If humans have the capacity to construct authentic avenues to the divine, these same avenues can also be usurped for fraudulent purposes. The idea of using artifice to fake divine connection offered rich content explored by a wide range of ancient authors, including historians, playwrights, and philosophers, long before the second century CE, when Lucian was composing his many works. The possibility of fake oracles and of bribing the Pythia is already woven into the Histories of Herodotus, for example.Footnote ¹ The reputation of chrēsmologoi (oracle interpreters) suffers in the hands of Classical writers from Aristophanes and Thucydides to Plato.Footnote ² Yet the conversation takes on a particular flavour in the first few centuries CE due, at least in part, to the religious circumstances at large.

The Roman Imperial period is known for being one of intensified religious choice and competition – it is the period for which John North created his famous model of the ‘religious marketplace’.Footnote ³ Following the economic analogy, North made a case for how the change from embedded to differentiated religion in the Imperial period can be seen as analogous to a change from a monopoly to a market system. At the same time as offering individuals a choice of religious ‘products’ that served as identifiers of social grouping within communities, poleis were also competing with each other through religious means from temple-building and renovation to the (re)establishment of festivals and games. Feeding into this religiously framed inter-polis competition was the well-known archaising Classicisms of the elite of the second century CE which led to the revival of traditional civic rituals and to an intensified interest in the best-known religious sites of the Classical period, especially oracular sites such as Delphi and Claros. This was a time, then, which offered rich contemporary inspiration for issues surrounding the legitimacy of and competition between cults, and these are reflected in Lucian’s satiric Alexander or The False Prophet.Footnote ⁴

Lucian’s Alexander (written c.180 CE) follows its eponymous protagonist – a native of Abonoteichos, a small port city on the coast of the Black Sea in the region of Paphlagonia and administratively within the Roman province of Pontus and Bithynia – back to his home city, where he manages to establish and propagate the cult of Glykon, hailed as Asklēpios neos, the ‘new Asklepios’.Footnote ⁵ The aim of the text is to reveal the cult as a complete and utter scam. To do so, the narrator pulls back the curtain on various tricks of deceit which Alexander used to create and then propagate the religiosity of the cult. The Alexander as a text is many things: part biography, part invective, part polemical exposure, part Epicurean apologetic. But rather than focusing on the elements of the text that make it a rationalistic tirade against the superstitious folk of Abonoteichos and a personal attack on the goēs Alexander, I will centre my examination around the idea of technique and religious fraud. I hope to bring into relief not just general issues surrounding how humans establish access to the supernatural realm and the implications of the human hand in creating and regulating access to the transcendental, but, in particular, how the technological formed and informed (explorations of) theology in this period.

Lucian’s Alexander relies on the two commonplace concerns: the role of the human hand in the production of sacred images and the potential anxieties surrounding such. These two ideas are then brought to life by embedding them in a narrative based on another characteristic element of ancient religion: the adaptability of the system to incorporate new gods. As we have seen, although this is not a novelty of the Imperial period, the changing religious landscape through the introduction of new cults – from the Isis, Mithras, and Imperial cults to Judaism and Christianity – was a germane issue of Lucian’s time.Footnote ⁶ Yet if there always existed and continued to exist old-fashioned competition between cults and sanctuaries, the story of Alexander of Abonoteichos is also very much embedded within and symptomatic of an early Roman Imperial world where there is a final important feature at play: the rise of religious freelancers. As Heidi Wendt has shown, despite stories of self-authorised religious actors being frequently bound up in highly interested, usually negative commentaries, evidence confirms that these specialised forms of religion abounded, especially in the first two centuries CE.Footnote ⁷ Just as we see in Lucian’s text, there existed great competition between individual religious experts to enlist followers or students. Certainly, Alexander of Abonoteichos is characterised by the narrator as a religious entrepreneur actively participating in spreading his religious ‘product’ to a market that had other options. Creating a genuine sense of religious aura through various techniques is thus integral to Alexander’s success. Beyond comments about cultic competition at the general level, then, Lucian’s Alexander through all of its satiric baggage makes a particular contribution in its exploration of the importance of successful manipulation of technē on an individual level for the fabrication of miracles, and so for the reputation of cult.

Technology and Cult Propagation

Epigraphic and numismatic evidence has convincingly corroborated Lucian’s description of the Glykon cult, at least from geographic and iconographic angles.Footnote ⁸ The evidence also suggests, further to Lucian’s brief comment at the end of his text, that the cult outlived Alexander by at least a century. This evidence has become well known, and I restrict myself to a few historicist comments on the basis of this material corpus.Footnote ⁹

The peculiar iconography of the god described in the Alexander – a snake with an anthropomorphic headFootnote ¹⁰ – is at least partially corroborated by three surviving statue(ette)s contemporary with the cult from Romania and Athens which have serpentine bodies and humanlike heads (Figure 7.1).Footnote ¹¹ Towards the end of the Alexander, the protagonist is said to have petitioned the emperor to change the name of Abonoteichos to Ionopolis and to have struck coins with this new name showing the images of Alexander on one side and of Glykon on the other.Footnote ¹² The numismatic evidence confirms that the request was at least partly granted.Footnote ¹³ The cult appears to have had a regional numismatic presence too, as coins bearing the name of Glykon and his image are found around the wider Bithynia region at Tieion, Gangra/Germanicopolis, Pergamum, and Nicomedeia.

Figure 7.1 C2 CE marble statue of Glykon from Tomis. Museum of National History and Archaeology, Constanza, Romania 2003.

These pieces of evidence proving the existence of a cult of Glykon do not prove the existence of Alexander as a person, nor of any specific detail in the text except perhaps the changing of the name of Abonoteichos to Ionopolis. My ultimate aim is not to discover whether the autophone was actually constructed by Alexander, or whether Glykon’s Mysteries were celebrated as they are described in the text. Instead, I seek to explore how technology and religion intersect both as literary fictions and as plausible historical realities, and to ask how that might have been experienced and interpreted in historical context. Though sympathetic to cautions against historicising the text, I will endeavour to offer an interpretation which does justice to the literary strategies of Lucian’s Alexander without shying away from the insights that adducing literary and non-literary parallels might offer.Footnote ¹⁴

The material evidence which offers a historical basis for the cult has been used by scholars to draw further conclusions regarding the cult’s formation and propagation.Footnote ¹⁵ Chaniotis has demonstrated that if the inhabitants of Abonoteichos were willing to accept the new god, this was not because of their stupidity, as the narrator posits, but because they were confronted with very familiar processes.Footnote ¹⁶ These range, for example, from the way that Alexander dresses, tosses his hair, speaks in tongues, and claims divine descent, to the legion of cult personnel he accrues, his use of torchlight and hymnody, as well as the cult’s ‘package-deal’ combination of divination, healing, and initiation. This approach to understanding the Alexander has proved fruitful, yet in these analyses, the mechanical component is invariably relegated to theatrics: stripped of its capacity for genuine religious persuasion, simply branded as a classic Lucianic rhetorical tool. In other words, the most striking element of Glykon’s epiphanic and oracular manifestations – the mechanical component – is never taken seriously as a technique to create religious aura, despite evidently playing an important role in the authenticity of the cult for its believers, and what the narrator considers forgery or, as we could reformulate it, in the construction of belief and disbelief.

There are (at least) two reasons scholars have been reluctant to use the technological elements of the cult of Glykon in any meaningful way in their analyses of the Alexander. The first is the emphasis on the sociological aspects of cult formation, which has been the focus of historical analyses of the text to date. This was encouraged by the adoption of John North’s ‘religious marketplace’ model on which, for example, Chaniotis’ work leans strongly. If North’s model has value for looking at the propagation of the cult through social means, it is limited in that it does not help us understand why one religious ‘product’ was preferred to another, or how these differed theologically. Here, I want to distinguish between the sociological issue of establishing a cult and the anthropological one of creating religious aura. The social effectiveness of cult must go hand in hand with, but is not identical to, the theological effectiveness. The social propaganda of the cult of Glykon – and the situation of religious competition of the Graeco-Roman world in the second century CE – is often acknowledged and foregrounded, while the technological marvels are relegated to the category of ‘religious trickery’, as if to count these elements as authentic parts of the cult would decrease its claim to historical validity. This is inadvertently to fall prey to Lucian’s rhetoric while claiming to see beyond it. Instead, I contend that real theological persuasion was going on in the use of technological epiphany and prophecy, and that Lucian’s text is useful for us in unpacking the power of enchantment of this category of religious mediator.

Alongside the sociological focus of scholarship on the Alexander, the tendency to assume that the technology in the text was a fictional product of the satiric genre – part of the theatrical metaphors throughout the text and nothing more – comes from ignoring our other evidence for technological epiphanies in ancient religion. This in turn likely stems from a Protestant sensibility where spirit is privileged over matter, theatricality is disavowed, and any connection between the technical and the divine is resisted. In fact, this is precisely the attitude of our early Christian texts, which explicitly denounce the combination of mechanics and religion as fraudulent. But to see the evidence from Christian apologists as supporting Lucian’s satiric description of these techniques of ‘religious quackery’ is to miss the broader historical point regarding the place of mechanics and theology in antiquity.

The early third-century Refutation of All Heresies, usually attributed to Hippolytus of Rome,Footnote ¹⁷ provides some of the best examples of the use of technologies for religious effect in pagan religion in general, and specifically corroborates Lucian’s description of the cult of Glykon.Footnote ¹⁸ Refutation of All Heresies condemns the following religious tricks (among many others): perforating and resealing eggs,Footnote ¹⁹ loosening and resealing wax seals,Footnote ²⁰ and fashioning oracular autophones.Footnote ²¹ These are all familiar to the reader of Lucian’s Alexander. Hippolytus’ account does not guarantee the historicity of the cult of Glykon, or of Alexander’s actions, but it does allow us to broaden the picture of the phenomenon at stake beyond the confines of Lucianic fiction. Yet while Alexander and Refutation of All Heresies are often made to speak to each other on equal terms, the defrauding ‘mission’ of Hippolytus is different to the Lucianic narrator’s in important ways.

Hippolytus’ text is concerned with identifying Hellenic practices – namely Greek philosophy, mystery cults, astrology, and magic – that have been adopted by the narrator’s Christian enemies.Footnote ²² In presenting the sources that are ‘plagiarised’ by his opponents, Hippolytus draws a genealogy between Hellenes and heretics which in turn de-authenticates the miracles according to (his) Christian doctrine: that it is the logos of God which is true.Footnote ²³ In Hippolytus, Hellenic practice (including the construction of technological miracles) is put against the Word of God. In the Alexander, the situation is more complex because Alexander is acting in a world where the very same miracles could be authentic. In one case, it is about proving that the miracles belong to a different theology; in the other case, these very same mediators are what holds pagan theology together: it is not available to the Alexander simply to say that Alexander’s miracles are fraudulent because God does not act like that. The core issue that the narrator of the Alexander faces is how to debunk a miracle when God does work by these very same mechanisms. For Hippolytus, science and technology are excluded from the theology altogether, but in the case of Lucian’s Alexander, science and technology are implicitly acknowledged as integral to the theology. This is not to say that Lucian is or is not adhering to traditional religion. Rather, the point is that as an author, Lucian is well aware that the incorporation of scientific and technological knowledges into Greek religion from at least the deus ex machina of fifth-century Attic theatre offers him considerable scope to play with these same themes in his text. While for his Christian contemporaries polemical exposure was just that, for his pagan readership, Lucian is toying with the divide between exposure and didactic manual, a point on which I will further elaborate shortly.

Hippolytus furnishes the most easily comparable material in terms of the specific techniques that are ascribed to pagan fraudsters, but similar issues also come out of other early Christian apologetic texts. Clement of Alexandria, for example, not only denounces material idols in general for the indirect contact they offer with God,Footnote ²⁴ but also condemns religious technologies, especially as they are used in Mysteries. Given his agenda, Clement’s description of pagan mystery practices must of course be taken with a pinch of salt, but in a passage that does not seem to exaggerate or invent too drastically, Clement lists the worthless symbola that the initiates of the Mysteries of Dionysus are duped into believing. These include ‘the knucklebone, the ball, the spinning-top, apples, wheel, mirror, fleece’ (ἀστράγαλος, σφαῖρα, στρόβιλος, μῆλα, ῥόμβος, ἔσοπτρον, πόκος).Footnote ²⁵ We have examined many of these objects over the course of the book. But, as with Hippolytus’ text, this is more than just additional evidence for the existence of the kinds of technologies already discussed (this time in the context of mystery cults): these Christian apologists help to confirm the efficiency of such objects in creating authentic religious experience in the pagan context.

This is another point at which theories of play are useful for interpreting the material at hand. Play can only be effective if the players believe in the game. Doubt, we have seen, is a core part of the attitude of belief and bears a similar role in religious context to indeterminacy in a game which explains the variations in a player’s commitment.Footnote ²⁶ Yet it is neither indeterminacy, nor even cheating, that destroys the game but rather the nihilist who denounces the rules as absurd and conventional and who thus refuses to play because the game is meaningless.Footnote ²⁷ The Christian authors here are the nihilists, while Lucian, through the character of Alexander, is interested in bringing the ideas of the cheat and of doubt into his exploration of the agonistic game that is cult propagation by religious freelancers in the Imperial period. Lucian’s text is certainly humorous, light-hearted, and playful, but it is also ludic in a way that is not frivolous but impacts arguments on religious belief in general, and on the technological miracle in particular.

Mechanics among Literary and Literal Theatrics

While it is now generally acknowledged that Lucian’s story around the cult of Glykon includes various familiar features of cult, scholars of the text still tend to see Lucian’s descriptions of the technological elements as part of his theatrical presentation of the whole ‘drama’.Footnote ²⁸ If we acknowledge that Lucian might instead be presenting technological forms of epiphany and divination as part of his exploration of the avenues of the human creation of the sacred, we might be moved to see a different relation between the text, the technological, the sacred and the theatrical. Could it be that as well as forming part of the typical Lucianic literary repertoire, the theatrical metaphors throughout the Alexander, and Lucian’s staging of the entire cult as Alexander’s theatrical performance, were enabled by the prominent place that technology plays in the theatrical realm? In this case, Lucian does not include the technological as part of the theatrical analogy he is making in the Alexander but, instead, the technological elements of the cult allow him to make a link to the theatrical precisely through the use of technology there too.

Lucian recounts how the fourth day of the celebration of the Mysteries of Glykon involved a re-enactment of the marriage of Alexander to the moon goddess Selene.Footnote ²⁹ In this ceremony, Alexander – recasting himself as an Endymion figure – lay down pretending to be asleep, and the woman chosen for the role of Selene, a certain Rutilia, descended from the ceiling ‘as if she were descending from heaven’ (ὡς ἐξ οὐρανοῦ).Footnote ³⁰ Unlike the movable cult statue of Glykon and unlike the autophone, Lucian here gives no indication of the precise technology in place, but scholars have, I think rightly, tended to imagine the use of a mēchanē of the sort used in the theatre explored in depth in Part I of the book.Footnote ³¹ The mēchanē was, in many ways, ground zero when it came to mechanical epiphany: it stood as the most obvious and long-standing context in which viewers were used to associating the divine and the technical. On one level, the theatre works with Lucian’s repeated literary theme of appearance and reality and on another, it offers Lucian the image of spectacle and illusion which he uses to characterise Alexander as a charlatan. Yet on a third level, the fact that mechanics were used in the theatrical context to manufacture onstage epiphanies allows Lucian also to absorb the deus ex machina within his complex exploration of the human manufacture of the sacred.

(De)limiting the Miraculous

The success of Lucian’s Alexander lies in its artful presentation of both the hatred and the fanaticism that surrounds the cult and the idol of Glykon.Footnote ³² The hatred is filtered through the narratorial perspective, while the fanaticism is represented by the (hyperbolically) increasing number of worshippers – starting from Abonoteichos, extending into the neighbouring regions of Bithynia, Galatia, and Thrace, then to farther parts of Ionia and Cilicia, and, eventually, ‘the whole Roman Empire’.Footnote ³³ Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis has shown the way that these two registers work to contrast elite concepts of logos and paideia with the irrational values associated with the low-class and the foreign, and how this forms part of a critique of the binary model of elite religion versus popular superstition.Footnote ³⁴ Building on Petsalis-Diomidis’ demonstration of how Lucian is satirising the use of false paideia to criticise the elite, I suggest that part of this involves demonstrating his own paideia as it relates to the knowledge of certain practical applications of knowledge (technai) in order, precisely, to position himself as (pseudo-)didaskalos of the miraculous. As with so many of Lucian’s texts, the Alexander is concerned with distinguishing truth from falsity, yet the Alexander is particularly forceful in its mission not only to demonstrate that appearances can be deceiving, but to indicate how to determine a hoax. The distinction I am making is the one between the observer noting ‘that trick can’t be true,’ and ‘that trick can’t be true, because I know that it is done in the following way … ’. This plays out in the text at the level of religious mediation, in determining whether these strategies and objects intended to connect with the divine are genuine or not, and how one can tell the difference.

Alexander as a prophet is clearly a quack, but what of the miracles he produces? Lucian intentionally complicates the narrator’s defrauding programme by engaging with contemporary discourse around the miraculous in both religious and scientific terms. Specifically, he makes room for the text to act as an instruction manual leaning into the inherent didacticism of technical texts. The narrator’s unravelling of the miracles of Alexander acknowledges and dramatises the interactions between science and religion, pushing the reader into complicity with the fraudulent.Footnote ³⁵ The Alexander is not just an exposé (of the exposé, as nicely put by ní Mheallaigh) in which Lucian ‘colludes with the reader about the more slippery aspects of his own wonder-work, in a form of authorial self-exposure’,Footnote ³⁶ but in the process of such exposure, the narrator leaves a workable record of how to re-enact the same miracles. If on a literary level Alexander’s text uses the discourse of wonder to promote his writing to wonder-worthy levels (both Alexander and Lucian are wonder-workers), on a practical level, in the process of doing so, Lucian renders the reader complicit not just by understanding the fraud, but by empowering them to replicate it. This is at once a critique of the educated people’s (i.e. the pepaideumenoi’s) incapacity to see the tricks for what they are, as noted by Petsalis-Diomidis, as well as a kind of forced ‘education’ of the various technai that have gone into the manufacture of the cult. I take two examples from the text to demonstrate how Lucian brings scientific vocabulary and technical knowledge into the processes of cult in order to show the mediated nature of both, and, given that they are not as opposed as might first appear, how one can be learnt and used to facilitate the other.

The technē of medicine forms an important part of the religiosity of the Glykon cult since the god is seen as the new Asklepios, able to enact healing miracles. Early on, we learn that a man from Tyana educated (exepaideuse) Alexander, but that this teacher was a disreputable goēs, ‘magician’ and total charlatan.Footnote ³⁷ The man was also, however, a public physician (iatros). A brief quotation from the Odyssey allows for a swift demonstration of erudition and, more to the point, of the narrator’s perception that the tension in the Tyanan’s character was reflected in the latter’s profession, since pharmaka too were both terrible and wondrous, dangerous but indispensable (esthla … lugra). Ridiculed though he is, this man clearly did a decent job of teaching medicine to Alexander, who is later reported not just to have prescribed medical treatment and diets to his worshippers, but to have produced ‘many useful remedies’ (πολλὰ καὶ χρήσιμα φάρμακα).Footnote ³⁸ Given the narrator’s overwhelming disdain for every part of the pseudo-prophet and his cult, this brief compliment is unusual. Healing was typical of Asklepeia in general, but neos Asklēpios, we are told, developed a new, particularly effective healing ointment made from bear fat.Footnote ³⁹ The effectiveness of this restorative ointment stands in direct opposition to the fraudulent oracles that Alexander delivers. While he may have ‘combined guesswork with trickery’ when it came to his oracular answers, Alexander was able to dispense accurate medical knowledge, and even invented a novel and efficient treatment. He is walking evidence of the importance of the instruction of technai as part of the discourse of the wondrous because if we judge a miracle by its outcome, Alexander’s medical knowledge has made the jump from suspicious to sincere. Does he then pass from charlatan to legitimate miracle-worker, at least in the field of medicine? There is also an issue of double determination at play here, whereby Asklepios as patron of medicine is involved in any physician’s success. Does that mean that neos Asklēpios is being promoted to authentic divine patron of medicine? In any case, Lucian’s presentation certainly (and perhaps bizarrely) legitimises Alexander’s medical abilities and in doing so, complicates the relationship between that technical expertise, its teachability and the (authenticity of the) divine.

The distinction between divine knowledge and scientific skill or forecast is one that the Greeks and the Romans reflected upon more broadly, and since much earlier than Lucian’s time. It is a conversation at least as old as the Hippocratic authors, if not the early natural philosophers, into which Roman authors of course also intervened. In Cicero’s De Divinatione we read that certain types of men make predictions based not on divine inspiration, but on reason (horum sunt auguria non divini impetus, sed rationis humanae).Footnote ⁴⁰ This does not make them divine, the text goes on to say; they simply know the laws of nature (natura). The angle that Lucian takes in the Alexander – namely the focus on the outcome of the miracle, rather than its source – is a particular spin on this familiar argument. Lucian shows a greater level of interest not just in acknowledging but problematising the line where divine knowledge ends and human knowledge begins by leaning on the fact that the outcome looks the same. This resonates with the sentiments found in the Cynic philosopher Oenomaus’ Exposure of Frauds, a polemic against oracles written a few decades earlier than Lucian was writing.Footnote ⁴¹ Oenomaus takes issue with the reliability of oracular responses on a number of fronts, including answers which have as their basis ‘natural’ (i.e. explicable through the laws of nature) rather than divine knowledge. In one instance, Oenomaus points out that the advice that an old man should marry a young woman if he wants children ‘is not the advice of a prophet, but of anyone who understands nature (physis)’.Footnote ⁴² As with Cicero’s comment, this is not quite as banal as saying that it is common-sense knowledge; there is some level of superior ‘technical’ understanding at play, but it is something that humans can attain without divine consultation.

The ideas of and discourses around physis were, as G. E. R. Lloyd has shown, utterly unique to the ancient Greek context.Footnote ⁴³ Lloyd uses the Hippocratic On the Sacred Disease and the coalescing of medical and religious knowledges there to demonstrate the practical stakes of the debates around natural and divine. Following Lloyd’s argument, we understand that behind these philosophical discussions are the realities of different practitioners delimiting their fields of expertise. The situation in the Imperial period is different from the early Greek medicine on which Lloyd bases his argument, perhaps most importantly in the sense that medical professionals had more formalised avenues for teaching and learning. Yet the problems that Lloyd identifies remain (or perhaps resurface as) relevant in a world where religious freelancers are particularly widespread and so where ‘domains’ of expertise were important to define.

Medical miracles are not the only kind in Alexander’s repertoire. The oracular component of the cult of Glykon involved a series of techniques progressively introduced by Alexander to mediate divine foreknowledge. The first prophecies were delivered by worshippers writing their inquiry to the god on a scroll (biblion) which they proceeded to seal with wax or clay. Alexander then took the scrolls into the adyton ‘inner sanctum’ of Glykon’s temple and returned them to the worshippers intact, but with the answer miraculously inscribed inside.Footnote ⁴⁴ A lengthy and detailed explanation of three possible ways that Alexander could have forged this ‘miracle’, using different technical knowledge, ensues: unpeeling and re-sticking the wax by using a warm needle; making plaster (detail of the chemical composition of the plaster included) and then taking a mould of the seal impression to reuse once the scroll had been opened; putting marble dust into glue to make a paste that hardened and, again, using it to make a cast of the seal.Footnote ⁴⁵ The didacticism is hard to miss. Technai here allow Alexander to forge divine responses and thus to look as if he were accessing divine knowledge. As in the case of medicine, however, it is possible to see this less as a straightforward denunciation and more as an exploration of the act of miracle-making, examining the extent to which forging a miracle still constitutes a miraculous act in the eye of the viewer/worshipper. On a textual level, this in turn brings the author-narrator-reader triangle into a forced teacher–learner relationship. The reader is released from being fed the knowledge that makes them complicit not just in identifying but possibly reproducing the fraud through an explicit mention of a contemporary work supposedly written by the intended recipient of the whole text, Celsus. The narrator praises the excellent treatise against sorcerers that Celsus wrote, which was able to preserve common sense in its readers despite citing so many instances of fraud like those just mentioned. Whether this evaluation of Celsus’ texts is genuine or tongue-in-cheek is difficult to know for certain, but, in any case, it flags the potential for polemical exposures to go too far in the other direction and become helpful rather than harmful to the cause they are vilifying.

The backdrop to Lucian’s narrative – namely the unstoppable momentum of the cult described at various points in the text – intentionally works against the narratorial voice and attests to the success of Alexander’s methods. Every gullible follower of Alexander serves both as a punching bag for the narrator and to strengthen the case for the effectiveness of the religious entrepreneur’s techniques in creating religious aura. The reader is told to ‘listen up in order to expose these imposters’,Footnote ⁴⁶ yet through his efforts to defraud, Lucian creates multiple new ways both to perform and to view – and therefore to see authentic meaning in – the miracle(s). Ironically – and the irony, I would suggest, was not lost on Lucian – the text condemning the pseudomantis provides his readers with the tools to (re)create the very tricks he uncovers, rendering narrator and reader thaumatopoioi, goētes, and disreputable didaskaloi too.Footnote ⁴⁷ Lucian’s pamphlet thus metamorphoses from exposure of fraud to instruction manual of fraudulent technique, precisely putting into the world the kind of text that contemporaneous authors – Celsus, Hippolytus, Oenomaus – feared: one which dwells on the ways that technical knowledge can be put to the service of religion, and the teachability of this knowledge.

Mechanical Epiphany and Technoprophecy

Let us now turn to a close analysis of the use of mechanics in the cult of Glykon as described in Lucian’s Alexander, first, through the mechanically enhanced image of Glykon, and, second, through the addition of the autophone to deliver prophecy.

Alexander first presents neos Asklēpios to the people of Abonoteichos by fashioning an anthropomorphic, painted, and lifelike head made of linen, which he affixes to the body of a real serpent. The head has a mechanism which, by horsehairs, would allow the snake to open and close its mouth, and to dart its black tongue in and out.Footnote ⁴⁸ Viewing the divinity was orchestrated in such a way as to imitate the viewing of Alexander the Great in his last days, appealing to the cultural memory of a long-since deified human.Footnote ⁴⁹ It is stressed that worshippers could and did touch the manifestation of the god, but the moment of encounter itself was fleeting.Footnote ⁵⁰ The crowd passed by quickly, pushed towards the exit by the next wave of fanatical admirers, and this, apart from filling them with fervour, intentionally compromised the accuracy of their viewing experience (καὶ πρὶν ἀκριβῶς ἰδεῖν).Footnote ⁵¹ The worshippers are left wanting more, forced to rely on a brief but evidently powerful combination of visual and haptic connection to stand as proof of the god’s existence.Footnote ⁵² The moment of manifestation was dimly lit by torchlight and this too likely worked to increase the religiosity, given artificial light’s association with mystery cult.Footnote ⁵³

Lucian’s explanation of the effect of Glykon’s epiphany on its worshippers is another (albeit complicated) piece of evidence which we can use to think through the issues of viewership which recur throughout this book. Here we have a description of the effect of a technological epiphany in an ancient cult context or, at least, the purported effect, through the disdain of the narrator, of such an epiphany on the gullible masses. The vocabulary of Lucian’s description is in line with what technical texts claim of the mechanical marvel. Various elements make the Glykon epiphany marvellous.Footnote ⁵⁴ First, it was prodigious (terastios) that a snake which worshippers had seen a few days prior born from an egg was now a large serpent.Footnote ⁵⁵ Second, this snake had a human face and was tame.Footnote ⁵⁶ Third, the miracle was convincing precisely because Alexander allowed haptic contact with the deity, which also let them get close enough to see the head opening and shutting its mouth. In other words, while snakes are typically wild and unpredictable, the Pellan snake was tame and would submit to anything; while nature usually determines a fixed rate of growth, this serpent grew unusually fast; while certain conventions existed for the visual representation of the divine, this god has a completely peculiar, humano-serpentine form with a smooth, writhing body and mechanically animated face. All these elements make this representation of the god religiously enchanting and explain why it drew such large crowds. The mechanical epiphany of Glykon was so successful because it contained so many elements that were para physin, that exceeded what nature was capable of without technical assistance. As we have seen, para physin (and its inverse kata physin) is terminology which lies at the very heart of the technological’s relation to the miraculous in the technical corpus too.Footnote ⁵⁷ From the time of the Peripatetic Mechanical Problems, the technological and the miraculous are presented as inextricably linked and, critically for the present discussion, the patterns of nature have a particular role to play in (understanding) this link. Humans marvel at that which happens kata physin, ‘according to nature’, if they cannot understand the cause, and at things which happen para physin, ‘beyond nature’, thanks to the intervention of the branch of technē known as mechanics. Lucian’s specific comments on the artificial linen head affixed to the Glykon image equipped with a hair-drawn mechanism which allows for the mouth to open and the tongue to move play right into this acknowledgement of the way that visible mechanics adds to the marvel, rather than detracting from it.

After the initial epiphany of the god, Alexander unveils a new and improved version of the artificial snakehead, having developed it also into a talking device used to deliver oracles: the ‘autophone’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Lucian explains that Alexander had fashioned the windpipe from a crane – that is, a trachea, known to be elongated in the crane, thus revealing a level of biological and pneumatic knowledge – to the head of the snake, through which the prophet could talk. The development of the autophone has a very specific purpose: to produce further shock and enchantment (ekplēxis) in the crowd.Footnote ⁵⁹ This subsequent invention demonstrates that the aura produced was in cumulative proportion to the complexity of the technology involved. This is precisely the point of Gell’s enchantment of technology.Footnote ⁶⁰ The increased ekplēxis which Alexander’s technical addition prompts aligns directly with the explanation that Hero of Alexandria gives on the intended impact of automata on the viewer. In introducing his text, Hero says that study of automaton-making is worthwhile on two fronts: for the skill involved on the side of the maker, and for the ekplēxis that the spectacle engenders on the side of the viewer.Footnote ⁶¹ Lucian’s Alexander, despite its satire, is consistent with Hero’s mechanical text in its presentation of the principles behind the religious persuasion of mechanics.

This is another point at which we might want to return to the didacticism in this text. To the pepaideumenoi educated in mēchanica, all these mēchanēmata should not fool them, but they should instead be seen for what they are: products of human technē. Is there an expectation of Lucian’s elite readership that, given their education, they should see the applied mathematics at work? Or is this a slightly more existential move meant to question what it means to subscribe to a theology that so intimately fuses the humanly manufactured with the divine? In a different Lucianic work, On the Syrian Goddess, the narrator also describes autonomously produced oracles. Though entirely different in genre, as a pseudo-Herodotean periegesis, On the Syrian Goddess is, like the Alexander, also about cult and religious thaumata, and is also a text whose relationship with history is fraught and contested.Footnote ⁶²

The narrator in On the Syrian Goddess dwells on a certain oracle to ‘Apollo’Footnote ⁶³ in Hieropolis which works without a priest or prophet: a statue moves by itself, prompted only by divine volition to bring its prophesising to fruition.Footnote ⁶⁴ It is autonomous, but not mechanical. The idea in On the Syrian Goddess is that the divinity has an independent desire to communicate something to the human realm which is then realised through the convulsions of the object. In the Alexander, the presence of the (false) prophet is a constant obstruction from the perspective of the narrator, and thus an essential enabler from the perspective of the worshippers. In On the Syrian Goddess, the autonomous action of the statue supposedly removes the need for a human mediator but in practice, the narrator goes on to relate that a priest is called in to make sense of the movements of the statue. Taken together, these texts show a general interest in working through exactly how the human hand fits into issues of animation, epiphany, and oracular communication. Both autonomous animation (as in On the Syrian Goddess) and mechanical animation (as in Alexander) form part of a discussion around the production and the effect of the miraculous, as well as the poles of sought and unsought epiphany discussed at other points in this book. The technoprophecy of Glykon, and of the Alexander, indulges in the difficulties surrounding sought epiphany and divination given their reliance on the cooperation between divine and human. The auto-animated oracle of On the Syrian Goddess instead speaks to theophanic epiphany that is unsolicited from the part of any worshipper, but which also makes little sense without human framing of some sort.

Taking these two oracles together, then, there are a few conclusions to draw. The first is a reinforcement of the idea presented in Part II that there existed a variety of contemporaneous oracular techniques, some of which relied on and intentionally leant into the mechanical more than others. Lucian was very aware that sought and unsought modes of epiphany existed in Greek religion, that both had their epistemological and theological complexities, but that both were considered part of the vocabulary of the miraculous which had gained currency in the first centuries CE. Both, therefore, are of use to Lucian and his vast corpus of stories of gods, humans, cults, and the miraculous. The issue that the Alexander ultimately raises and problematises is whether there is a point beyond which there is too much human intervention and not enough space for the gods.

In contrast to the intense scholarly interest that the Alexander has generated, Lucian’s Icaromenippus is an un-mined gem. Karen ní Mheallaigh’s recent monograph on the moon in the Graeco-Roman imagination goes some way in rectifying this scholarly oversight, offering sustained analysis of the Icaromenippus.Footnote ¹ The subject matter of her book, however, leads ní Mheallaigh to focus on Menippus’ lunar stopover and its contribution to ‘selenography’ (writings on the moon) and pioneering of ‘selēnoskopia’ (viewing from the moon), as well as on the text’s meta-literary comments on the hybridity and liminality of Lucian’s poetics. My discussion fits into the contours of ní Mheallaigh’s reading but focuses instead on Menippus’ final destination (Olympus), as well as on the method and theomachic implications of his flight.

Mechanical Aids: Wings, Wells, and the Divine

The Icaromenippus takes the form of a dialogue between Menippus and a friend, where the former relates his recent astronomical journey to the very highest point in the Heavens, the acropolis of Zeus, and back again. He explains that his motivation for undertaking such a voyage is his disillusion at the lack of consensus among philosophers regarding a series of cosmological questions.Footnote ² Menippus’ method of ascent, a great source of curiosity to his friend, is thanks to a pair of composite wings, the right carefully plucked from an eagle and the left from a vulture, subsequently assembled together and fastened onto the human body.Footnote ³ The hybrid form that Menippus assumes once he dons the wings, and the possible theomachy of his flight, will be discussed in due course, but I begin by turning my attention to the wings as mechanical tools of divine mediation – technological prostheses that allow the human and divine realms to be bridged and man and god to come into direct contact.

Lucian is precise in how the wings work, describing that sturdy straps are fitted on the shoulders and grips made for the hands at the very tip of the last quill feather on each side.Footnote ⁴ While the choice of the eagle will later turn out to be advantageous to Menippus for this bird’s characteristically keen eyesight, the selection of these two birds is initially justified through practical considerations of construction, namely that the wings of no other species would be large enough to uphold the weight of a man’s body. The wings in the Icaromenippus are the ultimate technological enhancement, allowing the almost inconceivable feat of human access to the heavens, and as such explore the shady area between science and fiction in much the same way that the Lucianic corpus as a whole repeatedly does.Footnote ⁵ Specifically in the Icaromenippus, this centres around the distinction between mythos and paradoxon (to which we shall return at various points in the discussion). From the outset, Menippus explains that, contrary to what his friend thinks, his astronomical journey was neither a dream nor a myth, but a paradoxon.Footnote ⁶ The wings of Menippus become analogous to the text of Lucian, whereby the Icaromenippus serves as a prosthesis of the scientific imagination, allowing first the friend and then the reader to embark on an astronomical journey and to view the world from the moon, from the heavens, and from the perspective of the gods.Footnote ⁷ The slide from the scientific to the religious is seamless and compelling. The tantalising difficulty, borderline impossibility, of what these wings need to achieve thus serves, on one level, to elevate Lucian’s poetics. On another level, however, the wings serve as a striking admission that if one were to be able to come face to face with Zeus, an ingenious mēchanē would be the way to do it.Footnote ⁸

After a lunar stopover where he meets the natural philosopher Empedocles, Menippus continues his journey to arrive, three days later, at Olympus. Greeted by Hermes, Menippus is shaking in his boots as he enters the divine assembly, only to find that the gods too are apprehensive about the situation.Footnote ⁹ The success of the wings as technologies enabling divine encounter has collapsed the safe distance that objects of mediation typically uphold. The contraption threatens to undermine the distinction – spatial and subsequently ontological – between man and god. Furthermore, Menippus has set a precedent which the gods fear might result in the whole human race arriving at any moment, all sporting similar wings. We will return to this compelling scene presently.

The reason that Menippus is led to undertake his astronomical journey in the first place is the lack of clarity on earth about celestial and divine issues. Specifically in the latter category, he raises a series of topics about which philosophers have conflicting views: the form of god, the configuration of the pantheon, monotheism versus polytheism (even the possibility of atheism), and the extent to which the gods intervene in human affairs.Footnote ¹⁰ All of these will be clarified once Menippus sees Olympus for himself, but we, as readers, receive some answers more fully than others. While the precise form of Zeus is not described, for example, his terrifying thunderous voice is,Footnote ¹¹ and while we come to understand that the traditional Greek pantheon with Zeus at its head must be in place, this is not explored in any depth. Instead, the dialogue is remarkably centred around Zeus. The experience of the heavens is through the lens of Zeus, and the reflections on the current situation in the human realm are from Zeus’ perspective. Lucian describes Menippus taking a stroll, engaged in casual conversation with the supreme deity who enquires about the price of wheat in Greece and the impact of recent weather on the crops.Footnote ¹² This flippant interchange does not simply question Zeus’ omniscience or paint him as uninterested or uninvolved in the details of human affairs, but reverses the typical dynamic of human–divine oracular interchange by positioning Menippus in the know, and with the power to relay information to Olympus’ reigning god. Zeus’ most pressing concern is his waning popularity on earth, which he attributes to the presence of ‘new’ gods such as Apollo, Asklepios, Bendis, Anubis, and Artemis.Footnote ¹³ The collection of deities in the list makes much more sense if understood as commenting on the popularity of their respective sanctuaries as specified by Zeus: Apollo at Delphi, Asklepios in Pergamon, Bendis in Thrace, Anubis in Egypt, and Artemis in Ephesus. This is not so much about new deities as it is about emerging regional religious presences and long-standing tensions between local cult and Panhellenic notions of the gods. Explored in the Alexander from the point of view of the enterprising religious charlatan, we here are given the divine perspective and the way it ‘dilutes’ the ancient prestige of Zeus.

Continuing in this vein, the dialogue points to the fragility of typical divine mediators not from the point of view of the human, who risks facing a mediator that is inauthentic and thus ineffective in forging a religious connection, but from the point of view of the immortals. Zeus asks about the maintenance of his cult statues,Footnote ¹⁴ holding festivals in his honour, finishing the construction of his temples, and the wealth (or poverty) of his sanctuaries.Footnote ¹⁵ These actions do not threaten the existence of Zeus, but they are elementary to his relevance in the human realm. The literal and metaphorical emptiness of cult statues is a favourite theme of Lucian’s, who in two different dialogues offers the same ludic image of mice occupying the inside of Zeus’ cult statues.Footnote ¹⁶ If, as we have seen, the Alexander explores issues of new gods and ‘empty’ material mediators, the Icaromenippus uses the perspective that an astronomical journey offers to reflect on some of the same anxieties from the ‘other’ side.

Lucian’s questioning of the superfluity and effectiveness of traditional channels of human–divine mediation is part of a re-visualisation of how the two realms are connected. This is not through song, dance, or ritual, nor through cult statues or temples, but through devices. After the initial success of the wings in getting Menippus to Olympus, we get to see how Zeus orchestrates his daily life and how religious rituals are experienced at the receiving end. We arrive, with Menippus and Zeus, at a row of ritual peepholes described as a series of little windows like the mouths of wells with lids (θυρίδες δὲ ἦσαν ἑξῆς τοῖς στομίοις τῶν φρεάτων ἐοικυῖαι πώματα ἔχουσα).Footnote ¹⁷ The hinge is once again acting as a cultural technique delineating ontological realms.Footnote ¹⁸ A golden chair stood beside each peephole which gave Zeus a glimpse of and access to a different ritual in turn: prayer, oaths, sacrifice.Footnote ¹⁹ The conflicting demands of the voices that come out of the orifices are theologically interesting for opening up questions of theodicy and divine perspective. Of greater interest to the current discussion, however, is the method of communication and the simile of the well. The imagery that Lucian uses is, as with the wings, a composite structure, this time drawn not from the animal world, but from known artificial interventions from the human realm. Windows, rather straightforwardly, allow access – visual, auditory, olfactory – to what is otherwise hidden. It is the comparison with the well that allows Lucian to enrich the perceived relation between the technical object and its divine function. Wells typically draw a source of sustenance for mankind from an unseen place, which works metaphorically for the well as cistern of divine knowledge from which humans attempt to draw. The well is also always mysterious in its depth and consequently is not just a reservoir but also a channel to send and to receive information across metaphysical realms, familiar to the modern reader from the image of the wishing well. Lastly, the well also stands as the paradigmatic example of an object offering sonic echo, this acoustic characteristic aligning it perfectly with its role as a vehicle to transmit oral prayers up to Zeus and to bounce Zeus’ answer back down to earth. I suggest that Zeus’ ritual wells in the Icaromenippus are not (just), as scholars have claimed, a parallel to the well-cum-lunar-mirror of True Histories, but rather a revision of the autophone in the Alexander.Footnote ²⁰ Put crudely, this is another way of asking readers to conceive of human–divine communication as enabled through artificial tubes. Indeed, visualising prayers as telephonic is something we also find in Plutarch’s On the Sign of Socrates: there – in a passage that makes avid use of images of techniques and technologies as analogies for the way that thought and speech function – through the use of an allusion to the sonic properties of brass shields.Footnote ²¹ Technology was being explored as both a literal medium and useful metaphor for the ways that physical and metaphysical might coalesce.

Menippus as Pseudo-Divinity

The very first thing that Menippus does in order to test his new contraption is to launch himself off the acropolis, swooping down to land in the theatre below.Footnote ²² The allusion to the deus ex machina could hardly be clearer.Footnote ²³ Aside from contributing to Lucian’s ever-present exploration of the boundaries between life and illusion, reality and theatre, aligning the wings with the best-known example of mechanical epiphany prompts us to view Menippus’ Icaran wings not simply as an artificial device which bridges human and divine realms, but one which converts the title character into a pseudo-deity.Footnote ²⁴ The jump down to the theatre is a quick one, serving to prove that the wings were working well and then leading Menippus to practice the art of flying by mountain-hopping across various known sanctuaries of Zeus (Parnitha, Hymettus, Geraneia) and other well-known peaks (Acrocorinth, Taygetus) before heading onwards and upwards to Olympus as if he were a welcome member of the divine entourage.Footnote ²⁵ At least that is Menippus’ self-perception, for when he stops for a rest on the moon he notes that he looked down on the earth ‘like Homer’s Zeus’ (ὥσπερ ὁ τοῦ Ὁμήρου Ζεὺς ἐκεῖνος).Footnote ²⁶ This is also the way that the journey is initially interpreted by the friend who, in response to Menippus’ relating that he is just back from the heavens, mockingly addresses him as ‘O divine and Olympian Menippus’ (‘ὦ θεσπέσιε καὶ Ὀλύμπιε Μένιππε’).Footnote ²⁷ Read in this way, Menippus plus his wings – ‘Icaromenippus’ – takes fraudulent Alexander and his fashioning of Glykon’s mechanical snakehead into new territory. That Icaromenippus (or Glykon) might pass for a god at all depends on the familiarity of theriomorphism within the Greek religious tradition. Lucian points to the absurdity of the fact that since the form of the gods is a human construct, recognising the divine becomes complicated in a world where ‘geese and dogs and plane-trees’Footnote ²⁸ could be divinities as much as anthropo-serpentine statues or, now, birdmen.

The issue of representation of the divine is pertinent to both the Alexander and the Icaromenippus, but while Glykon is a hybrid composition of a real snake with a mechanical, anthropomorphised head, Icaromenippus is a human with a mechanical, zoomorphic prosthetic. In both cases, mechanics are integral to the tricky business of navigating the junction between human and divine, between material and ephemeral. While Alexander centres around making manifest a god on earth, and the mechanics of the image are integral to producing a miracle which authenticates the religiosity of that cult to its worshippers, Menippus uses mechanical device to embody the characteristics of the divine (flying) and to make manifest a god in heaven.Footnote ²⁹ This takes mechanics from a discussion about the miraculous, to one about ontology. Lucian presses the issue further in the Icaromenippus by extending the significance of the wings from prostheses of flight (already no mean feat), to objects that endow the human with a telescopic ‘eagle eye’, encapsulating the animal kingdom’s advantage over the human and bestowing it on Menippus to convert him into a hybrid deity. It is Empedocles, during the lunar stopover, who advises Menippus to flap only the eagle wing in order to sharpen his vision.Footnote ³⁰ Thanks to this trick, from the height of the moon, Menippus is able to make out clear landmarks and topographical features.Footnote ³¹ In actual fact, Menippus’ vision is more than optically enhanced, for he also becomes witness to the unseen, observing political conspiracies, personal secrets, sexual scandals, and philosophical perjury.Footnote ³² The wings stand as more than an aid in flight: they are a tool for ontological transformation allowing Icaromenippus to exceed the boundaries of the animal and to infringe, in the omniscience he gains, on characteristics which define the supernatural.Footnote ³³

Yet Menippus’ transformation is neither complete nor irreversible. Indeed, he carefully retains his status as ‘human-plus-wings’ throughout the dialogue, and this is crucial. Being able to transition in and out of his human and pseudo-divine states – between Menippus and Icaromenippus – throws up further questions of ontological categories. Icaromenippus’ playful experimentation with human/divine/animal hybridisation overtly asks what mechanics can ‘do’ in temporarily blending what should be distinct categories.Footnote ³⁴ While there is more to say on the ornithological element – not least for the way that it destabilises relations between animal and human, and is an intriguing example of the use of animal bodies as media technologies – I will focus not on the natural but on the manufactured quality of the wings and on their role as an ingenious gadget to access Olympus: a divine mēchanēma. For all that they are taken from real birds, Menippus’ wings are contraptions designed overtly in the tradition of Daedalus’. The association with Daedalus helps to position the protagonist as somewhere between an artist and an engineer. This is a good moment as any to note, however, that the instability of the perceptions of characters such as Lucian’s Menippus is integral to the construction of the satiric hero more broadly, as Camerotto has demonstrated.Footnote ³⁵ In the case of the Icaromenippus, Lucian ensures there is never a simple association between his title character and the Cynic satirist Menippus. The opening scene, for example, sees Menippus ‘playing astronomer’ in adding up the astronomical distances of his recent journey.Footnote ³⁶ This aligns him with Hellenistic authors, such as Hipparchus and Aristarchus, known for their writings on the sizes and distances of planets. Menippus’ identification with astronomers and astronomy is not an empty move on Lucian’s part but, given that Cynics were known to be suspicious of pastimes such as astronomy,Footnote ³⁷ serves to destabilise the identification of the protagonist as a straight representation of the historic Menippus. This is all part and parcel of working within the flexibility of the satiric hero’s personas which will be integral, among other things, to Lucian’s transformation of Menippus into a pseudo-deity.

Thus, although Menippus’ first inspiration for astral technology comes from Aesop’s fables, he quickly dismisses the idea that he could possibly grow wings and turns to a model based on engineering.Footnote ³⁸ Even the wings that Daedalus made for his son, however, needed improvement (τὸ Δαιδάλειον γὰρ ἐκεῖνο σόφισμα τῶν πτερῶν καὶ αὐτὸς ἐμηχανησάμην.).Footnote ³⁹ The wax of Icarus’ wings, Menippus explains to his friend, was the clear weak point in Daedalus’ design which resulted in the disastrous failure of the flight. It is precisely when this technical detail is revealed that the friend’s mockery becomes true curiosity, and he is intrigued to the extent that he admits that he is starting to believe the epistemological claims of Menippus’ story.Footnote ⁴⁰ From the point of view of the poetics, this helps to transfer the story from mythos based on hearsay to paradoxon based in empirical fact. In terms of the object of the wings, Menippus’ alternative design successfully creates a hybrid where categories remain distinct: the wings do not sprout like Pegasus’ but are fastened on, first assembled together and then put onto the body like Lego blocks. As artificial tools of enhancement, they can be donned and removed at will; and since, unlike Icarus’, they allowed a safe passage to Olympus and back to earth, the wings facilitate a multiplicity in Menippus’ character between astronomer, engineer, pseudo-god, and, ultimately, ally to the philosophers and thus a threat to the gods.

Menippus as Theomach

No matter how innocent, even well-intentioned, the aims of Menippus’ astronomical journey might be, his flight poses a challenge to the divine order. We saw already how the gods collectively viewed Menippus’ arrival with some apprehension, fearing that the whole human race might appear at their doorstep at any moment.Footnote ⁴¹ Zeus makes no secret of his feelings by aligning Menippus with the Aloadae, the giants Otus and Ephialtes who had aspirations to swarm Olympus.Footnote ⁴² At the same time as marking him out as a transgressor and theomach, the comparison retains (or acknowledges) Menippus’ ‘divine’ status. Even though Zeus ultimately invites Menippus to spend a night with the gods and all seems to go rather smoothly, the wings are confiscated prior to Menippus’ return to earth so that he does not risk turning up again.Footnote ⁴³ In order to understand the nuances of Menippus’ role as theomach, and to ascertain what is Lucianic invention and what is tradition, I begin by looking backwards and exploring how and where technology and theomachy coincide earlier in the Greek literary tradition.

The pages of Greek and Roman literature are filled with theomachs and theomachies of many kinds.Footnote ⁴⁴ In a recent monograph concerned with theomachy in Roman Imperial literature, Pramit Chaudhuri starts by tracing how the primarily martial theomachies of Homeric epic are expanded into intellectual and political confrontations with the gods in Greek drama.Footnote ⁴⁵ Facilitated by the genre’s dialogic mode, tragedy reflects upon the relationship between human and god from a number of angles. Tragic authors relish staging the complex webs of motivations of their theomachs, producing for the audience a taxonomy of stronger and weaker theomachic acts, from accidental insult to arrogant scorn, disbelief, and utter rejection of a deity.Footnote ⁴⁶ While all stories of theomachy are about exploring the limits – literal, metaphorical, ethical, spatial, ontological – which separate humans and gods, Lucian’s Menippus in the Icaromenippus is cast at the intersection of two specific theomachic traditions: humans who physically try to reach the heavens and humans who insult the gods by being overambitious in their technical abilities.

The former theme, which I will term ‘astral theomachy’, is more common in Greek literature and the comparisons more evident in the Icaromenippus. Alongside Zeus’ allusion to Otus and Ephialtes, Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, melting the wax holding his wings together and spiralling to his death, provides the most obvious model of haughty astral aspirations for Menippus, already flagged in the title. The visual record for Daedalus and Icarus is rich and the insistence on the manufacture of the wings by human hand and with human tools is persistent. This begins with Etruscan, Roman, and Graeco-Roman gems which show Daedalus alone making the wings.Footnote ⁴⁷ Adzes, hammers, and other tools of carpentry can be made out in these intricate pieces, which range from the fifth to first centuries BCE.Footnote ⁴⁸ Scenes of Icarus alone flying appear on gems, pottery, and statuettes.Footnote ⁴⁹ Straps can very clearly be seen securing the wings to the arms in three bronze statuettes dated to the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.Footnote ⁵⁰ Depictions of Daedalus fitting the wings onto Icarus’ body with rope or straps are also plentiful in a variety of media.Footnote ⁵¹ Particularly striking are a series of Roman reliefs, contemporary with Lucian’s text, which show Daedalus part way through making the second wing with Icarus beside him, already wearing the first wing and the baldric crossing of the straps clearly visible across his chest.Footnote ⁵² The flight and fall are also common artistic themes.Footnote ⁵³ Of particular note for our purposes is a mid second-century CE Roman sarcophagus depicting the whole story from the fashioning and fitting of the wings to the flight and fall.Footnote ⁵⁴

Another astral journey relevant to thinking about how the Greek theomachic traditions involved the technological, and attested earlier in the Greek literary record than the myth of Icarus, is that of Bellerophon. Bellerophon was already hated by all the gods (‘ἀπήχθετο πᾶσι θεοῖσιν’) in the Iliad, though no explanation is there given as to why.Footnote ⁵⁵ In Pindar’s seventh Isthmian Ode we are told that divine contempt towards Bellerophon was due to his attempt to reach Zeus and Olympus.Footnote ⁵⁶ By the time of Euripides’ tragic Bellerophon, things had escalated to the point where the title character not only attempted to access divine space, but possibly denied the existence of the gods altogether.Footnote ⁵⁷ Bellerophon’s attempt to reach Olympus (and his ensuing plight) was, to judge by the fragmentary evidence, a major part of the tragic plot. The journey was apparently staged to great theatrical effect using the mēchanē which, if the repeated attention drawn to Pegasus’ wings in the fragments depicting the flight is anything to go by, had wings represented or attached.Footnote ⁵⁸ In myth, then, Bellerophon’s ascent is upon the winged horse Pegasus, and Euripides’ use of the mēchanē in his tragic version aptly triangulates mechanics, theatricality, and astral theomachy in a way which is highly relevant to understanding the range of models that Lucian had at his disposal in composing the Icaromenippus.

To this picture we must add the parody of Bellerophon’s flight from Aristophanes’ Peace.Footnote ⁵⁹ The comic spoof not only lends strong support to the idea that the mēchanē was used in the Bellerophon, but the transformation of Pegasus into a giant dung beetle resonates within the broader tradition of astral theomachies and technology as it is reinterpreted by Lucian. In defining the parameters of his own astral journey, Menippus first firmly denies that he might make it up to Olympus as a Ganymede favoured by the gods for his good looks.Footnote ⁶⁰ He later explains that the Aesopic tradition, on the other hand, did provide some inspiration since there, the heavens are accessible to various animals: the eagle, beetle, and camel.Footnote ⁶¹ The erudite, multilayered inter-textuality between Aesop’s fables, Aristophanic comedy, Euripidean tragedy, and their performative traditions is characteristically and brilliantly Lucianic. In referring to the various Aesopic fables in which animals had access to the heavens – the eagle, beetle, and camel – Lucian is pointing out the fallacy of Trygaeus’ claim in Peace that the beetle was his only option in parodying Bellerophon’s tragic journey on the winged mēchanē.Footnote ⁶²

Technology and Theomachy

Must we rely on stage machinery to insert the mechanical into the ancient narrative on theomachy which Lucian so deftly reappropriates? In what follows I explore the tradition of the technophile as theomach, not only to ascertain what models Lucian might have had in mind for his Icaromenippus, but also to answer wider questions on the nature of the relation between technology and the divine within Greek culture from as early as the archaic period.

I turn first to Salmoneus, who, like Bellerophon and, indeed, Prometheus, had Zeus as his main opponent.Footnote ⁶³ Instead of attempting to reach the heavens, Salmoneus insults Zeus by imitating the supreme deity’s thunder and lightning. He does so by dragging bronze cauldrons (and sometimes dried hides) behind a chariot and flinging torches into the sky. The important elements of the myth for our purposes, namely the imitation via human contraptions of celestial phenomena that are usually Zeus’ prerogative, are already recorded in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, dated somewhere between the early seventh and the late sixth centuries.Footnote ⁶⁴ Later sources, first Diodorus Siculus and then Apollodorus, flesh out the details from the fragmentary Hesiodic papyrus, adding that Salmoneus also denied Zeus sacrifices and ordered them to be offered to him instead.Footnote ⁶⁵ What is striking about the accounts of Salmoneus’ mimetic impiety is the detail surrounding the techniques used, and particularly the role of the mechanical. Indeed, Diodorus Siculus pulls together the various components of Salmoneus’ mimetic thunder-and-lightning machinery and calls it a mēchanē. Even Prometheus, another obvious technophile and theomach, did not have, in the archaic tradition at least, such overt links to technological media for, as we have seen, it is simply the theft of fire that features in the Hesiodic myth. If Prometheus’ theomachy consists of stealing divine prerogative and sharing it with mortals, Salmoneus’ challenge of divine order involves autonomously producing divine prerogative through technological aids.

Scholars have rightly noted that mimesis lies at the core of the early versions of the Salmoneus story and of its retellings throughout antiquity.Footnote ⁶⁶ Whitmarsh sees Salmoneus’ imitation of Zeus as an early contribution to emerging anxieties about the representation of the gods at the hands of humans in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE.Footnote ⁶⁷ Certainly, representation, even creation, of the divine become topics of interest and of unease, not only in early poetry, but also within visual and performative cultures, from evolutions in statuary to developments in theatrical display, as well as in the early philosophical tradition. Yet there are two distinct, if interrelated issues concerning man, god, and technique at stake here that ought to be teased apart: the representation of the divine, on the one hand, and fabricating the numinous, on the other. The main anxiety behind Salmoneus’ actions is not related to what gods look like, but rather to what gods can do, and particularly to the way that divine actions exceed the capabilities of mortals. The myth of Salmoneus is inevitably invested in contemporary theological discourse, but explores what is at stake behind miraculous actions which are a mark of divine presence, rather than targeting the problematics of divine form. It is the artificial production of sound and light, of thunder and lightning, that impinges on divine prerogative here, and the myth of Salmoneus places a mēchanē at the crucial juncture that defines the relation between gods and mortals. Read in this way, Salmoneus’ contraption of astral imitation is certainly among the earliest contributors in the conversation on the technological miracle which will subsequently make its way – through the Peripatetic Mechanica and Hellenistic automata – into Lucian’s dialogues.

The focus on technological mimesis of divine action is one of the elements that made Salmoneus’ story particularly apt for theatre, as Sophocles’ satyr play on the topic shows. Additionally, there was, even in antiquity, something slightly amusing about the simplicity, even vulgarity, of Salmoneus’ thunder and lightning machine, and this blend of the serio-comic likely made it attractive as the subject of satyr play. Lastly, satyr play’s penchant for presenting wonderful inventions – both positive and negative – made Salmoneus and his thunder-and-lightning machine triply apt.Footnote ⁶⁸ While next to nothing of this fifth-century BCE satyr play survives, the little that we can piece together points to the presence of miraculous action, technical spectacle, and divine imitation within the play.Footnote ⁶⁹ Stephen Trzaskoma and R. Scott Smith’s suggestion that Salmoneus’ story preserves him as the inventor of the bronteion ‘thunder machine’, known from its use in the theatre (and possibly in ritual), is now widely accepted.Footnote ⁷⁰ Sophocles, conscious of the layers of mimesis at stake between and within both the Salmoneus myth itself and the dramatic art form within which it was now embedded, drew meta-theatrical attention to the fact that the machinery on stage was able to reproduce Salmoneus’ imitation of Zeus’ thunder and lightning.Footnote ⁷¹ The act of remediation here follows a logic of hyper-mediacy as Sophocles makes viewers aware at each juncture of the new medium as a medium. In one fragment, a character (most likely Salmoneus himself) prepares to present the artificial fire bolt before the eyes of all, stressing the visuality of the production of the miracle, in this case, fire: ‘with a cloud I shall proclaim the spectacle of the fire to everyone’ (πέμϕιγι πᾶσιν ὄψιν ἀγγελῶ πυρός).Footnote ⁷²

We see in the figure of Salmoneus, then, an early model of the technophile theomach. It is important to stress, however, that Salmoneus is rather exceptional in the early mythological tradition as we now have it. Attempts to confront the gods and their powers technologically, through imitation or otherwise, is a motif that has surprisingly little traction in the Greek world. Daedalus, as the inventor and creator of Icarus’ wings and of the wooden cow that leads Pasiphae (divine in some traditions) to bestiality, meets a tragic fate in the loss of his son, but still stands as a respected artist and the engineer-craftsman par excellence. The only other contender for an early story which combines theomachy and excessive human skill in mechanical contrivance comes from the Iliad. There, in book 7, the Achaeans are said to have built a great wall without offering the appropriate sacrifices to the gods, which causes Poseidon to worry that such a purely human feat will eclipse the fame of the Trojan wall built by himself and Apollo.Footnote ⁷³ This is a better comparison for the present purposes than the martial theomachies common in epic given that it concerns human technē challenging the gods in a way which clearly worries them. But the issue at stake in this example is not so much the ingenuity of the wall but the lack of recognition of divine assistance in creating such a feat of engineering. It does help us to understand the way that superior engineering skill is conceived as something divine or divinely endowed in the archaic Greek cultural imagination, bringing us back to issues discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. As we saw, if invented dedications or automata in procession were to be theologically persuasive it was, in part, thanks to technological ingenuity always being a carefully measured enterprise between human and divine, as the tripods of Hephaistos or the story of Prometheus show. Interestingly, however, and as explored by Chaudhuri, the ideas of technology and fame come to have stronger theomachic associations in Roman epic, creating a true poetics of ambivalence surrounding the power of technology.Footnote ⁷⁴ Indeed, the discourse surrounding spectacle, technology, and political power will, in the Roman world, take on a completely independent cultural life of its own including, as pointed out by Kathleen Coleman more than thirty years ago, in the form of ‘fatal charades’ staged in Roman amphitheatres.Footnote ⁷⁵

From Faking to Fighting in the Icaromenippus

To finish, let us return to Lucian and to the Icaromenippus. Clearly, Lucian is engaging with models from Greek literature that explore theomachic astral flights and technological aids in theomachic actions including those of Icarus, Bellerophon, and Salmoneus. But before the Roman imperial period, attempts upon the divine world remain the stuff of mythical lunacy, another way of testing the boundaries of the theoretically possible, but not a theme with much cultural traction. No one would dare attempt what those mythical figures do, for fear of ending up just like them: plunged violently to their deaths from literal and metaphorical lofty heights. That is not to say, of course, that early explorations of theomachy exclusively affirmed conventional religious values. Limits are tested in very real and very suggestive ways, but no theomach in Greek myth gets away with it as Lucian’s Menippus does.Footnote ⁷⁶ So while Lucian’s title might align him with Icarus, his fate actually draws him from the tradition of the foolish theomach who gets his just deserts, to a new kind of human enquirer who toes the line between human and divine prerogatives, finally overstepping it not by visiting Olympus, but by divulging divine plans to those whom the gods perceive to be a bigger, truer threat: philosophers.

Once Menippus has made it up to Olympus thanks to his mechanical prosthesis and has witnessed how Zeus attends to various religious rituals through peephole wells, he is invited to dine with the gods.Footnote ⁷⁷ This scene looks back to an early mythic world where gods and humans cohabited and specifically where hospitality was indifferent to the boundaries between mortal and immortal.Footnote ⁷⁸ At dinner, Menippus indulges in a wonderful feast hosted by the gods and even has a share in the divine privilege of nectar and ambrosia. Apart from taking us back to mythic times, collapsing mortals and immortals together once more, Lucian’s redrawing of mythic commensality plays into creating a sense of commonality and thus of common purpose between Menippus and the gods. At the divine assembly the next morning, Menippus is present when Zeus raises not only the moon’s concern, regarding her misinterpretation by philosophers, but also general concerns relating to philosophers including their duplicitous moral conduct and, most of all, the Epicurean denial of the involvement of the gods in human affairs.Footnote ⁷⁹ Cacophonous outrage ensues from the gods and it is agreed that, once the festival season is over in four months’ time, all philosophers will meet the kind of end which we might have expected for Menippus: a wretched death by the horrid thunderbolt.Footnote ⁸⁰ The brief addition that the gods will not undertake this act until the start of spring does more work than might initially appear. The reason given by Zeus is that the truce for the duration of the festival period has already been announced and so it would not be right (ou themis) to punish anyone in that time. While one could read this as Zeus being true to his word, we also know from his previous interaction with Menippus that festivals are a key time for the (increasingly forgotten) god to receive sacrifice and other rituals. Furthermore, Zeus’ depiction of things, while pretending to give him authority, in fact bends divine agenda to the mortal calendar, implying, absurdly, that the divine must, like mortals, follow the rules set by them to start with! This is yet another clever way for Lucian to articulate how mortal and divine realms have started to bleed into each other and to question where authority ultimately lies. Finally, the four-month gap sets up a chronological distance for Menippus’ newly acquired knowledge that the gods are going to obliterate all philosophers, allowing him, in the dialogue’s swift final sentence, to trot off and divulge the divine plan to mortals. Menippus’ wings have gone from tools for him to go and explore Olympus to find out cosmological truths, to tools that make him akin to a seer, but against divine will. Technē has enabled him to go and be privy to a divine discussion, and while in Lucian’s twin dialogue Menippus the (same?) title character is initially reluctant to divulge what he has learnt from the other realm as he deems it would be impious,Footnote ⁸¹ there is no such concern in the Icaromenippus. If the wings themselves do not prove to be theomachic, the knowledge that Menippus gains thanks to his mechanical aids – the epistemological advantage that the discipline of mechanics has offered – should surely be seen as threatening to the divine.

A nice paradox remains. Using technical knowledge for religious fraud implies certain doubts or apprehensions about the religious system in question. Using technical knowledge to attempt to threaten the power of the divine relies on deep theological convictions about the realness of the gods because it is predicated on a world view in which they can be challenged through man-made technologies. Faking the gods exposes – or attempts to expose – worshippers as naïve and credulous by, as we have seen in the Alexander, dismantling the authenticity of the mediators which give claim to give access to the gods. The potency of these very same mediators is increased exponentially if they are used not just to bridge the human and supernatural realms, but to access and inhabit one or the other on equal terms. Indeed, Menippus is saved precisely thanks to this fact: he believes in the gods enough to go and consult Zeus when he has theological doubts; it is the philosophers who are the true theomachs and who will suffer the consequences.

This book began with a set of propositions about how the ancient Greek religious system worked, particularly in relation to divine manifestation. I set out to explore how technology featured and functioned with(in) those propositions which mediated between human and supernatural realms. Including the mechanical in the discourse on divine epiphany and religious experience is not intuitive. Karel Čapek’s satiric vision of a machine that creates practically free energy but spurts out a numinous by-product known as the Absolute is both very relevant and utterly alien to the ancient context. It is alien in that Čapek’s novel is focalised through (relatively) modern preconceptions of technology and religion as antithetical. The protagonist’s invention is strictly a machine of science fiction. That a sense of the numinous might be created by mechanical technology is entertained in the story as imaginatively (and metaphorically) compelling but remains impossible in practical terms. At the same time, the way that Čapek conceives of the mechanical-divine Karburator machine is strikingly relevant to the exploration at hand precisely because it targets technology’s potential to do more than power a steam engine. As it turns out, the Absolute affects human populations and the way they see the world to a far greater (and more devastating) extent than the energy produced.

Insofar as the parameters of the research were somewhat counter-intuitive, the book serves, on its most basic level, as a collation of the evidence that attests to the overlapping of mechanics and religion in the ancient Greek world. Simply to document examples would have been to sell the topic short, however. Faced with the examples, I have attempted to think about how technologies – mechanical objects, the knowledge that these encoded, and the processes which they engendered and within which they were bound up – were used to create and to authenticate theological truths in ancient Greek religion. This unearthed an important feature of ancient Greek religion: that mechanical epistemologies were not inimical to ideas of the sacred, but, rather, conditioned them.

The book seeks to reposition ancient ‘miracle’ technologies within a cultural discourse without reducing them to frivolous gadgets. Instead, I argue that religious technologies were cultural techniques used in presenting, exploring, and solving theological issues. This subsequently has ramifications for the study of Greek religion, foremost for the question of ancient ‘belief’ and for understanding the relationship between technical and miraculous epistemologies. A running thread of argument is that the visibility of divine appearance and the visibility of the mechanisms producing divine appearance went hand in hand, and that the latter did not diminish the thaumatic effect of the former. Epiphany and its constituent mechanisms were symbiotically constructed and this was embraced within the ancient Greek religious system. The book has also, then, exposed a religious system which was open not just to change, but also to innovations that were informed by mēchanica.

I first located mechanical epiphany in the familiar world of fifth-century Athens and the well-known context of the ancient theatre (Part I). The deus ex machina has been relentlessly attributed a structural function in wrapping up the plot of Greek tragedies; by contrast, I opted to take its material qualities more seriously to explore the theological potential of the mēchanē as a mode of visual epiphany. Rather than cringe at or dodge the inescapable historical fact that the mechanical components of the theatrical crane would have been visible to the audience, I took this as integral to reassessing how the machine was viewed, and thus how it functioned to mediate between human and divine realms. The visibility of the mechanics, I argued, was vital to the success of this mode of epiphany, challenging the viewer to recognise the divine intervention alongside the mechanics that constructed and enabled it. Part I presents the mēchanē as materially, theatrically, and theologically complex in its ability to store and to transmit ideas of divine representation, ontology, and communication.

Accessing and assessing the ancient viewing experience of the tragic mēchanē – and indeed of many religious technologies presented in the book – posed one of the book’s main challenges and at the same time provided its main insights. In terms of the mēchanē specifically, this issue was rendered thornier still due to the influential and damning assessment of the machine in Aristotle’s Poetics. If Aristotle’s judgement were representative of ancient opinion generally, the mēchanē could hardly have had the persistent and successful theatrical life it enjoyed and, furthermore, there would likely have been a resistance to the mechanical mode of generating divine presence in subsequent historical periods.Footnote ² Quite the opposite is true. The Hellenistic period sees technological theologies expand not only in terms of mechanical sophistication but also in contexts of deployment, as explored in Part II, and this takes on a different trajectory again in the Imperial period, the focus of Part III.

To escape the Aristotelian judgement and unearth the possible variety of responses to the theatrical crane, the issue of viewership was assessed from three angles (Chapters 1 and 2). I first adduced the evidence of Old Comedy to demonstrate how para-tragic uses of the crane undercut the interpretative symbiosis between man, machine, and divine agency on which tragedy was predicated. I then explored how the theatre as a form of mass media made it fertile ground for development and exploration of theological ideas, not just a reflection of literary norms. Finally, I put the mēchanē within the broader picture of rich visual theologies that existed both on the tragic stage and within the context of the Great Dionysia to illustrate some of the ways that the machine spoke to contemporary religious and cultural realities.

Contemplating how mechanical epiphany worked, in comparison with other, better-studied models of visual representations of the divine, shed light on this new mode’s unique material, theatrical, and theological characteristics. Certain elements of the mēchanē, it was shown, are always in play; others are emphasised to a greater or lesser extent according to the specific theological point of the play at stake. The mēchanē was always visible and thus paradigmatic of the constructed nature of the divine encounter. This was an integral component of the epistemological challenge that the mēchanē posed to the audience (the external witness), in contrast to the characters in the play (internal witnesses). This is something that a divine prologue delivered on stage could not ‘do’ in the same way, for example. The mēchanē, by its very nature, toyed with the structural poles of epiphany, wavering between its spontaneous, divinely ordained dimension and its constructed, humanly ordained component. The mēchanē was always part of a range of visual theologies within the plays, alongside (as it were) actors playing gods, statues, and altars – and we noted how the plurality of theatrical visual theologies here paralleled cultural norms – but, crucially, the mēchanē has utterly distinctive spatial and locomotive qualities. The manufacture and prominence of artificial movement – or what we might think of as ‘technological animation’ – within the divine encounter is a feature which I further emphasised in Part II and Part III. Finally, mechanical epiphany is shown to complicate the anthropomorphic expectations of divine epiphany on which a lot of secondary literature on the topic has fixated.

Despite the existence of such common features that united disparate uses of mechanical epiphany in tragedy, it would be a mistake to be entirely schematic in our reassessment of the mēchanē. Part I thus closes by offering a series of case studies to display how playwrights innovated in and around the mechanical epiphany’s paradigmatic qualities and imbued these with particular theological implications (Chapter 3). The mēchanē’s visibility in tragedy was at times noted meta-theatrically, not by drawing attention to the role of the mēchanopoios, as in comedy, but by partaking in explorations of the themes of cunning and ingenuity, as in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, for example. At other times, and far more frequently, the constructedness of the machine proved vital to the proper recognition of divine ontology: in Euripides’ Helen, Bacchae, and Orestes the deus ex machina was the epiphanic form that trumped all others. At other times again, the mechanics of the crane became a way to (re)present channels of communication between realms and to literally suspend a divine conversation prior to intervention, as seen in Euripides’ Heracles. The mēchanē performed the constant negotiation involved in human–supernatural encounters between divine distance and proximity, simultaneously linking and separating human and divine realms, with the notable exception of Medea and the horizontal shift from Corinth to Athens undertaken there. While in certain cases the linking component was stressed (e.g. in a mimetic sense between Philoctetes and Heracles in Sophocles’ Philoctetes), in other cases it was the characteristic of spatial separation which made mechanical epiphany useful. The cases of Orestes and Helen are two such examples of the latter. Even beyond its paradoxical capacity for concurrent linking and separation, the mēchanē constructed a rich vocabulary of spatial semantics: an ideological free zone and instrument of Helios (Medea), a platform for divine discussion (Heracles), a bridge of respite between man and god (Philoctetes), an unexpected expansion of seemingly finite space (Orestes).

There are various ways in which playwrights also used mechanical epiphany to comment on contemporary cultural understandings and experiences of divine presence: how divine beings move and what they look like, when and why they might be motivated to appear, and how this fits with human affairs. The Bacchae casts the mechanical as one of the many modes of epiphany which Dionysus could adopt; Orestes uses the mēchanē as part of a conversation on simulated epiphanies and divine ontologies, reflected both in ritual re-enactments by priestly personnel and in visual media where gods and their effigies were represented side by side. In Heracles the mēchanē becomes a window into divine deliberations perceived to occur around the event of the theophania. In all cases the mēchanē is far richer theologically than scholars who reduce it to a structural tool have been prepared to admit, and far more complex visually than those blindly following Aristotle’s line of assessment will see.

Having explored the range of ways that mechanical epiphany worked on the ancient tragic stage, and having tentatively offered a picture of the ways that this mode interacted with other visual modes of epiphany both on and off stage, I turned in Part II to look at how technologies were incorporated into rituals and what this meant for the experience of worshippers. This section explores both objects – astragaloi, mirrors, wheels, articulated figurines, wheeled tripods, automata – and spaces – temple interiors, oracular sites, and processional routes – as inherently devised, altered, and theologised through technical knowledge. Taken together, the chapters in this part of the book not only reveal that technical interventions were imperative to accessing the divine and creating sacred presence in a number of contexts, but posit, counter-intuitively, that technical intervention increased the accuracy and authenticity of an encounter.

Divination, for example, is shown to have been impacted from various angles by the intervention of human technical knowledge (Chapter 4). The first step to unearthing the ways that this functioned was to reposition our understanding of divination as an act of sought epiphany and of the objects used in the divinatory process as not only conduits for questions and answers, but also as media and thus asserting agents in the construction of divine presence and the transmission of theological ideas. Catoptromancy (mirror divination) and astragalomancy (knucklebone divination) were two ‘technical’ modes of ancient divination which carried theological implications and shaped theological suppositions as to how the gods intervened in the human realm and how this connected to human knowledge. Both worked in the same way, broadly speaking, in that both manipulated technical knowledge – catoptric and mathematical, respectively – to manifest the numinous. But precisely how this worked in each case differed significantly. The physical alterations of astragaloi, and the resultant manipulation of mathematical probability of the throws of the knucklebones, can be understood to be coterminous with the way that the gods intervened in the human world: relying on constraints imposed and created by the human world but retaining an element of the uncontrollable and unpredictable. The use and distortions of reflection made ancient mirrors useful in ancient divinatory contexts to fashion an image of distinct ontological status. Indeed, this capacity of the ancient mirror was harnessed beyond divination to create religious aura within ancient temples more generally. It was not just the interiors of temples that were artificially enhanced for religious ends, but subterranean spaces too, as demonstrated through the notable case of the Oracle to Trophonios in Lebadeia.

When worshippers chose to dedicate objects to the gods, a number of factors conditioned their votive choices. Chapter 5 sought to discover what technological ingenuity ‘did’ to the reciprocal favour – or charis relationship – that underpinned the act of dedication. The answer, I proposed, lay in the mechanical marvel’s unique position in navigating invocation and evocation, or mortal call and divine response. Indeed, one unique feature of technological interventions in/of the divine realm is precisely their ability to collapse these two poles. The pneumatically enhanced dedications described both in Hellenistic epigram and in technical texts, for example, demonstrate, in the first instance, that a number of ways existed by which technical ingenuity could invoke divine presence through the creation of movement, stillness, sound, silence. And yet in each of these cases, there was an overt negotiation between the thauma that the object invoked, and the technical knowledge which allowed this thauma. Mechanical texts not only offer a firm religious context to inventions described but help to unpack the relationship between wonder and mēchanē, making further contributions to the issue of viewership and the intention behind the construction which Part I began to address. Hellenistic epigram reveals the same relationship between mechanics and the marvellous within the confines of its own genre. Analysis of epigrams describing the Bes rhyton and the Lykon thēsauros, for example, showed how religious awe and technological capabilities were co-constructed and mutually reinforcing.

Chapter 5 also demonstrated how ritual actions and the worshipper’s body interacted in different ways to confirm divine presence with these inventions-turned-votive-objects, or ‘dedicated inventions’. From the worshipper spinning a bronze wheel to taking a sip from a pneumatically enhanced drinking horn to carrying an articulated figurine in procession, the technological components of these objects framed and gave sense to the ritual experiences within which they were used. Finally, Chapter 5 took us much further back chronologically in order to think about an early history of the phenomenon and made two interrelated points. The well-known passage from Iliad 18 describing Hephaistos’ self-animated tripods shows that from as early as the eighth century BCE there was not such a gap between human and divine technē. The myth of Prometheus, who gave mortals access to the divine privilege of fire and thus incurred the wrath of Zeus, offered a clear aetiology for this phenomenon whereby technē was always ambiguously divine and human. Yet while the Hesiodic tradition is general in its description of the theft, and focuses on the punishment that the Titan then experienced, the fifth-century Prometheus Bound vastly extends the discussion surrounding what exactly fire represented as a ‘pantechnos’ and places mechanics within this. From its place in archaic epic, the myth of Prometheus writes a history of technology as one that is, from its inception, both inherently human and divine and Prometheus Bound then makes this point specifically about mechanics through meta-theatrical use of mēchanē vocabulary throughout the play.

Read in a different way, the chapters of Part II also offer a new narrative for thinking about ancient technological objects, as well as their relationship with people – both past and present. Wheels, for example, are often overplayed in histories of technology as the simplest of machines which betray (and direct) humanity’s inevitable, climactic arrival at its modern state of technological genius. Without dismissing the importance of the wheel for production and transport, the evidence of the Peripatetic Mechanical Problems suggests that the wheel was foremost a source of fascination for the miracle-inducing capacity of circular motion. Similarly, mirrors were not simply ‘objects related to the female realm’ (vel sim.), but were always embodiments of catoptric knowledge and their uses in religious contexts, recorded both technically and anecdotally, show that it was precisely the manipulation of the laws of reflection which made them religiously useful.

In a similar vein, ancient automata, the focus of Chapter 6, should not be considered proto-robots. Reading these objects as anticipations of modern constructions misses the role they actually play in historical contexts. Large, self-animated machines were a feature of Hellenistic pompai which, I argue, were effective as pompeia because they enhanced existing features of religious procession: narrative, synaesthesia, and the call–response relation between worshippers and the deity. Automata in procession attest to new technological capabilities of the Hellenistic period, certainly, and are harnessed within new religious and political realities including the development of ruler cult, but their effective deployment was based on existing theological structures. Their use spoke to an existing mode of mechanical epiphany and to existing understandings of how the Greek gods cooperated in and coordinated ancient festivals from as far back as the deus ex machina of the Classical period. By this point in the book, a shifting diachronic picture has therefore begun to emerge. On the one hand, the evidence points to the fact that there is a continuity over time in the sorts of mechanisms used to enhance the presence of the gods. On the other hand, the degree of independent interest in the mechanisms for their own sake increases over time, as does the awareness of how crucial the theological work of mechanisms is, which is precisely what leaders of the Hellenistic and Imperial periods politicised. The discussion of Part III further explores and exemplifies this latter claim.

The mechanical miracle was always man-made, bound by the constraints and empowered by the potential of technical human knowledge. At the same time, manufacturing the marvellous always exceeded epistemological boundaries and thus attested to divine interference and presence. Yet if this symbiosis was to tip too far one way or the other – if the hand of the mechanopoios was too visible, if the simulated epiphany was more theatrics than it was theophania, if the automated wagon whirled around without Apollo overseeing the occasion – then the situation could change drastically. Thus, the roles that technology played in contemporary critiques of human behaviour in relation to the gods, whether fraudulent or overreaching, formed the focus of Part III.

The issue of religious forgery through technological means is central to Lucian’s Alexander (Chapter 7). The protagonist of Lucian’s text ‘falsifies’ a number of miracles and while the narratorial perspective works to uncover the trick behind the trick, the Alexander as a whole testifies to technology’s role in the effective propagation of the cult of Glykon. Lucian intentionally complicates the narrator’s defrauding programme by questioning in both religious and scientific terms what it means to plan and to perform miracles. The Alexander demonstrates the various ways that technical knowledge is integral to the act of miracle-making, turning the text, in spite of its satiric self, into a manual for these very same purposes. A comparison with Hippolytus’ Refutation of All Heresies not only attests to the broader use of technological miracles in ancient contexts, but also exemplifies how technology could be configured differently within a religion’s theological truths.

Technologies are also used to mediate between human and supernatural realms in Lucian’s Icaromenippus (Chapter 8). In that text the protagonist devises and constructs a pair of wings which allow him to fly up to Olympus and come face to face with the gods of the Greek pantheon. He stays with the gods for twenty-four hours, during which time he watches Zeus communicate telephonically with humans through prayer-wells, reminiscent of Alexander’s mechanical autophone, and dines with the gods. Lucian’s Icaromenippus shows once more that technologies are integral to the tricky business of navigating the junction between human and divine, but there are also hints in this text that this can be manipulated in ways that pose potential threats to the existing divine order. The wings not only give Menippus access to Olympus, for example, but endow him with divine characteristics of flight and, further, allow him to see things beyond what human sight can perceive.

The suggestion that Menippus’ actions mark him out as a pseudo or fake god provided a useful entry point for discussion of the issue of technology as a tool for theomachy more generally in the Greek cultural imagination. If mechanics were always linked to the human – in knowledge, construction, performative use – this begs the question of whether at some point in Greek history an antithetical relation was established between religion and mechanics. Icaromenippus, I suggested, plays into two distinct but related traditions which connect technology and theomachy. On the one hand, we know of several individuals in Greek myth who physically encroach on divine territory, such as Otus, Ephialtes, Icarus, and Bellerophon, all of whom meet terrible ends which Menippus notably escapes. On the other hand, there are those who insult the gods by being overambitious in their technical abilities: Salmoneus stands as the paradigmatic example of this category of theomach, with his mimetic imitation of Zeus’ thunder and lightning. In both cases – astral theomachies and technophile theomachies – theatrical fragments indicate that the intersection of mechanics and religion was played out meta-theatrically through the use of stage machinery, as the case of Prometheus Bound had also shown earlier in Part II.

The insistent meta-theatricality of the phenomenon at hand – an element that recurs in all three parts of the book from the deus ex machina and simulated epiphanies to articulated figurines, processional automata, and Lucian’s texts – is worth stressing for what it illuminates about the history of ancient Greek religion. Religious technologies were, I argue, effective in large part because of their self-referentiality, pointing to their own ability to reproduce the theatrics and rituals around which Greek religion was constructed. In this sense, the book contributes to a re-characterisation of ancient Greek religion and its ritual experiences. To the theatrical, I have also repeatedly insisted on the related quality of the playful. While we often think of religion as sombre, play and light-heartedness are clear features of the Bes rhyton, the Lykos thēsauros, and the articulated figurines, not to mention the polyvalence of these objects as both toys and votive objects. The divinatory use of astragaloi relies on the role of alea (chance), rotating wheels in temples capitalise on the discombobulating, dizzying power of ilinx, and spectacle and mimesis underscore the use of theatrical machinery from the deus ex machina to processional automata. Further, conceptual models of play allowed at various points in the book for reflection on the parallel modes of functioning between the player’s and the believer’s attitudes which, in both cases, involve a careful balance between awareness and ignorance, compliance and detachment. This offers an important contribution to current scholarly discussions on belief in ancient Greek religion.

This book is, I hope, far from the final word on the interplay between technology and the divine in Graeco-Roman antiquity. Most obviously, and as indicated in Part III, the Roman world merges these two components in a different cultural configuration to that of the Greek world. This deserves full treatment in its own right, particularly as Christian theologies adopt, reject, and intersect with the pagan treatment in historically illuminating ways. There is also more to be said of architecture as a technē which formed and informed theologies, often employing elements of mēchanē, as discussed in Part II. Finally, and, in my eyes, most pressingly, discussion of manifesting the divine needs to be inserted in wider discussion of modelling the cosmos and understanding the place of the human within this. Celestial technologies, lunar (as hinted at in Chapter 8) and solar as well as complex astronomical models such as the Antikythera mechanism, do not mechanically manufacture the marvellous but technologically configure the cosmos, and how we relate to the divine cannot be divorced from how we relate to the cosmos itself.