Technical automation - the ability of man-made (or god-made)
objects to move and act autonomously - is not just the province of
engineering or science fiction. In this book, Maria Gerolemou, by
taking as her starting point the close semantic and linguistic
relevance of technical automation to natural automatism,
demonstrates how ancient literature, performance and engineering
were often concerned with the way nature and artifice interacted.
Moving across epic, didactic, tragedy, comedy, philosophy and
ancient science, this is a brilliant assembly of evidence for the
power of 'automatic theatre' in ancient literature. Gerolemou
starts with the earliest Greek literature of Homer and Hesiod,
where Hephaestus' self-moving artefacts in the Iliad reflect
natural forces of motion and the manufactured Pandora becomes an
autonomous woman. Her second chapter looks at Greek drama, where
technical automation is used to augment and undermine nature not
only through staging and costume but also in plot devices where
statues come to life and humans behave as automatic devices. In the
third chapter, Gerolemou considers how the philosophers of the 4th
century BCE and the engineers of the Hellenistic period with their
mechanical devices contributed to a growing dialogue around
technical automation and how it could help its audience glance and
marvel at the hidden mechanisms of self-motion. Finally, the book
explores the ways technical automation is employed as an ekphrastic
technique in late antiquity and early Byzantium.
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