically, geographically, and chronologically disparate ancient articulated figurines is their inclination towards meta-ritualistic poses. Second, they allow for supernatural response through the figurine’s capability for animation. Articulated statuettes’ playful quality works alongside, not in opposition to, their ability to invoke sacred awe. Verity Platt has explored how naturalism in dedication is a way to make acts of worship present.Footnote ¹²⁴ Focusing instead on the object’s technical features which endow it with agency, I suggest that even minimal mechanical ingenuity, as in these figures, should be considered another way in which objects and associated techniques of construction work to invoke the supernatural in ancient Greek votive contexts. Unfortunately, the original archaeological context of ‘dolls’ – still so called in much scholarship – is not always recorded, but it remains instructive for our purposes to consider groups of articulated figurines from several times and places in the Greek world, which give a sample of the variety and change of form before we try to analyse their power as religious objects.

The early ‘bell’ type is a good place to start. Far removed from the Classical ideal in form, these curious domed-shaped figurines with dangling legs were most common in eighth-century Boeotia, where a particular Theban workshop seems to have specialised in their construction (Figure 5.6).Footnote ¹²⁵ The Boeotian articulated figurines are of terracotta and have small heads with long necks giving way to a bell-shaped body with stubby, jointed legs hanging loosely from the bottom. As well as their articulated legs – which could have made noise clanging together as they swayed – the figurines all have holes in their ears where earrings would have hung, mimicking the motion of the legs and the holes in the tops of their heads from which the figurine would presumably have been suspended for display: a hyperbolic showcase of the potential for movement. They tend to be painted with Geometric designs, sometimes identifiable as sacred iconography. Although the original find-spot of many of these figurines is lost, Violaine Jeammet, who published two beautifully preserved examples now in the Louvre, lays out the possibility that they were used as pompeia in the Boeotian Daedala festival,Footnote ¹²⁶ or as part of a ritual in the cult of Artemis Kondylea – so-called due to the ‘hanging’ of her idols.Footnote ¹²⁷ Ultimately, however, by parallel with a number of similar bell-shaped articulated dolls found between the tenth and seventh centuries BCE in Attica, Skyros, Rhodes, Cyprus and Cos, Jeammet concludes that these Boeotian bell figurines most plausibly formed part of funerary rituals and will have been found in tombs, like many of their counterparts. It is not impossible, I would add, that though ending up in tombs, the figurines had played a previous role in other rituals which also sought connection with the divine. For our purposes it is important merely to note, first, that bell-shaped articulated figurines had a widespread life in Greece from the Proto-Geometric periodFootnote ¹²⁸ through to the early Archaic period. Second, it seems clear that articulated bell figurines had a religious life, even if we cannot quite determine the specifics of what this was, and that their ability to create or to sustain a link with the supernatural world – whether in procession, in a sanctuary, or in a funerary context – is not to be doubted.

Figure 5.6

C8/7 BCE Boeotian bell-type articulated figurine. Louvre CA 263

Though united in their static arms, domed bodies and articulated legs, the category of ‘bell dolls’ from other parts of the Greek world convey recognisable regional identity (e.g. compare Athenian Figure 5.7). The Cypriot bell types are probably the most distinctive for the way that they adopt a series of telling postures, often imitating ritual acts. One figurine, for example, carries an animal (for dedication or sacrifice?), another plays a flute (Figures 5.8 and 5.9).Footnote ¹²⁹ This meta-ritualistic element of the ‘dolls’ will prove to be a continuing feature over time and helps us to understand how the joints elicited a sense of divine interaction or presence.

Figure 5.7

Mid-late C10 BCE Attic bell-type articulated figurine. From tomb 33. H 8.2 cm.

Athens Kerameikos Museum, inv. no. 962. Hellenic Ministry of Culture.

Figure 5.8

C8/7 BCE Cypriot terracotta figurine, once articulated, holding an animal. From a tomb. H. 16 cm.

Metropolitan Museum of Art 74.51.1613. The Cesnola Collection. Purchased by subscription, 1874–6.

Figure 5.9

C8/7 BCE Cypriot terracotta figurine, once articulated, of a male flute player. From a tomb. H. 14.9 cm.

Metropolitan Museum of Art 74.51.1691. The Cesnola Collection, Purchased by subscription, 1874–6.

As we move into the Classical period, articulated figurines lose the bell shape in their body, but the enthusiasm for the potential of the joint seems grow over time as the figurines gain an extra set of joints at the shoulders, resulting now in four movable limbs (Figure 5.10). Examples of Classical articulated figurines abound from Athens, Corinth, the Crimea, Rhodes, and the Cyrenaica.Footnote ¹³⁰ The sanctuary of Demeter and Kore at Acrocorinth is a particularly good example where articulated votive figurines are prolific and well published from the Classical to Roman periods.Footnote ¹³¹ Just shy of one thousand articulated figurines were deposited during the fifth and fourth centuries BCE at this single site, making ‘dolls’ by far the most common type of figurine found and dedicated at the sanctuary.Footnote ¹³² Ranging in size from statuettes to miniatures, most, though not all, of the articulated figurines could be suspended by the head, as with the bell types. Most represent young women with faces that show traces of paint, and of the approximately 930 extant torsos, about 810 are naked while the remainder wear a knee-length chiton or peplos. Some of the figurines have offerings in the hands of their articulated arms, and particularly common among these is a type of basket carrying cake known as a liknon. Given the high number of terracotta likna votives also found at the site, this strengthens the meta-dedicatory role of the ‘dolls’ and thus speaks clearly to the earlier Cypriot articulated figurines.Footnote ¹³³

Figure 5.10

C5 BCE Corinthian terracotta jointed figurine.

Metropolitan Museum of Art 44.11.8. Rogers Fund, 1944.

Classical ‘dolls’ from other sites hold tambourines or cymbals, instruments associated with ritual dancing.Footnote ¹³⁴ Postures of the ‘dolls’ diversify as some are preserved in a seated position with static legs and mobile arms, though this type is less common in Corinth than other parts of Greece, such as Athens, for example.Footnote ¹³⁵ Various manufacturing techniques existed to make the dolls and specifically to secure the limbs which hid the hinges to a greater or lesser extent. The assemblage from the Acrocorinth sanctuary preserves socketed-leg and flanged-leg figurines which, until the fourth century, existed side by side (Figure 5.11).Footnote ¹³⁶ It has been suggested that socketed-leg dolls are Attic while flanged-leg dolls are Corinthian,Footnote ¹³⁷ though Merker rightly warns against assigning geographical origins to different methods of attaching limbs. With time, materials used in the fabrication diversify as well, and we get bronze and ivory articulated figurines alongside continued use of terracotta. The oldest Greek example of an articulated ivory ‘doll’ comes from Taranto in the Hellenistic period and, like its terracotta counterparts which continue to be made, carries traces of paint (Figure 5.12).Footnote ¹³⁸

Figure 5.11

Examples of socketed-leg and flanged-leg articulated figurines from Acrocorinth.

Adapted from Merker 2000, plate 12.

Figure 5.12

Late C4/early C3 BCE articulated ivory figurine said to be from Taranto.

Metropolitan Museum of Art 11.212.43. Rogers Fund, 1911.

An interesting group of articulated figurines comes from the Bosporan Kingdom from the late second century BCE to the third century CE. Muratov has recently published some of these articulated figurines and offers a convincing hypothesis of their use in Dionysian, para-theatrical contexts.Footnote ¹³⁹ Depicting only male characters, these once brightly decorated, terracotta figurines had jointed legs as well as large movable phalloi (Figure 5.13). Overwhelmingly found in the necropoleis of Bosporan cities, they were also found in temples and sanctuaries. It is tempting to see these figurines as related in some way to the string-drawn neurospasta described in Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ There, residing in the temple that the narrator is visiting, little wooden men with large phalloi are made to mount large erect phalloi, and are referred to as Dionysian mystic objects. According to Lucian’s text, there seems to be a ritual where worshippers proceeded to imitate the phallus-riding puppets by climbing large phallus-poles.Footnote ¹⁴¹ These string-drawn figurines acting as proxies to the human worshippers who themselves then mimetically duplicate the actions of the puppets reimagines, in a Dionysian way, the idea presented earlier in this chapter of worshippers as playthings of the gods, by blurring the boundaries between puppets and puppeteer; human and object; ritual, representations, and re-enactment. These ludic neurospasta, the Dionysian para-theatrical Bosporan figurines, as well as the various articulated figurines made to adopt ritualistic poses (dance, music-playing, dedication, procession) are a nice reminder of the way that sacred and festive activities often went hand in hand in ancient Greek religion.

Figure 5.13

Sketch of Bosporan terracotta figurine with articulated legs and phalloi. Moscow State Historical Museum Оп.Б 72/3.

(Image Y. Nakas, copyright T. Bur.)

The ritual mimesis described in Lucian’s text between articulated figurine and worshipper cannot be historically verified. Yet one subcategory of the Bosporan figurines appears to attest a similar intention. A large number of these statuettes participate in ritual action such as dancing or playing an instrument, or sporting ritual objects including human figurines, possibly effigies of deities (Figure 5.14).Footnote ¹⁴² In the case of the latter, the worshipper walking in procession carrying or wearing this small, movable figurine, itself armed with an even smaller figurine or effigy, creates a wonderful hall of mirrors effect, visually enacting the constant reflections and refractions between man, god, and object. Once dedicated, the articulated figurine, legs swaying as it hung in the temple, re-enacted over and over again the activities of procession and dedication to the god. Ritual uses of visual (and verbal) mise en abyme were common in ancient religion.Footnote ¹⁴³ We have already seen, for example, the staging of epiphanies within the staging of Orestes, or the way that the Archinos relief re-performs its own existence as votive tablet to both internal and external audiences.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ We should add to this the use of articulated figurines in procession where the hinge plays a crucial role in both assimilating and distinguishing ontologies through a metonymic logic that renders present the divine. On the one hand, the articulated figurine stands in for all worshippers and facilitates a connection with the divine through its status as votive object. On the other hand, the hinge as a technology of animation invests the object with a power to move autonomously and to be received in the human realm as a reflection of divine will. The meta-performative aspect of large spectacle machinery that came to be used especially in Hellenistic pompai will pick up on and expand this theme significantly.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ We move first to a detailed contemplation of the hinge as a cultural technique of animation.

Figure 5.14

Sketch of Bosporan terracotta figurine with articulated legs carrying an effigy. Moscow State Historical Museum Оп.Б 305/115.

(Image Y. Nakas, copyright T. Bur.)

Given that articulated figurines were popular as votive dedications across a wide breadth of time and space in the Greek world, and that they existed in addition to, not instead of, non-articulated figurines, we must now try to ascertain what would lead a worshipper to dedicate one of these relatively fragile, highly theatrical objects. In other words, what (theological) work do the joints do? Here, I take my cue from Bruno Latour’s work on the sociological impact of ‘non-humans’ that inhabit our world.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Latour’s sociological theory of (technological) objects complements rather than contradicts Gell’s anthropological theory of art and his work on the enchantment of technology. Latour sees technology as anthropomorphic in the sense that it is made by humans, takes the place of or supplements the labour of humans at performing tasks, and controls human minds and relationships. The non-human door, for example, turns an impenetrable space bordered by walls into a room in and out of which humans can resultantly move freely. The technology of the door – we might even say the mēchanē of the door – composed simply of a panel to fill space and a hinge to allow opening and closing has been delegated a crucial role as gatekeeper, and human movement and activity are compelled to arrange themselves around it and thanks to it.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Entry and exit must be through this single point in space, and human movement requires the momentary delay of pushing or pulling a door. The non-human door, then, has both spatial and temporal impact on its human users, but that is not all. Thanks to its hinge, the door can open and thus feel inviting, or slam shut and invoke a sentiment of rejection in the human user who is typically seen as the ‘subject’. The example of the door holds an important lesson on the agency of the most unassuming of technologies which aids in breaking down the presumption that technological objects needed to be the most advance objects that antiquity had to offer in order to engender (numinous) effect.

A Latourian analysis of the joint on the ancient articulated statuette helps in understanding what was at stake when a human worshipper picked out, or commissioned, this object as their votive dedication of choice. Articulated figurines have potential for movement and animation which, even when unrealised, is visible in the object’s construction, always hinted at by the creases at the joints on the statuette’s body and integral to the object’s very existence. We might compare Siegert’s comment on the way that the door ‘shapes the possibility of closure against the backdrop of the possibility of opening and keeps virtually present both possibilities’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The articulated nature of votive ‘dolls’ means that they are not committed to any single pose and, as a result, a simple gust of wind as they hang from their chosen place in the temple can animate them and suggest that life has been breathed into them by some supernatural power, opening them up to become possible signs of divine approbation or condemnation. When taken in hand, they move in a way that is independent of but directly related to the worshipper’s own corporeal existence. The joint in the figurine is, in effect, a technology of animation and, as such, a temporal tool allowing for a connection between human and supernatural both in and beyond the moment of dedication.

There is an illuminating parallel here with early Renaissance devotional polyptychs which use the hinge as a comparable cultural technique. In those apparatuses of religious display, the hinge serves both a practical and symbolic function: to protect the artwork when folded and to create meaningful breaks in the pictorial representation. These two objectives meet in that the hinge in both cases distinguishes sacred from profane whether in regards to context (concealing and revealing) or content (separating and connecting). Just as we saw with the theatrical mēchanē in Greek tragedy, hinges open up spaces that are characteristically ‘outwards’ and ‘beyond’ and are thus extremely useful to both ‘articulate and operationalise the precarious threshold between appearance and vision, the profane and the sacred.’Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The hinge on the polyptych is a cultural technique harnessed for revelation of a divine scene. The hinge on the articulated figurine also reveals, but it reveals an ability for movement, a potential for animation and thus the hinge of both the polyptych and the figurine ‘stage’ epiphanies and produce ‘almost-visions’ of the divine.

This idea is also exemplified in Hero of Alexandria’s Pneumatics, where the engineer designs two ways for temple doors to open automatically.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Hero’s inventions do not imagine life-size temples but are instead miniature or model temples where the heat of a worshipper burning an offering as part of this small display allows for the doors to open of their own accord. Beginning with the doors of Olympus in the Iliad and through to Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo (and beyond!) automatic doors have a strong mythic precedent as divine sēmata.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Hero uses his pneumatic expertise to bring such stories to life through the technology of automation, yet the instigation still lies with the worshipper’s ritual action (burning an offering). This is Hero’s version of the visual mise en abyme that articulated figurines lean into as well. While the figurines work with and respond to the worshipper’s body in procession, for example, and the movement enabled by the hinge aids in the almost infinite re-performance of procession and dedication, Hero sets a miniature temple inside a larger temple where every burnt offering reconfirms divine presence thanks to his pneumatic intervention. In other words, hinges as technologies of automation can function in an ancient Greek religious contexts thanks to the inherent principle of call and response that underpins human–divine communication more generally.

Technological animation is the perfect technique both to refer to and to create sacred aura, in that it collapses into a single object both the call and response of the divine. That figurines often hold dedications themselves or engage in other ritual acts, that Hero’s inventions are also meta-ritualistic, plays with and plays into this call and response paradigm that technologically enabled epiphany allows. Votive objects were agalmata: delightful things meant to adorn, honour, and please the gods. At the same time as being an act of piety, the dedication was also an act of self-display, a cognitive tension that the ancient Greek worshipper had no problem reconciling. The god delights in seeing this unique statuette and is able to express himself or herself back to the worshipper through it. It is an embodiment of human ingenuity made both for and thanks to the very same divine powers that frequently reveal themselves in the human world; it is an object of Promethean technical superiority that both benefits from divine inspiration in its creation and remains resolutely made by mortals; a gift for and from the divine intended to delight, persuade, and give thanks to the gods, as well as an object which – by virtue of its mechanical component and the religious potential contained in its capacity for animation – is able to create an aura of the supernatural.

Processional Automata: The Anecdotal Evidence

The para-theatrical use of articulated figurines should be interpreted alongside the processional use of large, self-moving, mechanical machines known as automata.Footnote ¹ In the previous chapter, I raised but left open the question of whether we should see articulated figurines as ‘proto-automata’. In the past, scholars have argued that the evidence of small, jointed statuettes betrays a desire to mechanically animate the human body which was first realised through the construction of ancient Greek automata, then through Renaissance and early modern automata, and which was actualised most successfully through the development of modern-day robots.Footnote ² However, ancient Greek automata – in technical manuals as much as in anecdotal evidence – very rarely seek to animate the human form.Footnote ³ From the evidence we have, the only bodies that appear technically animated are those of divine figures (Nysa, maenads, Dionysus) and animals (e.g. snails, birds that sing or appear to drink).Footnote ⁴ Otherwise, there are cases of the natural world being mechanically enhanced to recreate a Hesiodic golden age where spontaneous abundance was characteristicFootnote ⁵ (e.g. as with endless springs, or those that turn water to wine) or cases of inanimate objects being animated (e.g. a ship, shrine, or temple doors). Furthermore, any continuity between articulated figurines and ancient automata occurs strictly in their contexts of use and their suitability in such contexts, not in their aesthetics. What unites the two categories of object is the technical knowledge that they embody and the way that this epistemological tradition – leading to a capacity for mechanical animation – proves useful in religious contexts. The two categories of objects should not be teleologically linked by supposing desire to create an autonomously acting human. Ancient mechanics was not used to replicate the mythic Talos, Pandora, or Daedalus’ statues.Footnote ⁶

By presenting the evidence for the use of ancient automata in religious procession, I seek to discover what makes these large, self-animated machines suitable for their immediate processional and religious context, as well as for their broader politico-historical context. I argue that automata are effective as pompeia because they enhance existent features of religious procession: narrative, synaesthesia, and, above all, the call–response relation between worshippers and the deity.Footnote ⁷ I also make certain historical suggestions about the suitability of these machines for political theatre in a world which adapted a precedent for mechanical epiphany within new-found political, scientific, and religious realities.

The earliest ancient evidence for the use of automata in procession appears in Polybius’ Histories and describes the use of a self-animated (automatōs) snail which led (proēgeito) the procession of the Great Dionysia of 309/8 BCE, leaving a trail of slime as it went:

Demetrius of Phalerum was appointed to rule Athens by Cassander in 317 BCE, remaining at the head of the Athenian polis until his expulsion in 307 BCE. It was very soon before he was expelled, in his capacity as archon in 309/8 BCE, that Demetrius organised the Great Dionysia in which we find the snail. The passage is difficult to interpret, not least because there is a strong element of political slander at play, making it hard to tease apart fact from fiction. At this point in his Histories, Polybius is trying to defend Demochares’ reputation against the words of Timaeus. Thus, the account as we have it is obviously slanted to favour Demochares, one of Demetrius of Phalerum’s greatest political opponents. From what we can ascertain, Demetrius had boasted about the prosperity which Athens enjoyed while it was under his rule. Given the strain that the Lamian War (323–322 BCE) would have recently put on the Athenian economy, as well as the ever-present burden of the garrison at the Piraeus, the recovery and economic stability that Athens experienced during the Phalerean decade does in fact seem a commendable achievement.Footnote ⁹ Yet since the low level of military activity under Demetrius was also perceptibly linked to Athens’ subordination to Macedonian power and thus its loss of independence, the city’s relative prosperity under the Phalerean regime was nevertheless easily turned against the leader, as done here.

The relevance of such politics is that Demochares criticises Demetrius’ administration of the city by explicitly linking it to spectacle, and the spectacle apparatus of choice is none other than a grand, processional automaton. The contrast between political and military incapacity of the Athenian demos on the one hand, and prosperity and love of theatrical display on the other, is both a familiar rhetorical trope throughout Athenian history and one that applies to the Phalerean regime particularly well.Footnote ¹⁰ Even if the whole passage were fictional slander against Demetrius, it remains good evidence for the processional automaton being familiar enough for the literary trope to function – not so common that every leader could afford one, but frequent enough as a spectacular treat that the audience understood the implications of the scientific knowledge and financial resources that went into the production and deployment of such a machine.Footnote ¹¹

From the point of view of his enemies, the sort of lavish pomp seen at the Dionysia of 309/8 BCE was contradictory to the character of the bulk of Demetrius’ legislations largely geared towards enforcing religious propriety. This sentiment is conveyed in a fragment by Duris, who notes that Demetrius was criticised for laying down laws for other people and regulating their lives, but organising his own life utterly without constraints.Footnote ¹² Usefully for our purposes, the same passage attests that during the pompē of the Dionysia where Demetrius brought out the spectacular mechanical snail, he also arranged for a chorus to sing verses of ‘Siron of Soli’ in his honour in which he was spoken of as hēliophormos, ‘shaped like the sun’. While this is not quite an explicit equation with a god, it is certainly symptomatic of a time when the lines between mortals and divinities were becoming increasingly blurred. It would seem, then, that the festival as a whole was used by Demetrius as a tool of political and possibly even religious self-aggrandisement, and this then leads us to ask to what extent the processional automaton of the Dionysia of 309/8 BCE was linked to the development of Hellenistic ruler cult.

Unlike the notorious case of Poliorcetes and his Ithyphallic hymn shortly after, Demetrius of Phalerum never received religious cult. Indeed, this would likely have been seen to contradict much of his moral and religious legislation. Yet it is also easy to see that if Demetrius had wanted to bolster his status as leader of the city, aggrandising the pompē of an existing festival that he was in charge of hosting would certainly be a suitable and effective way to do this. As Angelos Chaniotis has described, the worship of Hellenistic rulers and worship of Greek divinities resembled each other, and the pompē was one of the key elements of ruler cult which modelled its worship on the ways that gods were (already) worshipped.Footnote ¹³ In this vein, processional automata should not be seen as a sudden Hellenistic innovation tied on the one hand to ruler cult and on the other hand to the development of mechanics in Alexandria. Instead, there is a more complex historical story at stake here where the use of automata in these very public contexts was a way for leaders to capitalise on the existing theological potential that religious machinery already held and communicated to communities. If processional automata became increasingly useful in a context that was open to the idea of monarchs being seen as gods, it was not simply because of the machine’s novelty status, but thanks to the way it was able through its epistemological novelty to speak to existing conceptions of divine presence and notions of human–divine reciprocity. This was further facilitated by a religious climate that became sensitive to the potential for a human leader to act and be received in a godlike fashion, in the way that the polis both expressed gratitude for past action and set up expectations of future benefactions. Processional automata were a useful tool to associate the human ruler with divine prosperity that the city was experiencing under them, without necessarily being as overt (and sacrilegious) as establishing full-blown cult. In other words, hosting a religious festival in which impressive spectacle machinery reflected the presence and magnanimity of the god was a convenient way to draw links between the notion of the self-animated, spontaneous, and bountiful as symbolised by the device and the agency of the ruler, also unbound by conventional human limitations. This would take a far less subtle turn in the Grand Procession of Ptolemy Philadelphus, treated later in this chapter, where the Egyptian context made it less controversial for the ruling monarch to equate himself directly with the divine.

Before moving to the Ptolemaic example, there are a few final ways that we can further flesh out the Polybian passage along a more practical line of argument. The route of the pompē of the Athenian Great Dionysia left from the Dipylon Gates in the Kerameikos, continued to the Agora, stopped at the Altar of the Twelve Gods for choral displays, passed along the Panathenaic way as far as the Eleusinion, and followed down the so-called Street of the Tripods along the northern slope of the Acropolis before finally twisting right to arrive at the foot of the Acropolis at the Theatre of Dionysus.Footnote ¹⁴ Reconstructing the route of the Great Dionysia helps us to imagine the mass movement through the Athenian cityscape into which processional automata were incorporated, and, on a practical level, allows us to conjecture possible storage (the Pompeion in the Kerameikos seems a likely candidate), as well as opportunities for repose, regrouping, and resetting (even repairing) the machine as needed.Footnote ¹⁵ As the examples of attested processional automata will make increasingly clear, there is no need to imagine that the machine participated in the entire route of the procession, particularly if this leads to reconstructions inconsistent with our ancient sources.Footnote ¹⁶ This takes some mechanical pressure off the machines, especially as regards topographical inclines approaching the Acropolis, and it fits with the known structure of festival procession which did not simply make a beeline from start to finish. Polybius’ text in this case highlights that the snail led (proēgeito) the procession and moved automatōs. Surely, since the very premise of ancient procession was social inclusivity,Footnote ¹⁷ participants would have been able to join together in seeing the machine from relatively close up not only during but before and after the procession too.Footnote ¹⁸ Thus the miracle of animation was far more compelling if there was no chance of a rumour being spread about a human (or animal) inside the machine. Furthermore, Hero of Alexandria is explicit in his instruction to construct automata so as to avoid potential scepticism in the viewer of human intervention in the movement.Footnote ¹⁹ The instigation of the machine’s movement – that critical, miraculous moment when the automaton went from inanimate to animate – would herald the beginning of the pompē. The machine and its state of technological animation acted both as the utmost honour for Dionysus and as an assurance that the deity – pompos theōrias on the evidence of the BacchaeFootnote ²⁰ – had arrived to oversee the occasion.Footnote ²¹

The Great Dionysia in which we find the automated snail would have occurred a mere fourteen months before the end of Demetrius of Phalerum’s decade in power and Demetrius Poliorcetes’ entry into Athens.Footnote ²² The former ended up at the Ptolemaic court, where he would partake in the cultural projects of Ptolemy I and II, including the Library of Alexandria and the Museion. Perhaps not coincidentally, Alexandria under Ptolemy II is the location of our next securely attested use of processional automata. The cultural ambitions of the Ptolemies led them to gather engineers and mechanicians of all sorts at their court.Footnote ²³ Both Ctesibius and Hero – who wrote texts on automata-making – worked at the Ptolemaic court after Demetrius of Phalerum’s death, and could well have had predecessors or teachers active there beforehand. Equally, as I have already suggested, the picture often painted of Alexandria as the birthplace of all mechanics, and especially of automata, needs some recalibrating when it comes to analysing the historical place of processional automata in order not to lose sight of the theological continuities with earlier practice.

At some point in the 270s BCE, Ptolemy II organised what must have been one of the most lavish festivals of antiquity.Footnote ²⁴ Originally recorded in the fourth book of Callixenus’ contemporary text On Alexandria, an abridged version of the ‘Grand Procession of Ptolemy Philadelphus’ survives in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae.Footnote ²⁵ What we lose in detail from Polybius’ lamentably brief account of Demetrius’ automated snail we make up for in the description of Ptolemy’s Alexandrian parade. Both the occasion and the description begin in an ornamental pavilion where a banquet was likely hosted. The pavilion in Callixenus’ text is presented as a curated vision of art and nature combined under the complementary guiding forces of Dionysian tryphē and Ptolemaic wealth. Animal skins of great variety and size hung between wooden columns shaped like palm trees and thyrsoi; gold couches, woollen rugs, and Persian carpets decorated the interior; marble figurines, paintings, and portraits by famous artists had been sourced and displayed; the sheer volume of gold- and silverware was literally too great to describe, leaving Callixenus with no choice but to surmise the total combined weight of all the vessels in a single mass (‘about ten thousand talents’, or nearly three hundred tonnes!). Callixenus explains that since the banquet was held in the middle of winter, the floral profusion which appeared as the picture of a spectacular divine meadow was particularly incredible (paradoxos).Footnote ²⁶ Elevated alcoves containing representations of tragic, comic, and satiric figures sitting together in symposia, dressed with real clothing and given real cups of gold, assured guests that they were in good company, enticing them to join in the festivity and toying with the boundary between art and nature, between inanimate and animate. The theatricality of the decoration and design of the pavilion offered a preview of the thematics which the procession develops: Ptolemy’s Alexandria was wealthy and powerful to the point of being unhampered even by the powers of the seasons, and Dionysiac unrestrained abundance comfortably finds a home in such a city, as does Dionysus himself.Footnote ²⁷ The pavilion quite literally set the scene for the combination of natural wonder, human ingenuity, and divine benevolence that featured in the procession to follow with automata playing a key role in uniting these themes.

The act of procession is about going from point a to point b, but in order for the procession to gain and sustain collective momentum it must have a story that justifies the general occasion as well as the specifics of the route.Footnote ²⁸ Narrative is thus integral to procession, and objects, as well as costume, form part of dressing this narrative, giving it features that make it identifiable aesthetically, ideologically, and religiously. The part of the pompē of Ptolemy II’s Grand Procession which Athenaeus relates performs a series of vignettes which together form a complete narrative showcasing and honouring the life and spheres of influences of the god Dionysus. Having established this as a large section of the procession (and perhaps even the festival)’s raison d’être, Ptolemy then inserts his own political agenda into the pompē through the pompeia.

First, we see Dionysus as patron of the theatrical arts. Sileni and satyrs introduce the theme and are swiftly followed by personifications of Dionysian festival: a tall, beautiful woman named Pentetēris with a tall man called Eniautos in tragic costume and mask. These two extravagantly dressed figures literally perform the passing of time and the periodic appearance in any four-year cycle of Dionysus, his revelry, and theatrical performances in his honour.Footnote ²⁹ Poets and the guild of artists of Dionysus (οἱ περὶ τὸν Διόνυσον τεχνῖται) come next, followed by the climactic final montage of this section of the parade: a monumental statue of Dionysus drawn upon a four-wheeled cart fifteen feet tall and pouring a libation from a gold cup (karchēsion). The god wears layers of purple, saffron, and gold. He stands below a canopy decorated with ivy, grapevine, fruits, ribbons, thyrsoi, tambourines, fillets, and theatrical masks. Bacchant women holding snakes and knives recalling the potential dangers of Dionysiac frenzy especially associated with the theatre act as a coda to this first portion of the parade.

The next cart carried a statue of Nysa twelve feet in height, wearing a yellow tunic embroidered with gold, and with a Lakonian himation wrapped around her. She held a thyrsos, wore a crown of ivy leaves and jewelled grapes, and was placed under a canopy which had torches at each corner. Callixenus describes her movement as follows:

Probably meant to personify Mount Nysa, where Dionysus was raised according to certain mythic traditions, the automaton also introduced the Eastern imagery which will gain prominence in the following section of the procession. We note too the way that Nysa is animated in order to perform a ritual action, just as the articulated figurines presented in the previous chapter were performing meta-ritualistically. Beyond iconography, however, we must ask what Nysa’s technologically animated capacity added to the occasion. As a procession passes, a story unfolds. When an animated frame is included as part of this, it creates moments of internal narrative and the procession becomes a storyboard of moving GIFs instead of a storyboard of stills.Footnote ³¹ The effect is one of intersecting patterns of movement, much like planets orbiting the sun and turning on themselves. These intersecting movements allow for multiple stories to be told and to be heard at the same time. On the one hand, seeing the statue of Nysa rise, offer a libation and sit down again is a clear testament to Ptolemaic science, but the automaton’s individual story is embedded into the procession’s wider thematics allowing spectator-worshippers to witness both the marvel of the moving object, and to recognise its broader religious context. In this way, the automaton maintains and revels in its dual status as man-made and divine, as Ptolemaic and Dionysian.Footnote ³²

Dionysus as patron of wine was personified by a massive wine press full of grapes with sixty satyrs to tread on them while they sang and played the aulos overseen by a Silenus. The juice (gleukos) produced streamed out of the cart onto the processional route. From the production of wine, the procession moved to its storage and dispensing best captured through a novelty-size wineskin (askos) capable of holding thirty thousand gallons and made from the skins of leopards stitched together. This giant askos slowly released wine through the streets of the city as it was processed. Countless satyrs, Sileni, and boys followed on, holding various vessels associated with sympotic activity and doubtless splashing about in the puddles of wine in the streets. The parade then passed through Alexandria’s stadium, where premixed water and wine was distributed to all. Taken together, this section of the pompē offers a picture of Dionysus overseeing everything from the natural production of grapes and its juice to the human activities of winemaking and the various rituals that surrounded the consumption of wine. The synaesthesia of this part of the parade is especially striking. The juice and wine running through the streets which would release an aroma and drench the feet of participants speaks to the curious mention of slime following Demetrius’ snail. Both also literally leave visible traces of divine presence in the cityscape. Pausing in the stadium to distribute wine aligns well with the recalibrated picture of the Great Dionysian procession which also involved moments of pause and performance, at least at the Altar of the Twelve Gods in the agora, and possibly elsewhere too.Footnote ³³ Ptolemy’s procession evidently slowed down through the stadium, and there is an indication in the text that there was another moment of pause later when a giant crown of gold adorned with precious stones was hung in the portal of the Berenikeion.

Slightly obscure are the six-foot tables (trapezai) ‘upon which many lavishly constructed spectacles (theamata) worthy of seeing were led around’ (ἐφ’ ὧν πολλὰ θέας ἄξια πολυτελῶς κατεσκευασμένα περιήγετο θεάματα.)Footnote ³⁴ The only theama described is the bridal chamber of Semele. To make sense of this strange part of the text, one might simply imagine a series of static tableaux, which together formed a sequential narrative enhanced by their parading one after the other. But making periēgeto work slightly harder as ‘made to revolve’, it is not impossible that these scenes had some internal movement too. Philology aside, self-moving tableaux would fit the thematics of the procession rather well, and they are mechanically viable if we take into consideration the evidence of Hero of Alexandria’s staton automaton itself based on an earlier version by Philo of Byzantium, who would have been roughly contemporary with Ptolemy’s parade.Footnote ³⁵

Dionysus as sponsor of spontaneous abundance of natural goods, and particularly the advantage this held for humans, was the next facet of the god to be paraded. A dark, mysterious cavern was set upon a cart from which various breeds of birds flew out ‘along the whole route’ not so that they might go free, but with string tied to their feet to make it easier for spectators to catch them! The same cave was richly decorated with ivy and smilax and from it poured never-ending springs of milk and wine. Practically speaking this would have been possible through, for example, the ‘invention’ of the ‘Archimedes screw’, powered by the wheels of the cart.Footnote ³⁶ Hermes stood in this float, probably alluding to the infant Dionysus having been entrusted to Hermes by Zeus to be taken to the cave of the nymphs at Mount Nysa. During what should have been the most frugal time of the year, the endless supply of live birds, paired with the pneumatic marvel of never-ending streams of liquid, was a potent image of conspicuous consumption and a visual demonstration of the abundance of Dionysus and of Ptolemaic Alexandria. In its magnificence, the parade was both an invocation of Dionysian presence and a manifestation of the deity’s forces at work. The use of automata in the pompē – the Nysa statue and the eternal springs – was particularly effective in visually manifesting this human–divine call and response. In a Ptolemaic religious context where there existed both an Egyptian precedence for associating monarch with god and a Hellenic precedence for the category of mechanical epiphany, lavish, self-animated spectacle machinery made it almost too easy to manifest the cultic fusion of and equation between Alexandria, Ptolemy, and Dionysus and between city, monarch, and god.

The third piece of evidence recording the use of a processional automaton comes from the Great Panathenaea of 143 CE, where Herodes Atticus apparently organised a self-moving ship to make its way through the streets of Athens:

By the second century CE, the Panathenaea had a history of more than six hundred years during which time developments had taken place in almost every area of the festival, the procession included.Footnote ³⁸ The automated ship was most likely a late mechanical introduction, but it worked with existing traditions of the Panathenaea. John Mansfield has argued that, as opposed to the yearly peplos robe, the penteteric peplos was a large tapestry hung for viewing on what resembled a ship’s mast.Footnote ³⁹ There is scholarly disagreement as to exactly when the Panathenaea began to use a ship to convey the peplos tapestry/sail, with Julia Shear, for example, arguing that this did not occur until the Roman period.Footnote ⁴⁰ For present purposes, it is enough to note that when considered more broadly in tradition with ancient Greek religious processional machines, the peplos tapestry/sail doubtless had some relation to the known use of ship carts in ancient religious procession. The ship cart seems to have been used at the very least by the first century BCE in the Panathenaea,Footnote ⁴¹ and is a known feature much earlier of other Greek processions, at the Dionysia in Athens, for example, as well as at the Dionysia in Smyrna.Footnote ⁴² Once more, then, we are prompted to look beyond the picture of processional automata as an abrupt innovation by a few power-hungry individuals and are instead able to contextualise mechanical processional equipment more broadly, noting here the way that the use of ship carts in procession already predates and theologically anticipates the more complex automata that follow. The mechanised ship of the Panathenaic procession would be a popular and recurring feature at least into the 370s CE.Footnote ⁴³

Exactly how automated ships moved remains unclear. In the case of the Smyrnan Dionysia, a trireme was apparently brought from the harbour to the agora by stern cables being released, allowing the ship to slide over land under the direction of the priest of Dionysus.Footnote ⁴⁴ Philostratus’ description of Herodes’ ship mentions obscure ‘underground machinery’ but does offer detailed explanation of the processional route. Modern reconstructions of how the Panathenaic ship might have been propelled have been plentiful and imaginative, ranging from the use of concealed draught animals (despite Philostratus specifying that animals were not used) to the construction of a proto cable car.Footnote ⁴⁵ Whatever the precise mechanical solution, the use of ship carts and automated ships elsewhere and, critically, much earlier in Greek religious festivals attests simultaneously to the mechanical viability, as well as generally to the theological persuasiveness of the automated ship.

Yet the specific Imperial context of Herodes Atticus does deserve slight emphasis here given that it was a time when Athens’ cultural capital – intimately tied to its religious traditions – gave the city its autonomy and prestige.Footnote ⁴⁶ The case of the automated Panathenaic ship is a good example of the way in which traditional Greek festivals had come to be celebrated under the Roman Empire. Earlier Hadrianic reforms to the Panathenaea had already led to a greater monumentalisation of processional route and an increase in the theatricality of the pompē of the Panathenaea.Footnote ⁴⁷ The automated ship is just one element of the greater contemporary and especially the Herodian agenda of creating wonders of various kinds within the Athenian landscape relating to (or justified by) the religious occasion of the Panathenaea. Upon receiving the crowning honour of organising the festival, for example, Herodes built a stadium of pure marble to receive the competing athletes. This stadium is referred to by Philostratus as a monument ‘beyond all other marvels’ (ὑπὲρ πάντα τὰ θαύματα),Footnote ⁴⁸ precisely the vocabulary that surrounds automata from the Homeric thauma idesthai of Hephaistos’ tripods, to Hero explaining that those who make automata are called thaumatourgoi. All the same, at a time when the creation of new festivals abounded and, as is often argued, festivals had taken on an increasingly secular flavour, it is a clear mark of Greek Imperial culture that Herodes embedded his technical marvels within one of the city’s most ancient traditional festivals. If Shear is correct, the Roman emphasis on the Panathenaic ship in the festival procession was a nod to Athens’ past naval success and perhaps especially during the Persian WarsFootnote ⁴⁹ and it would make sense, in a Greek Imperial world, for this age of victory to be (re)emphasised within the religious and martial symbolism of the procession. Technological animation was here a useful tool to recreate the glory days of fifth-century Athens, tying together the naval successes of that time, and thus the presence and benevolence of the city’s patron deity, to the current leader’s awe-inspiring benefactions, both architectural and mechanical.

Automata and Political Theatre

What the body of anecdotal evidence makes clear is the way that processional automata, at least from extant examples, were associated with individual political leaders: Demetrius of Phalerum, Ptolemy II, and Herodes Atticus. Yet the individual historical and political circumstances that underlay each was quite distinct. The Ptolemaic case is rather self-explanatory in the automata’s ability to link and to manifest Ptolemaic/Alexandrian/Dionysian splendour and excess. The Demetrian case is slightly more complicated in its politics where there is, at least in the Polybian presentation, a power play between spectacle as a sign of abundance and stability, and spectacle as needless waste of a self-aggrandising (though not quite divine) ruler. The Herodean case presents a different context again, when Athens’ fifth-century achievements and cultural capital were being re-harnessed and re-performed, and where the city’s religious capital was integral to this mission. Yet if there are rather different political contexts that underlie the three extant instances for the use of processional automata, we have seen that all have traditions of interaction between religion and mechanics that predate and anticipate them. We now turn to some final reflections on the use of processional automata theologically across a breadth of time and space.

In the past, the use of machinery in public spectacle has been explained as a way to show the power and prestige of rulers, especially of Hellenistic monarchs and, later, Roman emperors. In one such formulation, it has been said that ‘automata were part of the apparat of Hellenistic kingship, one of those trappings of power that did nothing, that only communicated the cold ‘facts’ of power relations’.Footnote ⁵⁰ This argument can be complicated on various levels. The first is the implication that communicating power relations was ‘doing nothing’. Second, from an object-agency perspective, is the overlooking of the fact that imposing, rare, scientifically advanced, miracle-making machines would have produced emotional, somatic, and cognitive responses in their viewers. Seeing an object move of its own accord is necessarily provocative; this is as true today as it must have been of antiquity. Responses should be considered a large, overlapping Venn diagram including categories such as surprise and shock, curiosity and scepticism, excitement and inspiration. In short, the precise kind of overlap that exists between the non-mutually exclusive responses of religious reverence and mechanistic intrigue. This is not to mention how the object might have played into feelings of political subservience and readjusted expectations of ‘nature’ and ‘the natural’. Gell’s ‘nexus’ is useful here as it allows us to draw attention to the multiple agents (A) and patients (P) at stake in the object of the processional automaton and thus to nuance our understanding of its agency. The processional automaton itself (A1) was clearly commissioned by one of these leaders (A2) for deployment within the procession to be viewed both by those also involved in the pompē (P1) and by those watching from various parts of the city (P2). To complicate matters further, as I have argued so far, acting as both agent and patient is the patron deity of the festival (A3, P3). We should also take into account the thaumasiourgos (and team of workers?) who would have had some autonomy in the devising and making (A4) and who would have experienced the machine differently again (P4). Finally, if the argument about the object ‘doing nothing’ is to imply that that they had impact ‘only’ in communicating political power and that they ‘did nothing’ theologically, then I hope the previous discussion has proven the contrary. Instead, we should seek to unpack precisely how these objects ‘did’ things in their performative contexts that were the outcome of entanglements between the political, the religious, and the manufactured object; between humans, gods, and things.

One possibility is that in its ability to provoke the thauma of mechanical animation, the automaton served to assimilate the leader to a god (A2 = A3). This may have functioned in this way in Hellenistic Egypt (where the idea of the king as god already existed), and perhaps in other parts of the Hellenistic world, to the extent that ruler cult changed the nature of the division between human and divine.Footnote ⁵¹ But this does not quite explain the case of the Panathenaea or Dionysia where the leaders sought association but not necessarily equation with the Athena or Dionysus, respectively. Ultimately, the use of mechanics to manufacture divine presence in procession allows a leader to show that they have what it takes for the city under their watch to be the kind of city that can properly worship its gods and, in turn, for the gods to bestow upon the people the proper kind of benefits that go with being properly venerated. Processional automata act as the ultimate do ut des in the civic realm, with the fruits of the relationship literally playing out before the eyes of the participants.

While we might see processional automata as products of a Hellenistic world, since their popularity (or perhaps simply their availability) increased in this politico-religious context, they were no sudden theological novelty. As Part I has shown, the theatre had already provided opportunities for mechanical epiphany to exist within the range of theological possibilities of divine manifestation. That this would extend to the procession – a highly theatrical occasion in its own right – is an evolution, one might even argue a logical evolution, but not an innovation. At the same time, the evidence of articulated figurines used in procession indicates an alternative source of inspiration from which the processional automata may have grown. That is, it shows that mechanical ingenuity was one modality of value, among many others, which functioned in human–divine relations. On the one hand, processional objects (pompeia) were always seeking to do the kinds of things that automata embodied so well in the one object; on the other hand, the deus ex machina provided a model for the symbiosis between mechanics and manufacturing divine presence.

Contextualising ‘Automata-Making’

The anecdotal evidence discussed in the previous sections of this chapter reveals the way that ancient pompai offered numerous opportunities for repose and performance during the parade, and that processional automata did not necessarily follow the entire processional route. In the case of Herodes’ ship, for example, the text states clearly that the ship stopped and ‘moored’ at the Pythion, while the full Panathenaic procession continued up to the acropolis. That the pompeia of an ancient procession could be dropped off or picked up at various points and that these religious parades paused to include performance allows conjecture as to the context of use for the automata described in Hero of Alexandria’s technical text On Automata. Hero presents two categories of automata at the start of the treatise. The first, hypagonta automata, are movable shrines or altars (ναοὶ ἢ βωμοὶ), the second, stata automata, function as miniature theatres.Footnote ⁵² Hero discusses in detail an example from each category: a shrine to Dionysus, and the legend of Nauplius, respectively. At various points, however, Hero stresses that the external presentation of the machines can differ.Footnote ⁵³

Unlike comments in the pneumatic texts we examined in Chapter 5, which offer direct evidence that the objects described were designed for use in religious settings, nothing is so explicit in On Automata. We are therefore forced to look for clues embedded within a manual which otherwise proceeds according to its own agenda of describing how to construct automata mechanically. In both the moving and stationary automata, Hero alludes to predecessors whose models he is improving, and in the case of the miniature theatre he singles out Philo of Byzantium (c.280–220 BCE).Footnote ⁵⁴ Philo’s work on automata was one of the now lost books of his nine-book Mēchanikē Syntaxis. Even a generation before Philo, Ctesibius (c.300–230 BCE) was concerned with applied mechanics in much the same way as both Philo and Hero after him.Footnote ⁵⁵ A comment by Vitruvius suggests that Ctesibius too wrote on automata, or at least on mechanical objects used in contexts of entertainment.Footnote ⁵⁶ Though this does not firmly contextualise the automata described in Hero of Alexandria’s manual, it reveals a tradition of automaton construction, or at least of texts dedicated to devising automata, from the third century BCE to the first century CE.

Twice in On Automata, Hero explains that stata automata are safer, less risky, and more adaptable than moving automata.Footnote ⁵⁷ Such comments indicate a concern for the practicalities of use and for viewer experience, allowing us to conclude that, at least in Hero’s mind, his automata were not armchair inventions. Hero’s very first concern in the description of the hypagon automaton is the smoothness of the machine’s forward and backward movements. The author cautions that, if the surface will not allow the wheels to glide easily, wooden slats should be placed on the ground.Footnote ⁵⁸ There is some evidence that this was actually done in antiquity both in general to drag boats over land, and specifically in festival contexts to prepare the processional route.Footnote ⁵⁹ Indeed, a very good example comes down in the epigraphic record from Delos which shows payments to those in charge of smoothing the road for the phallos wagon.Footnote ⁶⁰ Prepared trackways of wood or of stone were also used in ancient theatres to move either entire stage buildings or ekkyklēmata.Footnote ⁶¹

A close examination of the automata in Hero’s text allows further contextualisation of the machines, beginning with the construction of the hypagon automaton. At the floor was a rectangular base which concealed the wheels and supported four columns upon which was a circular architrave. This bottom section of the machine totalled twelve palms in height, or just under a metre. Placed on top was a round shrine with six columns which housed a statuette of Dionysus holding a thyrsos and a skyphos and with a panther at his feet. In front of and behind Dionysus were altars with dried kindling. Atop the shrine was a figurine of Nike with her wings spread – fittingly implying imminent flight – and holding a wreath in her right hand. Six maenads encircled the shrine, with wreathes as decoration in the empty spaces.Footnote ⁶² The exact dimensions of Dionysus’ shrine are not given in Hero’s text, but the whole object must have measured less than two metres in height since the author stipulates that it should not be so big that viewers suspect a human inside.Footnote ⁶³ It also seems sensible in terms of performance to imagine the moving elements of the shrine roughly at eye height.

Before the automaton’s performance begins, Hero insists, the machine should be placed in some spot alone, with viewers standing back. As with the smoothness of the movement of the automaton, this comment shows a clear concern for the spectacle of the machine. After a few moments, the automaton rolled forward and stopped. At this point, viewer attention was pulled from the machine in its entirety to the Dionysiac display on the top. The altar in front of Dionysus spontaneously blazed up and milk or water squirted from the top of the god’s thyrsos. Wine poured forth from the skyphos he held, showering the panther below. The maenads danced around the shrine, accompanied by the sound of drums and cymbals. Once the noise had subsided, the figures of Dionysus and Nike both rotated 180 degrees and the whole performance was repeated facing the other way, beginning with a second fire blazing up before Dionysus. The construction of the hypagon automaton indicates a 360-degree viewing experience, a detail inconsistent with Prou’s hypothesis that the machine would have performed ‘like an actor’ on the logeion prior to theatrical performance.Footnote ⁶⁴ The machine then rolled back to the place where it had begun, retreating both in space and with regards to its state of animation.

Several feature of the hypagon automaton will by now seem familiar to the reader as characteristic of processional automata and of religious machinery more broadly. The hyper-sensorial combination of the heat of the fire, the sound of cymbals and drums, milk, and wine squirting with no apparent source, the spontaneous movement, the prominence of Dionysus and maenadism all speak to the sources presented earlier not just in this chapter, but in Part I too.Footnote ⁶⁵ Further, Hero in his texts says that the makers of automata are called thaumatourgoi.Footnote ⁶⁶ This is a fascinating insight into one of the types of personas that the ancient mechanic could inhabit. The relation between the mechanic/miracle-maker and the person who then put the machine into action in context is frustratingly unclear. In any case, the figures of thaumatourgoi/thaumasiourgoi and related (or synonymous?) thaumatopoioi had a general relation to festivals and spectacle whether this was working complex or simple miracle technologies. Dio Chrysostom recounts with disdain, for example, that thaumatopoioi performed in the street at the Isthmian games.Footnote ⁶⁷

Hero’s static automaton extends the picture of religious mechanics integrated into the festival context. We have already seen, for example, the way that the miniature automated theatre participates in the discourse on the mechanics of epiphany through Athena’s appearance ex machina.Footnote ⁶⁸ Hero’s staton automaton – book II of On Automata – comprised a miniature theatre built ‘as big as one wishes’, set upon a wooden pillar with doors which opened and closed. The hinge here featured once more as a cultural technique, this time to reveal and conceal a sequence of mythical scenes which offered a version of (a part of) the revenge of Nauplius:Footnote ⁶⁹

• Scene 1: Twelve Greeks preparing their ships: sawing, hammering, drilling loudly.

• Scene 2: Ships are launched.

• Scene 3: Painted sea and sky with gradual appearance of ships, swimming dolphins. Sea turns stormy.

• Scene 4: Nauplius holding a torch with Athena next to him. A fire is kindled atop the torch.

• Scene 5: Shipwreck, Ajax swimming. Athena is lifted ex machina. Peal of thunder accompanies a lightning bolt falling on Ajax.

As with processional automata, narrative is again technologically animated, not just through motion, but through sound and fire too. Both Hero’s moving and stationary automata could conceivably have functioned as para-theatrical objects in the festival context, either directly prior to theatrical performance, or at some point in the proceeding festivities, including moments of performative display during the pompē.

If this is correct, when taken in context these automata are highly self-reflexive in what they do. Technological animation is used to draw attention to the ways in which the human activities into which the automata are incorporated are orchestrated just like the performance these objects mechanically reproduced. They point to the performative nature of Greek religion and especially of the festival, to the stylised nature of Greek religious rituals and the role of the mechanical in such, they refer obliquely to the role of the human hand in creating the very marvels which serve to offer cognitive reliability of the presence of the gods. The self-referential nature of religious automata is perhaps not so surprising since it is a quality which pervades Greek performance, Greek religion, and Greek art. In sum, automata do much more than simply showcase scientific potential, despite Wikander’s well-intentioned but ultimately harmful post-blocage claim that for some time now ‘a more serious judgment of automata has prevailed, describing them as object lessons in mechanical and pneumatic principles, rather than as tricks intended to inspire wonder’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Such an assessment seriously misunderstands both the objects at stake and the nature of wonder in ancient Greece.

That Dionysus is the divinity who appears most often associated with automation and automata cannot be coincidence. We have seen in our analysis of the Bacchae in Part I that Dionysus not only offers endless and spontaneous abundance in the human realm (and particularly of products such as milk and wine as featured in Hero’s machine), but also that, as the paradigmatic disturber of binaries, the god unsettles the boundary between animate and inanimate. The technology of automata thus offered an ideal tool both to honour and to present to Dionysus, as well as to represent Dionysus, his influence, and his presence, something which Ptolemy II clearly capitalised on.

A piece of negative evidence offers further opportunity to probe the place that mechanical automation had in the broader theology of the ancient Greek pantheon. In the enigmatic and understudied corpus known as the ‘Socratic Epistles’, a letter describes a little automated wagon racing around the hippodrome in Delphi and Apollo’s apparent disdain at mechanical automation.Footnote ⁷¹ Though dating these letters with any precision is difficult, the most recent consensus is that the Socratic Epistles were written after the earlier part of the second century CE.Footnote ⁷² The Greek of the letter is rather garbled, but the implication is that the automated wagon was sent as a religious gift from Syracuse to Delphi.Footnote ⁷³ This is not the only reference to a disgruntled Apollo in relation to grandiose display and automation. Philostratus says that although Apollo could shake all of Parnassus, make Castalia flow with wine, or forbid Cephisus from being a river, he preferred to reveal his oracles modestly without such boasting.Footnote ⁷⁴ Divinely inspired movement – mechanical or natural – when associated to Apollo is portrayed as an unnecessary (perhaps even vulgar) superfluity within human–divine relations. In the Socratic epistle, it is specifically the spectacle (theōrēma) that bothers Apollo. This can perhaps be taken in direct opposition to Dionysian use of automation which strengthened the mortal sense of connection with the deity.

What is equally at stake in the Socratic Epistle, however, is not Apollo’s dislike of mechanics, but that a religious context for deploying this machine was absent. The very fact that Apollo arrived to see the little automated wagon circling around independently disassociated it from any connection with divine agency, blatantly ignoring the interpretative symbiosis between human technē and divine presence that we have seen to be crucial in religious machinery so far. This stands in stark contrast, for example, to the self-opening doors which precede and predict the arrival of Apollo in Callimachus’ hymn to the god.Footnote ⁷⁵

Automata as a Category of Object

From this anecdotal and technical evidence for the use of automata in ancient procession the first important conclusion to draw is that there is consistency neither in how these machines worked mechanically nor in how they looked. From what we can tell, Demetrius’ snail, Ptolemy’s cart-drawn automata (Nysa and the springs), the Panathenaic ship, and Hero’s automata all had different mechanisms of automation, and all presented very differently to the spectator. These machines were never a standard feature of procession by any means and, on the contrary, were intended to inspire awe by staying fresh in appearance. This point is made explicit in Hero’s text:

Hero here uses the comparative of the adjective kainos to equate, somewhat deceitfully, novel appearance and technical innovation. The technical knowledge that Hero sets out in his text will allow his reader to put the machine together in a great number of new arrangements which constantly impress through visual novelty. This notion of the importance of variety in external presentation of automata is reinforced through Hero’s emphasis on the machine being poikilos. The vocabulary of poikilia is used three times by Hero in this text: once in the very opening line of the text, once when he introduces the moving automaton, and once when he introduces the static automaton. This quality is clearly a feature of machines that Hero prioritises, likely due to the way that it is able to connote visual variety and ingenuity as well as skilful manufacture.Footnote ⁷⁷ The three instances of poikilia vocabulary are the following:Footnote ⁷⁸

Poikilia is an aesthetic phenomenon, and Hero’s choice of vocabulary thus becomes a way to bring mechanics into an art historical discourse. Artistic complexity, versatility, and visual variety – typically associated with metallurgy, weaving, and painting, including, or perhaps especially, of the oeuvres of the gods in Homeric epic – is purposefully interlaced here with mechanical complexity, narrative variety, and contextual diversity. The automaton is composed of various individual parts which work together to form a well-constructed, visually impactful whole: a mechanical miracle. Part of the ingenuity of the automaton, therefore, is precisely that it has variegation in physical appearance, and this happens exclusively thanks to its mechanical complexity.

Despite this emphasis on visual variety in the construction of different arrangements of automata, several features unite the testimonia for the use of processional automata: the synaesthetic quality that the machine engenders, the ability to create internal narratives within the broader processional story, and, crucially, the way that the miracle of automation worked with the call and response between god and worshipper which was at the very core of the religious processional experience in ancient Greece. In other words, the only way that we can conceive of this heterogenous collection of objects as a unified group over roughly five hundred years of history is if we acknowledge that there was a common thread of theological logic that underpinned their deployment and guaranteed their religious authenticity. Mechanical objects were effective as processional objects (pompeia) for their capacity to exemplify how that religious occasion existed both to solicit divine attention and to manifest divine presence. This is not to say that nothing changes over time. In the politicisation of processional automata that begins, from the patchy available evidence, in the Hellenistic period we witness an important moment in the intervention of the human hand in the mechanical miracle. Earlier worshippers were not more naïve; they were not duped into believing that religious technologies occurred exclusively through supernatural forces. Mechanical objects, as we have seen, were always and unproblematically products of human technē even (or especially) when used in religious contexts. However, the human hand begins, with Demetrius of Phalerum, and certainly by Ptolemy II and Herodes Atticus, to have a firm social and political identity in figures who undertook to define their religious identity by capitalising off the symbiosis which preconditioned the existing mechanical miracle. If a leader, even a deified or deifiable one, could be this ‘hand’ or ‘in charge of this hand’ (depending on how we assume ancient scientific patronage worked), what about your average Joe, or your average Alexander, as it were? With the passing of time, what will this teasing out of the mechanism qua mechanism mean for both the mechanism and the miracle?