It is generally accepted that the mēchanē available for use in the Athenian theatre by the late fifth century BCE was probably placed on a base behind the skēnē and constructed as an asymmetrical counter-weighted beam with pivoting potential.Footnote ¹ Mechanically, this model has the advantage of employing principles found in one of the oldest and most widespread devices used in the Mediterranean: the swing beam or shaduf used for lifting water.Footnote ² When at rest, the mēchanē would have been minimally visible since the bar lay horizontally. Then, when in use, the mēchanē would have come into view hovering not over an artificial backdrop, but over the sky itself with a view of Attic hills and the southern city in the distance.Footnote ³ The crane would have been able to pivot up to 180 degrees, sweeping across the space in front of the skēnē roof as certain plays require.Footnote ⁴ The actor might have been suspended directly from the mēchanē by a harness, which would have allowed the actor’s body to be entirely disconnected from any additional supportive structure. This option becomes less appealing, however, when we imagine a number of actors harnessed next to each other, as would be required for various plays. Alternatively, actors could have perched or stood on some sort of trapeze which would still give the impression of a floating body but could more comfortably fit two people side by side. A final hypothesis is that the actors stood on a large platform attached to the machine, and this certainly seems to have been the case for plays such as the Medea where the title character was not only accompanied by her children but also needed to appear as if she were flying on Helios’ chariot.Footnote ⁵ All things considered, it seems most likely that the main base structure of the mēchanē remained the same, and that the precise harnessing mechanism and decorative elements were modified according to the needs of individual plays.Footnote ⁶

One piece of later evidence sheds light on the significance of the visibility of the crane in the moment of mechanical epiphany. Hero of Alexandria, probably writing in the first century CE, is responsible for our only extant treatise on the construction of self-animated machines known as automata.Footnote ⁷ The text contains two types of automata: a self-animated shrine to Dionysus which is termed a hypagon automaton, since it moves forwards and backwards, and a miniature theatre, which performed the legend of Nauplius, referred to as a staton automaton.Footnote ⁸ Hero was by no means pioneering a literary tradition; in his description of the automated miniature theatre he explicitly states that his model is based on a similar one by his predecessor Philo of Byzantium, who flourished around 200 BCE.Footnote ⁹ Hero has two main problems with the mechanics of Philo’s earlier model: that he failed to explain how a thunderbolt accompanied by sound would fall on Ajax, and that he used a crane to bring Athena on stage, which was more difficult (ergōdesteron) than it needed to be given that it was possible to make her appear simply by using a hinge at her feet.Footnote ¹⁰ We can deduce, then, that Philo of Byzantium’s model had used a miniature mēchanē to reproduce the entrance of the divinity at the end of the play, directly copying contemporary theatrical technologies. While Hero’s later model was planned around the ways in which the same visual effect – the sudden apparition of the deity – could be reproduced in the particular genre of the automated theatre, Philo had simply followed real-life stage conventions.Footnote ¹¹

Hero begins his treatise by narrating the legend scene by scene, as depicted by Philo, but does not, at this point in the text, explain how anything works mechanically. Instead, he initially describes how the story looked from the perspective of the viewer, and only afterwards does he break down the mechanics of each element. The scene with dolphins jumping in and out of the ocean is a good example: ‘Often dolphins swam alongside [the ships], sometimes diving into the sea, sometimes visible, just as in real life’ (πολλάκις παρεκολύμβων δὲ καὶ δελφῖνες ὁτὲ μὲν εἰς τὴν θάλατταν καταδυόμενοι, ὁτὲ δὲ φαινόμενοι καθάπερ ἐπὶ τῆς ἀληθείας).Footnote ¹² The twelve figures who make up the opening scene are similarly described as the viewer would see them: ‘some sawing, some working with axes, some with hammers, others using bow-drills and augers, making a lot of noise, just as would happen in real life’ (τὰ μὲν πρίζοντα, τὰ δὲ πελέκεσιν ἐργαζόμενα, τὰ δὲ σφύραις, τὰ δὲ ἀρίσι καὶ τρυπάνοις χρώμενα <καὶ> ψόφον ἐποίουν πολύν, καθάπερ <ἂν> ἐπὶ τῆς ἀληθείας γίνοιτο).Footnote ¹³ Yet in the description of the mēchanē alone, Hero specifies the method of arrival via the machine: ‘<and Athena was> lifted on the mēchanē above the stage’ (<ἡ δὲ Αθηνᾶ ἐπὶ> μηχανῆς τε καὶ ἄνωθεν τοῦ πίνακος ἐξήρθη).Footnote ¹⁴ We should deduce from this that the mechanics were intentionally visible to the audience in Philo’s miniature mēchanē, and that this was the case because it followed regular stage conventions where the crane was also visible, at least in the moment of deployment.

To our modern sensibilities, the fifth-century mēchanē seems a highly artificial and intrusive instrument to the realistic illusion that we expect of theatrical entertainment, and of the genre of tragedy in particular. This is why modern productions of ancient plays often opt for other ways to represent epiphany of the divine.Footnote ¹⁵ It does not follow, however, either that ancient spectators saw the machine in the same way, or, conversely, that to ancient eyes the mēchanē would have seemed realistic because they did not know computer-generated imagery.Footnote ¹⁶ The former is plainly anachronistic given the visual conventions of Greek tragedy, which included other ‘intrusive’ elements such as masks, and the latter would be attributing a primitive mode of viewing to the Greeks which is neither warranted nor intellectually productive. Taking into consideration the performative conditions of fifth-century Attic tragedy – namely that theatrical performances were held outdoors, during the day and with no use of the modern ‘spotlight’ to divert attention – spectators would undeniably have seen the beams, ropes, and platform or trapeze bar which constituted the mēchanē.Footnote ¹⁷

Patricia Easterling in 1993 explained that spectators are always aware that what they are seeing is both real and make-believe at the same time, and that the audience can deal with this apparent contradiction quite comfortably.Footnote ¹⁸ David Wiles in his more recent monograph on the mask also treats this paradox of literal and metaphorical, and his study is useful as a starting block to think about the mēchanē as more than an empty piece of stage machinery, indeed as part of the construction of the divine in tragedy.Footnote ¹⁹ Wiles explains that the mask is not a thing sitting on the face to be viewed but is endowed with agency as an instrument of metamorphosis.Footnote ²⁰ Using Alfred Gell’s terminology, this makes the mask an ‘index’ pointing at a reality elsewhere (the Gellian ‘prototype’).Footnote ²¹ The mask brings about a being that was not there before; it does not hide the human behind it but transforms the wearer, blending human and mythical worlds. Masks were a way of bringing heroes to life, just as the mēchanē was a way of bringing gods to life. As alluded to already, an anthropological theory of art such as Gell’s, which entirely eschews aesthetics and style, is particularly useful for looking at the agency of the mēchanē since there is no certainty as to what this assemblage of machine with masked and costumed actor atop would have looked like, yet this does not mean that we cannot come to an understanding of the effect of the object’s perceived agency on its viewers.Footnote ²² I suggest that, much like the mask, the mēchanē was visualised in a more nuanced way than through the binary of ‘real’ and ‘artificial’. Ancient spectators were both aware that there was an actor wearing the mask and completely comfortable with the fact that the actor was the character. The Pronomos Vase, which depicts a tragic acting troupe on one side, including actors dressed as satyrs, and on the other side ‘real satyrs’, exemplifies this phenomenon visually. Indeed, this is yet another way in which there is much interpretative overlap between art and technology, and theatrical performance (or ‘playing’) here is a useful bridge between the concepts. Classical art historians too point out the twofold nature of viewing ancient art where both the entity represented in an image and its created status are recognised.Footnote ²³ Similarly, the mechanics involved in the appearance of the god may have been obvious, but this did not stop it from being a manifestation of the divinity. The mēchanē challenged the viewer to recognise the epiphany together with the mechanics that construct it.Footnote ²⁴

Seen in these terms, Bolter and Grusin’s reflections on the idea of ‘remediation’ pertain directly to the operations of the mēchanē.Footnote ²⁵ Modern culture, the authors argue, wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation. Thus, new modern digital media oscillate between the logic of immediacy which attempts to erase the medium itself and leave us in the presence of the thing represented, and the logic of hypermediacy which acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible. While working with, and in many ways exploiting, ancient Greek theological preconceptions regarding the divine’s ability to appear in the human realm, the deus ex machina is at the same time uniquely hypermediated in its layered assemblage of machine, actor, stage, performance, theatre, and festival. Where immediacy suggests a seamless and unified visual space – the way that the characters in the play experience divine epiphany – hypermediacy constructs heterogeneous space. In this case, representation is not a direct window into the world, a ‘faceless interface’ of sorts, but rather ‘windowed’ itself, with windows that open onto other representations or other media.Footnote ²⁶ This idea will be important in understanding the mēchanē’s ability to remediate extra-tragic spaces notably, but not exclusively, Olympus.Footnote ²⁷

The Comic Crane

Some of the best evidence for how the machine was viewed in its ancient performative context is – with all the caveats that the genre entails – through para-tragic uses of the crane in Old Comedy.Footnote ²⁸ On a basic level, while there is no reason to think that the machines differed at all in terms of mechanics or presentation, we know that the mēchanē of tragedy was known as the kradē in comedy. Since the word also referred to a fig branch, the ‘kradē’ was avidly exploited as a comical image for the awkward way that actors were suspended in space. Two fragments of Strattis, both of which meta-theatrically draw attention to the actor’s precarious position up on a piece of machinery, offer good examples, signalling the arresting visual experience of seeing a body hanging disconnected up in the air.Footnote ²⁹ Furthermore, the Strattis fragments accentuate that this has been inflicted by a human hand through the intervention of the mēchanopoios ‘crane operator’.

Various Aristophanic fragments also draw attention to the role of the mēchanopoios. Aristophanes’ Gerytades, for example, included a brief meta-theatrical reference to the crane operator’s responsibility in controlling the pace of the machine in the moment of use.Footnote ³⁰ In Aristophanes’ Daedalus the actor not only addressed the mēchanopoios directly, but underscored the role of the trochos ‘wheel’ in the machine’s deployment overtly signalling the relation between the human and the mechanical components that made up this theatrical device.Footnote ³¹ From what we can tell, the story of Daedalus revolved around Zeus making use of the arts of the eponymous master craftsman in an erotic adventure. Given Daedalus’ reputation as inventor-engineer, and his particular association with mechanical technē through myths such as Icarus’ wings, it is not too difficult to imagine why the kradē might feature meta-theatrically as a wonderful piece of machinery.

Comic authors were evidently making a concerted effort to integrate the visible mechanics of the crane into the humour of their plays specifically through alluding to the fact that the otherwise fantastical entrances and exits were produced by human action. We should consider the overt mechanics of the machine in Greek theatre and the interpretation of the forces at work in its viewing to be in a symbiotic relationship. The fact that the mēchanē works seamlessly in tragedy is attributed by spectators to divine agency; at the same time, it is only because the mechanics work seamlessly thanks to human construction that divine presence is confirmed. This symbiosis is intentionally rendered farcical in comedy. In other words, the oscillation between immediacy and hypermediacy is intentionally tipped in favour of the latter. Human engineering efforts are observed and often criticised, cutting off any possible intervention from the divine. Since the mechanics of the kradē are flawed, there is no chance for the intervention of divine agency, and as there is no divine agency, the mechanics remain obviously and humanly flawed. The Gerytades fragment along with the two Strattis passages refer to speed and imply that the machine and its operator were inconveniently slow. While this element of the mechanics was most likely used to advantage in tragedy in order to make the movement of the machine seem imposing, it was just plain inconvenient in comedy.Footnote ³²

The kradē is also securely used in two extant plays of Aristophanes which situate the crane within a larger plot and within broader themes of the plays. The only mention of the mēchanopoios in a comedy which is not devoid of context comes from Aristophanes’ Peace. The mechanised entrance of the protagonist, Trygaeus, is dramatically signalled by his slave calling attention to the spectacle: ‘Oh my god! Come here, neighbours, come here! My master’s up off the ground, soaring into the air on beetle-back.’Footnote ³³ The kradē was presumably decorated in some way so as to represent a giant beetle, possibly with wings.Footnote ³⁴ Trygaeus’ dialogue immediately focuses on the unsteady movement of the machine.Footnote ³⁵ He tells his slave that he is heading to Zeus in Olympus, speaking to the way that the mēchanē conventionally joined mortal and immortal realms.Footnote ³⁶ Various references to Euripides’ Bellerophon help to hammer home the fact that this is tragic parody.Footnote ³⁷ When the elevation or the movement become too much for the actor, he directly addresses the crane operator in good comic fashion, imploring them to take care lest he be ill.Footnote ³⁸ Shortly after this, Trygaeus descends to stage level onto the side of the skēnē that represents the palace of Zeus. The other far door represents the house of Trygaeus and between the two is a cavern. Instead of arriving from the divine realm and landing in the mortal realm as the tragic mēchanē facilitates, Aristophanes has collapsed both spaces together on stage horizontally and then forces the protagonist to undertake a comically perilous journey travelling via airborne means across a distance which he could have traversed in a few steps on the ground. The mēchanē, which in tragedy connects seen and unseen spaces with different ontological conditions in an ingenious and theologically profound way, is thus rendered superfluous and ungainly in comedy. This speaks, in fact, to Hero of Alexandria’s assessment of Philo’s miniature mēchanē being more cumbersome than it needs to be and clues us in to a fine line, but an important distinction, between the machine being visible (which it was) and the machine being burdensome (which it should not be) in fulfilling its ultimate goal. Further, the human engineering which lay behind the machine and which was visible on stage to spectators, on the one hand stands as a visual reminder of the ways in which technai of various kinds allowed humans to encounter their gods, while on the other hand it also points precisely to the concerns and tensions surrounding the acknowledgement that interacting with the sacred relied on humanly manufactured materials.

A second example comes from Aristophanes’ Birds, a play which, among other things, questions the air as a ‘route’ of communication and movement between human and divine realms. Both Peace and Birds are utopic plays, and both use the kradē in their own way as a theatrical tool to dramatise travel between places in the hope of arriving – literally or metaphorically – at a better place. Yet Birds has a much more intense focus on space given the premise that the utopic ‘Cloudcuckooland’ will be somewhere between earth and Olympus. The scene using the kradē in Birds (lines 1199–1261) takes place about three-quarters of the way through the play, once viewers are aware of the new rules by which the Cloudcuckooland operates. In general terms, the mēchanē in Greek tragedy serves to reinforce empirical hierarchies between gods and men, earth and Olympus, nature and technē. In Birds all these binaries are intentionally turned on their heads. Cloudcuckooland is a place where humans are birds, birds are gods, laws are inverted, and cannibalism is a given. When the rainbow goddess Iris appears aloft on the kradē – reminiscent of her tragic entrance on the mēchanē in Euripides’ Heracles – Peisetaerus promptly starts pestering her. Even before she is identifiable, the whirring sound of her wings had alerted Peisetaerus and the Chorus of her proximity. Iris has not come to intervene on any specific issue but, it appears, was simply passing through at the wrong time. Peisetaerus questions Iris about her movements through space like a grumpy air-traffic controller, leading her to ask, exasperated, ‘But where else are the gods supposed to fly?’.Footnote ³⁹ Unlike Trygaeus in Peace, who satirises the tragic use of the machine, Iris is following a model of epic epiphany to her own dismay and misfortune.Footnote ⁴⁰ She describes her course of navigation: flying from Olympus to earth to deliver a message which includes religious instruction.Footnote ⁴¹ This would have been fine Homeric divine ‘machinery’, but, unbeknownst to her, she is crossing the skies of a comedy where entirely different spatial and theological rules apply. The use of the kradē/mēchanē in Birds does not collapse seen and unseen space to render the machine obsolete, as in Peace, but instead Birds changes the rules of the game altogether so that although the Olympian gods can and do still fly, they themselves are redundant, thus making their channel mechanism futile. The point is brought into even stronger relief since the new deities of Aristophanes’ imagined polis do not need a mēchanē to fly but can rely merely on their wings – an innate part of their physis. As the final cherry on the cake, the birds of Cloudcuckooland are described as being able to construct a city completely without engineering.Footnote ⁴² Thus, Aristophanes has, in this comedy, rendered the crane useless not only in its theatrical capacity, but in its renowned role as weight-lifting device too!

Theatre and/as Media

As well as conceiving of the mēchanē as an individual object with agency, as the discussion has largely done thus far, we should also consider it as a constituent part of the institution of the theatre. Put differently, it is worth thinking about the theatrical crane from a sociologically inflected perspective where the object is produced and circulated within a specific institutional framework which provides further context for its interpretation. Ancient theatre was a rare form of ancient mass media. It was also religious. Even if scholars continue to debate the possibilities of plays having theologies, the extent to which the plays reflected the practices of civic religion, the relationship of tragedy to ritual, and so on, the theatre as an institution undeniably formed part of a city-wide religious festival.Footnote ⁴³ Media and religion have a long, and tremendously instructive, relationship lasting to the present day where television and radio are used to diffuse sermons and blockbusters are produced to present biblical stories.Footnote ⁴⁴

When media began as an area of study in the 1920s, media communication was understood as a linear process from sender to audience. In the latter part of the twentieth century, however, alternative ways of thinking about media and human behaviour arose from observing the impact of media on society. Media began to be regarded not just as neutral, unidirectional channels, but as part of the dynamic of society itself. In the context of media and religion, this prompted a shift from analysing religious organisations’ use of media and the effects they achieved to looking more broadly at religion as a mediated phenomenon (just as the whole of society and culture is perceived to be mediated too).Footnote ⁴⁵ Media, then, do not carry fixed messages, but are sites where construction, negotiation, and reconstruction of cultural meaning take place in an ongoing process. The catchphrase to explain this fundamental idea common to many media-theoretical approaches is still Marshall McLuhan’s notion that ‘the medium is the message’ from his Reference McLuhan1964 book Understanding Media. The form of a medium, McLuhan demonstrated, massages the communication by favouring certain kinds of messages over others and by adding particular (sensory) preferences to the content. Emphasis is placed on the material structures of technologies and the changes these introduce into culture, not on the ways in which these are used or the content of the messages that pass through them. Decentring the human and understanding media technologies’ cultural and social agencies have thus been at the core of media theory from the discipline’s inception, though subsequent media theorists have gone on to defend much stronger technological determinist positions than McLuhan.

Writing in direct response to Understanding Media, the work of Friedrich Kittler too is concerned with channels and their properties rather than the semantics which are transmitted. Where Kittler diverges from McLuhan, however, is his stronger materialist focus. As the title of his book suggests, McLuhan posited ways to understand media, an idea which Kittler rejects outright.Footnote ⁴⁶ While Kittler deems it possible to understand the effects media introduce into social relations, the possibility of understanding media itself is absurd to Kittler in that one cannot possibly understand a technology. Kittler instead interprets media in terms of their capacity for storage and transmission.Footnote ⁴⁷ This is a useful idea to help to contemplate how the mēchanē stores and transmits ideas of the divine, particularly as it relates to their ontology and communication. Different ontological realms (human and divine) as well as different epistemologies (theatre and reality) are channelled by the medium of the mēchanē.

Media take various forms and do not need to be technological, yet in the case of the mēchanē and other religious media discussed in this book, that is precisely the category that interests us. Technological media have specific physical, social, and epistemic characteristics that become an integral part of the communication itself. Material technologies also offered a particular source of fascination for Kittler which feature most prominently in his work from the early 1980s onwards.Footnote ⁴⁸ Over the course of his oeuvres, Kittler documented the historical conditions of the emergence of various technological media alongside the structures of communication and understanding they subsequently made possible.Footnote ⁴⁹ Discourse Networks 1800/1900, originally published in 1985, analyses the changing structures of communication systems at two historical junctures: 1800 and 1900, respectively. While the ‘discourse network’ of 1800 relied exclusively on the book, by 1900 new technologies such as the typewriter, gramophone, phonograph, and film had emerged, and their cultural and social effects were taking root. This second set of technological media which, towards the end of the nineteenth century, broke down writing’s monopoly then formed the basis for Kittler’s 1986 Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. In later work, Kittler came to focus on optical media and writes the narrative of artistic, analogue, and digital media to show how these and other technological media do not just attune, take on qualities of, and even override or deceive, human sense perception but in fact enable philosophical reflection and cultural concepts to be elaborated.Footnote ⁵⁰ So Kittler writes that ‘the only thing that can be known about the soul or the human are the technical gadgets with which they have been historically measured at any given time’.Footnote ⁵¹ This provocative statement is precisely the sort of idea which proves useful for exploring our subject matter.

The ancient theatre was used as a channel of (for its day) mass media which did not just communicate but also constructed all sorts of cultural stories, expectations, and understandings including ones pertaining to religion.Footnote ⁵² The mēchanē was not employed to ‘symbolise’ the god, but instead worked to create, illustrate, and authenticate stories about how gods worked and particularly how they appeared, intervened, and transmitted messages in the human realm. When it comes to understanding the mēchanē as tool of divine epiphany, we must think of it not simply as a solution to stage pre-existing conceptions of gods (those ‘already evident’ in literature, for example), but equally as a way to propose something new about divine ontologies and about how human and divine were thought to interact through technology.

The mēchanē was just one way to (re)present divine epiphany in ancient Greek culture, and it is a way that prioritises sight (unlike auditory or olfactory epiphanies, for example), participates in a discourse on the form of the divine, couples this visual emphasis with notions of the divine’s spontaneity, their locomotive distinction, and their ontological and haptic distance from humans, at the same time bringing to the fore the possible passages of connectedness between mortal and divine. Mechanical technē, in other words, tunes the signal in specific ways. The epiphanic experience created by the mēchanē is by its nature collective (received by many at once) and in the same way as cinema needs a showing room, the crane needs the theatre and the festival. It collectively confirms, (re)draws, and questions epiphanic orthodoxy; it does not merely represent the god.

The very fact that the mēchanē is used to delineate and to transmit ideas about divine transcendental powers tells us something about the use of technology in ancient religion to begin with. It is not about suspending disbelief as one sees the clunky mechanisms of the crane dangle the god(s) overhead, but about seeing those mechanisms as precisely the point of the message: as paradigms of how divine encounter works. Ancient Greek religion was always mediated through man-made objects representing the divine and inducing epiphanic presence, the mēchanē is novel in what it contributed to the ways that objects are used as religious media in term of pace and patterns. The mēchanē simultaneously made viewers aware of its material nature and eschewed its materiality completely. Viewers are aware of it and aware through it: the mēchanē both defers (points to a reality elsewhere), and in the way that the medium materialises it performs (and is the god in the moment of performance).

The deus ex machina is by no means the only way that the gods of the Greek pantheon were represented and remediated on the tragic stage. Indeed, a range of visual epiphanic strategies was available to and avidly used by ancient playwrights and the use of the mēchanē therefore constituted a particular theatrical choice which had particular theatrical and theological significance. This section does not aim at a systematic review of all divine presence in Greek tragedy, but rather presents a few other (i.e. non-mechanical) modes of divine appearance specifically as they bring something to bear on the subsequent argument concerning the mēchanē.

Internal and External Witnesses

Divine presence was enacted in a number of different ways in Greek tragedy. Plays such as the Eumenides or Prometheus Bound show that in certain cases, ancient playwrights had no problem with divinities walking the tragic stage. Relatedly, Euripides is well known for displaying gods on stage in divine prologues as well as on the machine. It was also possible for dramatists to invoke divine presence without showing divine characters on stage at all, simply leaning on traditions of divine involvement in human affairs.Footnote ¹ The case of Athena’s invisible appearance to Odysseus at the start of Sophocles’ Ajax lies somewhere between these two models, and is a good place to start a discussion on the multiple audiences that theatrical epiphany could hold, and which staged mechanical epiphany invariably did hold.

Scholars have remarked that Athena’s invisibility to Odysseus in Ajax is based on Iliadic models of epiphany, where divine bodies have no shape or form.Footnote ² This is held to be in contrast to Odyssean epiphanies, for example, which tend to be anthropomorphic. Instead of looking to literature to explain the treatment of Athena’s epiphany in the Ajax, however, I want to use this example to shed light on issues relating to the spectators of staged epiphanies in order to ask how this differs from and speaks to mechanical modes of divine apparition. Athena’s appearance to Odysseus opens the Ajax, and the goddess justifies her presence by explaining that she always keeps an eye on Odysseus.Footnote ³ The emphasis on Athena’s capacity to see the human realm (and thus understand and control what goes on) is marked, and strikingly one-sided, as Odysseus replies that though he hears her voice clearly, he is unable to see his guiding deity.Footnote ⁴ The exact staging of the scene and, in particular, whether Athena was physically present on stage and invisible to Odysseus, or whether she was entirely absent, is unclear. Donald Mastronarde’s suggestion that Athena was on the roof of the skēnē seems most sensible, as this dominating position is consistent with her Machiavellian control over Ajax in the opening, which is harder to achieve if the deity is physically absent.Footnote ⁵

Odysseus responds to Athena’s opening words, immediately addressing her by name. The point of the response is less to explain Athena’s identity (though this may have been part of the intention if she was in fact absent), and more to emphasise that though he could not see her, the epiphany was validated by the clarity of the divine voice. The playwright intentionally creates room for the fact that theatrical epiphanies have multiple Gellian ‘patients’ – the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ audiences – and that the ‘index’ (here Athena) exerted a different mode of inference (or sense of ‘abduction’) on one ‘patient’ than it did on the other. Abduction is the term used to designate the cognitive operation we bring to bear on indexes, and Gell is keen to distinguish the non-linguistic kinds of inferences which constitute abduction from linguistic semiosis.Footnote ⁶ In other words, the index does not ‘mean’ different things to the two patients, but exerts different agencies. Ajax makes inferences about Athena’s agency according to what he hears, the audience according to what they hear and see: possibly Athena herself, certainly the effects of Athena’s presence on the other characters. In Euripides’ Hippolytus a dying Hippolytus recognises Artemis by scent.Footnote ⁷ Again, Hippolytus recognises the epiphany by a different set of inferences (based on smell) while the audience relies potentially on smell (if something was done theatrically such as burning of incense at that moment), but certainly on sight.

The dual audiences of epiphanies speak to other forms of visual epiphany in Greek culture. The Archinos relief from the Amphiareion at Oropos offers a good example.Footnote ⁸ Within a single frame three different strategies of divine encounter are presented. In the background and on the right-hand side of the relief is a worshipper praying. In the mid ground, a worshipper reclines in the manner typical of an incubation healing scene with a snake touching his shoulder. In the foreground and to the left of the relief an anthropomorphised Amphiaraos heals the same shoulder of a worshipper. As has been noted by scholars, the three worshippers look identical yet there is no way to tell if the scene depicts a chronological sequence or a single moment in time as would be understood through different levels of cognition. The relief essentially maps a network of religious experiences where the related activities of prayer, oneiric theriomorphic epiphany, and anthropomorphic ‘physical’ epiphany are presented as integral, interrelated components of an encounter with Amphiaraos. The success of the relief thus comes precisely from the intentional ambivalence with which it presents the relation between the epiphanic strategies and the way that the receiver(s) of the epiphany interpret(s) the divine moment(s). Concurrently, the relief refers, through the votive pinax seen in the background, to the physical location of the Amphiareion, thus signalling its own role as religious medium which offers another mode through which to connect the divine to worshippers, this time those concretely in the sanctuary at Oropos, and ‘external’ to the relief. The Archinos relief is an exemplary but not a unique case demonstrating how votive reliefs often manipulated their potential for creating internal and external audiences where, as in the case of a mechanical epiphany on stage, reactions to the epiphany are multiple and multilayered.Footnote ⁹ Unlike the characters in the play or the figures on the votive relief, spectators in the theatre and viewers of the relief are not expected to show physical reverence to the gods by falling to their knees or raising their hands in prayer. Yet they are still supposed to recognise the epiphany as legitimate, and any religious media involved as exerting divine agency.

Staged mechanical epiphanies by their very nature had multiple patients. Unlike the external audience – whose viewing experience, as described in Chapter 1, relied on seeing the mechanics at work – the characters within the play presumably did not see the mechanics of the crane, or at least not to the same extent or quite in the same way. Further, the spectators were presumably aware of this distinction between their viewing experience and that of the characters. The space created between internal and external audiences was a deliberate part of the mechanical epiphany, just as Sophocles’ ‘invisible’ Athena deliberately toyed with spectatorship and modes of epiphanic viewing too. As formulated by Platt, ‘epiphanies have a habit of pushing epistemological dilemmas to crisis point’,Footnote ¹⁰ and what we are seeing with the epiphanies considered so far is a dramatic staging of ways of knowing the divine, of recognising the divine, and of authenticating the divine. The deus ex machina is participating in this conversation very overtly: it is a challenge to the audience both to recognise it as an epiphany and to recognise the mechanics that construct the epiphany, and the human involvement in such.

Divine Prologues

Non-mechanical appearances of the gods in Greek tragedy commonly take the form of divine prologues. If, as scholars maintain, the choice to use the mēchanē revolved around physically distinguishing the human from the divine by projecting gods ‘above’ the human realm, consistent with their distinct ontological status,Footnote ¹¹ why would divine prologues not use the mēchanē? There must be something distinct about the two forms of divine apparitions which scholars are yet to tease apart.

Especially in the tragedies of Euripides, divine prologues are not normally seen by characters of the play but are staged for the benefit of the audience only, and thus eschew the creation of multiple Gellian patients. The unique case of Sophocles’ Ajax aside, divine prologues – unlike dei ex machina and other staged epiphanies with internal and external audiences – are not playing with epistemologies of seeing the divine. Instead, they are about the complexities of divine communication and divine involvement in human affairs. I would not like to claim that the two categories are mutually exclusive by any means (for example the deus ex machina in Euripides’ Electra drastically questions divine prophecy), but the categories are useful to understand the range of epiphanic manifestations in tragedy and the ways that the visual is used to make theological statements on seeing, knowing, and understanding the divine.

In Euripidean tragedy, divine prologues often include prophecy. Far from simply predicting the course of the play, and thus robbing the plot of any suspense, the audience’s initial expectation set up in the prologues is often challenged, as the prediction is altered, qualified, questioned, or contradicted.Footnote ¹² Critically, however, the previously established expectations are known only to the audience, not to the characters in the play, since they are overwhelmingly delivered on an empty stage. Divine prologues, then, create a different level of action, and it is this ‘extradramatic action’ (to use Hamilton’s term) which holds theological richness. In Alcestis, for example, though Apollo’s prophecy is essentially correct in the facts it offers, the god cannot gauge the human realities of the situation he has created. The disjunct between the two versions offered – the prologue’s sterile description and the play’s emotional tragic action – brings into relief the tensions between divine and human expectations and experiences. At the other end of the spectrum is Hermes in Ion. On an empty stage, the divinity introduces himself and the background to the story and then prophesies what is to come. He says that Creusa and Xuthus will arrive in Delphi and that Apollo will present Ion as Xuthus’ son. Having thus entered the family, Ion will then be recognised by his mother and Apollo’s role will remain unknown to all.Footnote ¹³ Unlike in Alcestis, this is not just a question of difference of scale, but, as discussed by Hamilton, presents us with ‘the most unequivocal example of a prologue prediction not coming true’.Footnote ¹⁴ Creusa recognises Ion not in Athens but in Delphi, after having tried to kill him. Athena on the mēchanē later stresses the importance of this alteration and the intervention of Apollo making apparent the way that the divine works by sudden interventions as much as by preordained, overarching plans.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet the theologies – the stories about the gods, and about gods and humans – which prologue epiphanies engender are largely plot based and thus are only tangential to the discussion insofar as they prove other ways that divine apparitions serve theological goals in tragedy in comparison to the object of study at hand: mechanical epiphanies.

Static Divine Presence: Altars

Tragedy manifests divine presence in ways that extend beyond masked actor on or above the stage playing the role of the gods. The use of divine statues and altars as part of the theatre space and scenery, and within dialogue, should be seen as elements of tragedy’s visual religious media. This is particularly pertinent given new materialist approaches to object agency which have only recently been applied specifically to Greek tragedy.Footnote ¹⁶ As both a machine of divine presence and a machine of stagecraft, the deus ex machina must be considered alongside this category of theatrical equipment which I have collectively termed ‘static’ objects of divine presence.Footnote ¹⁷

Aiming to give an image of the sheer volume of ‘stuff’ that Athenian theatrical performance entailed, and of the resultant expense of production, Plutarch mentions in a single breath theatrical masks, altars (bōmoi), stage machinery, and tripods.Footnote ¹⁸ We know too, from the lexographical evidence, that Greek theatrical orchestras contained the so-called thymelē: seemingly a small (probably portable) altar on a podium.Footnote ¹⁹ Though details surrounding the thymelē are notoriously obscure, a persuasive case has been made for the way that this altar confirms a close connection between sacrifice and the origins of tragedy.Footnote ²⁰ For our purposes, then, it suffices to note the strong religious charge that the thymelē would have carried as a ritual object incorporated into the theatrical space.Footnote ²¹ Internal evidence from many tragedies also attests to the use of altars placed in the orchestra, whether this was the thymelē repurposed, another permanent altar or, most likely, a portable altar structure erected according to each plays’ demands (which we might like to see as Plutarch’s bōmoi).Footnote ²²

Debates continue concerning exactly how and when these were usedFootnote ²³ and I would simply like to stress that a striking number of plays which made use of an altar in the theatrical space also used the mēchanē. This fact alone highlights the multiplicity of visual strategies of divine presence that tragic playwrights embraced simultaneously and with enthusiasm.Footnote ²⁴ Euripides’ Andromache, for example, opens with the eponymous widow taking her place as a suppliant at the altar to Thetis who later appears on the mēchanē.Footnote ²⁵ An altar to Apollo is placed in front of the acting area in Euripides’ Electra and becomes the location of the recognition scene between the siblings, who will later be visited by the Dioscuri ex machina and to whom they will vehemently complain about Apollo’s prior actions. In Heracles there is an altar to Zeus Soter before the house of Heracles where Amphitryon, Megara, and Heracles’ three sons sit as suppliants at the start of the play, but it is an altar whose protective force is rendered empty in light of Hera’s machinations enacted through Iris and Lyssa’s ex machina intervention. In Iphigenia at Tauris the skēnē represents the temple of Artemis in the land of the Taurians and somewhere in the theatrical space was an altar – bloodied and decorated with spoils of Greek victims.Footnote ²⁶ This visually arresting altar manifested the presence of a goddess who otherwise does not appear in a tragedy which revolves around her cult image, but which sees Athena descend ex machina.Footnote ²⁷ The skēnē in the Ion represents the temple to Apollo in Delphi with an altar before it upon which Creusa takes refuge from Ion’s wrathFootnote ²⁸ but it will be Athena on a chariot who later appears on the crane ‘above the incense-laden temple’.Footnote ²⁹ This list is by no means exhaustive, but the examples are chosen as a sample to demonstrate the way that the theatrical landscape of Greek tragedy, like the landscape of Greece itself, was dotted with physical manifestations of divine presence. Just as altars and temples were products of human construction, so they were also clearly sacred spaces both within the plots of the plays and in the context of the sacred festival that framed the performances.

Further, these objects were used to create visual theologies throughout the plays. In Greek tragedy the altar stands less as a place for sacrifice and more as a place of supplication. Aeschylus in his Suppliant Women, for example, draws attention precisely to the protective power of the altar, having Danaus note that ‘an altar is a stronger thing than a fortification; it is a shield unbreakable’ (κρεῖσσον δὲ πύργου βωμός, ἄρρηκτον σάκος).Footnote ³⁰ Characters take refuge on an altar in the hope that the divine might hear or see their plea and manifest themselves as a result. In this, they engage in one of the many rituals means of invoking heroic or divine presence within Greek religion, and they relied on the safety of the sacred space which the altar designated in order to do so. This contrasts with unsolicited arrivals of the divine for which the mēchanē is frequently employed. While sought epiphany stresses the reachability and cooperation of the divine, theophania demonstrates the gods’ ability to involve themselves in human affairs as spontaneously and intrusively as they liked, completely detached from human will. Mechanical epiphanies in tragedy manipulate these two structural poles of epiphany: they are theophanic within the tragic narrative, but if we think of the way the apparatus was constructed by a human, the play written and enacted by humans, framed by the essentially ritual forum of choral performance, ex machina epiphanies stress just how effective human technai are to reach the divine. Visually, then, tragedians used theatrical actors, objects, and machinery to present and negotiate the defining elements of the cultural understanding of epiphany – the fact that it could both be solicited through prayer and supplication or occur unexpectedly, for example – on the same stage, in the same plays and, in the case of the mēchanē, even collapsed within a single object.

Static Divine Presence: Statues

Another form of static divine presence used in the plays which encourages audiences to think about the ways in which the divine manifests itself within the human realm and how this connects to objects, spaces, and situations is the use of statues.Footnote ³¹ The festival context again offers an important backdrop, creating positive conditions for interactions between divine and human.Footnote ³² In Athens the Great Dionysia could not begin until a xoanon – archaic wooden statue – of Dionysus was ritually (re)integrated into the city.Footnote ³³ The statue was taken from the neighbouring city of Eleutherai and installed at the eschara ‘hearth’ in a sanctuary of Dionysus near the Academy prior to the beginning of the festival.Footnote ³⁴ It was then carried in a torchlit evening procession to the sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus near the theatre in the centre of the city of Athens, recalling Dionysus’ first entry into the city. Framing the entire religious festival, within which dramatic performances were embedded, was the movement and integration – in other words, the animation – of an ancient cult statue into the civic and festival space. A religious procession is always both a call and response – a call for the attention of the divine and a manifestation of divine authority at the same time – and the statue stood as the central focus of this cooperative effort between dedication and epiphany.Footnote ³⁵ The coordinated performance of the statue’s spontaneous movement, overseen, of course, by the god himself, likely culminated with him being installed in the theatre space as a spectator for the theatrical acts to follow.Footnote ³⁶

A similar picture emerges beyond Athens and the Classical period, too. In Delos, for example, archaeological evidence attests to the way at the Dionysia there, Dionysus was quite literally the principal observer not only the plays performed, but of the spectacles that took place beforehand, too. The Delian monument of Karystios dated, according to epigraphical evidence, to the beginning of the third century BCE, offers clues relating to the festival’s preceding rituals and how these invoked sacred presence there.Footnote ³⁷ The monumental stone platform was decorated with two colossal, erect marble phalloi on pillars, probably relating to the procession of phalloi followed by revelry known as the phallephoria.Footnote ³⁸ The monument originally held three statues in between these: two fat, elderly, hairy Satyrs (Silenoi) juxtaposed with a nude, seated Dionysus on a marble throne.Footnote ³⁹ Evidence exists for similar statues in the theatres of Attic demes including Rhamnous, Ikarion, Euonymon, and Thorikos.Footnote ⁴⁰

The so-called visual and material turns have prompted a surge in interest concerning the exact nature of the relationship between ancient gods and their images.Footnote ⁴¹ Of the great number of insights that these studies have revealed, two are most relevant to the present discussion. First, that divine images did not just symbolise the divinity but were the divinity, and served to conjure the presence of the god or goddess into the human realm so that both parties could look at and connect with each other.Footnote ⁴² The most intense divine encounter is deemed to have occurred upon viewing the so-called cult statue usually displayed in a prominent position with the temple.Footnote ⁴³ There, by virtue of placement and function, the representation was taken to be ‘a living embodiment of the divine, inhabiting the same space as the viewer-worshipper’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Together with the epiphanic potential of visual representations of the divine, scholars have drawn attention to the great variety of styles, materials, and techniques which coexisted to depict the gods. While certain representations of the divine were thought to have been fashioned miraculously – acheiropoiētos ‘without (human) hands’; diopetēs ‘fallen from heaven’Footnote ⁴⁵ – the Greeks on the whole were not uncomfortable with the fact that cult statues were the product of human craftsmanship.Footnote ⁴⁶ An ancient Greek cult statue could be aniconic, semi-iconic, or anthropomorphic; non-figural representations could coexist with and were not replaced by anthropomorphised cult statues; and a single god could be represented by multiple epiphanic strategies even within the one space.Footnote ⁴⁷ The doubling of images in a Greek sanctuary was a widespread, well-attested phenomenon demonstrating the diverse visual strategies employed by Greek craftsmen and religious personnel and accepted by the viewer-worshippers to evoke epiphany within sacred space.

Just as there existed a variety of visual epiphanic strategies in Greek religious life, it should not surprise us that there existed a variety of visual epiphanic strategies on stage. An analysis of the climactic accumulation of the sacred image(s) of Athena in the closing tableau of Aeschylus’ Eumenides will demonstrate the point. In the first two plays of Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy the audience has been looking at a skēnē that represents the Palace of the Atridae in Argos. By the beginning of the third play, the Eumenides, the skēnē has changed to depict the temple of Apollo at Delphi and it is relatively easy to imagine this change being marked by the removal of the column of Apollo Agyieus and the pillar of HermesFootnote ⁴⁸ – both of which routinely stood outside domestic dwellings, and were likely used as markers in tragedy – and their being replaced by, for example, the tripods that stood in front of the Delphic temple and/or the omphalos.Footnote ⁴⁹ Then, at line 235 of the Eumenides, there is another scene change as Orestes enters an empty orchestra to take refuge at the statue of Athena Polias in Athens.Footnote ⁵⁰ The ancient image of Athena (palaion bretas) takes central position at this point in the play, and Orestes clutches the image dramatically in his armsFootnote ⁵¹ just as he had been instructed to do by Apollo earlier.Footnote ⁵² If we are to believe Pausanias, the actual version of this image in the city of Athens was particularly sacred because it was unwrought and had fallen from heaven.Footnote ⁵³ The bretas is frequently referred to throughout the Eumenides and it is likely to have been visible to the audience at least by line 235.Footnote ⁵⁴ Unlike the anthropomorphised deities represented in divine prologues who appear alone, and unlike the dei ex machina who are untouchable in their isolated bubble of theatrical space,Footnote ⁵⁵ this replication of the city’s most ancient and holy cult statue can be physically clutched by Orestes as he supplicates the goddess. The haptic contact is particularly poignant since Orestes’ state of defilement at this point in the play, and what this means for his presence in sacred space, are precisely the issues at stake.Footnote ⁵⁶

The picture becomes more complex still when, at line 397, Athena enters in anthropomorphic form, represented by a masked and costumed actor. The entrance itself is theatrically controversial, owing to the apparent contradiction in sense between lines 404 and 405 which has left commentators unsure as to her exact mode of entry.Footnote ⁵⁷ Whether she appeared on foot, on a chariot, or on the mēchanē, the dialogue shows her to be at pains to demarcate her epiphanic presence as separate to that of the Athena Polias, who is also still on the stage at this point. Anthropomorphic Athena draws attention to the multiplicity of visual epiphanic strategies framing the encounter of goddess and humans in the moment, noting, rather redundantly, that Orestes is ‘sitting close to her image’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The intention here is not to tease apart the ‘real’ goddess from the representational ‘image’ – the bretas does not become obsolete once the actor enters. On the contrary, at the end of a play we witness a triumphal procession where it is the goddess herself who, once again, takes care to explain that she will accompany the priestess of Athena Polias as well as the female attendants who are guarding (and probably at this stage carrying) the sacred image.Footnote ⁵⁹ In the closing tableau of Aeschylus’ trilogy, the ancient image of Athena would thus have been walked in sacred procession alongside both the anthropomorphised Athena that the actor embodied and the priestess to the goddess who, in certain ritual contexts, was herself considered to be Athena. It was a tableau that spoke directly to the realities of Athena’s epiphanic presence in the sacred space of the Athenian Acropolis to which the play is referring, as well as to other visual representations of theologies.Footnote ⁶⁰

This is not the only play which demonstrates the importance of the statue on stage to manufacture, authenticate, and at times multiply, sacred presence. Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians, for example, revolves around the theft of the cult statue of Artemis: a portable object whose divine aura is consequential enough to be used in the founding of a new cult.Footnote ⁶¹ A lost Sophoclean play, Lakainai, treated the theft of a statue of Pallas. In Euripides’ Hippolytus there were statues of both Aphrodite and Artemis on the stage, images vital in creating divine presence and in depicting the two deities in tension with each other (as the play does more generally).Footnote ⁶² The Suppliant Women of Aeschylus was visually dominated by the twelve statues representing the twelve Olympian deities lined up horizontally between the orchestra and the skēnē.Footnote ⁶³ At a critical juncture in the play, the chorus women hang off these statues like votive offerings hung in a shrine, hoping the Olympians will afford them protection from the incoming Argives.Footnote ⁶⁴ Statues in Greek tragedy were not ‘empty’ props or decorative objects,Footnote ⁶⁵ but integral ways of representing the divine which not only proved vital to the plots in various ways but, critically for the present discussion, also interacted with other visual techniques used to mediate the divine.

Over the course of the discussion thus far, we have touched on ways that the mēchanē differed from other techniques of manifesting the divine on stage. The mechanical epiphany will always have both internal and external witnesses, it plays with the structural epiphanic poles of sought and unsought epiphany, it will be spatially separated, and it resists haptic contact between deity and worshipper. These general features, which the mēchanē enables as an object of divine epiphany, should be enriched by analysis in situ too. We turn now to ascertaining what it is that the mechanical epiphany ‘did’ and how it worked to manufacture a sense of the divine, not just compared to other strategies but as a strategy in its own right, by analysing a selection of plays where the use of the machine is, though not uncontested, fairly secure, and which best demonstrate the range of uses for mechanical epiphany in Attic tragedy. Later, in Part II, we will deconstruct further the way that the mechanical mode of epiphany, already shown to be a feature of the fifth-century theatrical landscape, reached a climax in the Hellenistic period notably by seeping outwards to other parts of the festival as seen in the use of religious technologies in the pompē.Footnote ⁶⁶ One should not see this as a technological ‘progression’ in depictions of the gods, but rather as recalibrating our vision of the network of Greek visual epiphanic strategies. Far more than a bizarre theatrical anomaly, the mēchanē offered an important cultural and religious precedent for mechanical epiphany.

Aiming to demonstrate the theatrical and theological richness of the mēchanē in Greek tragedy, six case studies are dealt with here individually, exploring how the mechanical mode of epiphany works in situ. Such a methodology avoids viewing the manifold uses of the machine through the prism of a single model,Footnote ¹ while still allowing for interpretative overlaps to shine forth regarding what the ex machina epiphanies achieve and how they are treated. I have grouped the six plays loosely into pairs: the Helen, we shall see, uses the mēchanē to confirm divine form in a play otherwise full of illusion; concern for divine form also pervades the Bacchae, but in that instance the mēchanē is presented as yet another epiphanic mode of the mimetically inclined patron god of theatre. Philoctetes and Heracles use the mēchanē less to explore divine appearance and more to theorise (and theologise) issues of space, movement, and the connectedness of divine and mortal realms. Orestes and Medea are two plays which use the mēchanē to question divine epiphany by bringing to the fore issues of ontological boundaries between human and divine.

Mēchanē and Form: Euripides’ Helen and Bacchae

A major theme of Euripides’ Helen is that of constructing and identifying presence: divine and otherwise.Footnote ² Based on an alternate version of the affair of Paris and Helen leading to the Trojan War, Euripides’ play has Paris given an eidōlon of Helen who follows him to Troy, while the real Helen is hiding in Egypt.Footnote ³

Complexities of the theme of appearance versus reality are played out first as a personal conundrum, through the discrepancy between the impact of Helen’s actions and those of her divinely sent illusion. Helen is aware that she has a Doppelgänger at Troy, and continuously laments that she is impacted by this fact: ‘Why loathe me for the troubles she has caused?’ (ταῖς ἐκείνης συμφοραῖς ἐμὲ στυγεῖς;) Helen asks in her initial encounter with Teucer.Footnote ⁴ One Helen, we are told, is born from Zeus, the other is a divinely sent illusion made from aether by Hera, a divine mēchanēma of sorts.Footnote ⁵ According to Teucer, though the two Helens are physically identical (rendering the mere faculty of sight redundant),Footnote ⁶ they can be distinguished by the difference in their hearts.Footnote ⁷ The chorus do not profess the same sentiment, however, and in fact take the issue of the limits of human understanding to a general level when they express that any distinction is near impossible: ‘What mortal can search out and tell what is god, what is not god, and what lies between?’ (ὅ τι θεὸς ἢ μὴ θεὸς ἢ τὸ μέσον / τίς φησ᾿ ἐρευνάσας βροτῶν;).Footnote ⁸ These are preoccupations with identification, and it is Menelaus, in his recognition scene with Helen, who understands that the problematics of construction come first, seeking to understand how the Helen back in Troy could possibly have been fashioned.Footnote ⁹ The point being made in the interchange between Helen and Menelaus – and in the play as a whole – is that if there is a difference between something (or someone) divine, and something divinely manifested, both are equally able to enact the same fate, to Helen’s utter despair.

The cogitations around the construction of divine presence throughout Helen continue right through to the use of the theoi apo mēchanēs at the end of the play. If, after contemplating real and divinely manifested presence in the person of Helen and her eidōlon, viewers are left wondering how divine encounters can be presented unequivocally – above all in tragedy – the method of Castor and Pollux’s epiphany is presented as a solution. The Dioscuri’s appearance on the mēchanē leaves no doubt that they are divinities specifically thanks to their mode of entry. It must be said too that they are also particularly appropriate given that their existence between different ontological categories – human/divine, mortal/immortal, celestial/corporal – makes epiphanies of the Dioscuri epistemically complex by nature.Footnote ¹⁰ The prevalence of the theme of constructing identity in Helen intentionally creates an ambience of uncertainty about ontological status. This would have made a stage-level entry for the Dioscuri far less compelling, failing to tie off the exploration of divine identification in any meaningful way and leaving the audience wondering whether they are in fact seeing one or both of the twins in their human incarnation. Dunn sees the epiphany of the Dioscuri as a ‘contrived pretext for bringing on a deus ex machina’, and he may well be right in terms of the inconsequentiality of their intervention for the plot.Footnote ¹¹ But the use of the mechanical epiphany is far less contrived if we consider how it interacts more broadly with the theme of the incomprehensibility of the phenomenal world and the limits of human understanding.Footnote ¹² It is precisely the appearance which is most mechanical that is unequivocally the ‘real’ divine appearance; it is precisely the visible mechanics which facilitate the Dioscuri’s intervention that guarantee that they are truly divine. Counter-intuitively, then, we can have more confidence in the reality of the appearance of the gods if we understand how that appearance is created. Helen starts by questioning the reliability of the faculty of sight and problematising the security of divine ontology, and ends by employing the mēchanē as the only unproblematic identification of the divine. The choral exodos – appearing in at least four other Euripidean plays with only slight modifications – might be formulaic, but it is certainly not irrelevant, since it allows Helen to close with a meta-theatrical note on the many shapes that the divine and their plots take: ‘What heaven sends has many shapes, and many things the gods accomplish against our expectation.’ (πολλαὶ μορφαὶ τῶν δαιμονίων, / πολλὰ δ᾿ ἀέλπτως κραίνουσι θεοί·).Footnote ¹³

Yet the mēchanē in Helen does more than deliberate authentic ways of signalling and constructing (divine) presence. The mechanical theophania also exposes the ‘rules’ of this particular mode of human–divine interaction: its restrictions, its tolerances, and its peculiarities. Epiphany, it would seem, is subject to the politics of divine hierarchy as Castor and Pollux reveal that they would have intervened much earlier had this not been overridden by fate and the other gods.Footnote ¹⁴ Though the epiphanic encounter is perceived by the worshipper(s) in that moment to be the will of the god before them, the Dioscuri here underscore that epiphany is (or at least may have been) the outcome of a collective divine decision based on underlying divided opinions.Footnote ¹⁵ This same sentiment is further problematised through Iris and Lyssa’s mechanical epiphany in Heracles.Footnote ¹⁶ Epiphany guarantees direct communication from the divine realm which is not susceptible to the human interferences or corruptions that burden prophecy, for example. As a seer, Theonoe is a human bridge between the realms yet she is corruptible, experiencing multiple pressures on her at any one time. She is obliged to act as a mouthpiece to the gods, but also as a daughter, a sister, and someone with her own reputation to maintain.Footnote ¹⁷ The play presents these interests in clear conflict to demonstrate the fallibilities of the inspired human medium as a method to bridge sacred and profane to obtain divine foreknowledge.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet Castor and Pollux’s revelation that they themselves had a different will to other, clearly more influential divine powers serves to complicate the representation of epiphany, presenting it with its own set of problems stemming from the polytheistic system within which it exists.

Castor and Pollux speak first to Theoklymenos and then to Helen, though she is no longer on stage, having already boarded a ship with Menelaus.Footnote ¹⁹ A similar situation occurs in Iphigenia at Tauris (IT) when Athena addresses Thaos and then the absent Orestes and Iphigenia.Footnote ²⁰ The intervention of divinities in such contexts surely represents the omniscience of divine knowledge providing a place ‘on high’ to draw a visual metaphor for the view of the gods being further reaching than any individual’s restricted vision of events. The objection could be made, however, that the height of the theologeion would have served fine for this purpose. But the mēchanē’s materiality, and especially its unique locomotion, are crucial to communicating the theological understanding that the Greek gods are not, in fact, always present but need to be made to appear. Tapping into the Dioscuri’s cosmic existence as stars, the slowly rising beam suspending the twin gods (and perhaps even pivoting them above and across over the orchestra) represents the theological imperative for the Greek gods not just to appear, but to be mobilised. Castor and Pollux in Helen, and Athena in IT, can thus make pronouncements to two different audiences in two different locations thanks to the fact that they are not standing stationary upon the theologeion, but are carried upon the mēchanē, an object with a unique ability to straddle on- and off-stage spaces, performing not just divine arrival, but the divine arriving.Footnote ²¹

*

Bacchae revolves around encountering the god Dionysus, and the consequences of the misrecognition of divine presence. While Helen uses the mēchanē as the only epistemologically legitimate mode of divine presence, Bacchae presents it as just one more way that the Dionysiac miracle works. The final epiphany upon the mēchanē should be seen not as a mere theatrical convention tacked on to the end of the play to enact divine retribution, but rather as an active part of this palimpsestic exploration of Dionysiac epiphany.

Interpreting sacred presence relies on correctly identifying a divine encounter in the first instance. In other words, knowing the god and understanding what an epiphany might mean for the viewer-worshipper relies first on seeing the god for what she or he is.Footnote ²² Bacchae’s insistence on vision has been noted by various scholars.Footnote ²³ While, for example, Justina Gregory argues that the motif works to explore ‘the nature, varieties, and scope of human perception in the play’,Footnote ²⁴ I focus on how this same motif of seeing is used to comment on the nature of Dionysiac epiphanic encounter in order to then fit the mēchanē into the broader picture. The issue of seeing in the Bacchae is not as simple as the binary posited by Gregory, between secular and religious points of view.Footnote ²⁵ Even within the religious ‘view’, the Bacchae explores the many manifestations that Dionysus can and does adopt, as well as the ways that humans interact in creating, viewing, and understanding these epiphanic forms. While tragedy as a genre explores human–divine relations, and mechanisms for bridging the mortal and supernatural realms in an abstract sense, Bacchae is deeply rooted in Dionysiac cult and Dionysiac epiphany.Footnote ²⁶ Euripides explores through this play what it means to see, and thus to encounter, not just any god, but specifically the god Dionysus.

To do this, Bacchae presents us with waves of Dionysiac epiphany which work cumulatively towards the climactic apparition on the mēchanē at the end of the play.Footnote ²⁷ To see how this progression works to present various facets of the god’s presence, it serves us well to follow the text in order. Dionysus opens the tragedy himself, taking the stage alone to deliver the prologue.Footnote ²⁸ Discord between theatrics and dialogue, and between knowing and seeing, are established even before the first words of the play are uttered. Either the actor’s costume marks him out as a god in some wayFootnote ²⁹ intentionally jarring against Dionysus’ opening words (and with the expectations of the Euripidean divine prologue) which situate him concretely in Thebes and not far-off Olympus;Footnote ³⁰ or the actor appears dressed as a mortal priming the audience for a human prologue in the tradition of IT or Electra, in which case viewers are unsettled by the immediate revelation that this is in fact a god in disguise. In his identification, Dionysus presents himself as the son of Zeus and Semele.Footnote ³¹ The origin myth evoked through this specific choice of genealogy alludes blatantly to the power of epiphany since Semele, Dionysus’ mortal mother, died after requesting that Zeus appear to her in his true form.Footnote ³² The tomb of Semele still smoking from Zeus’ thunderbolt is apparently present in the orchestra – a potent visual reminder of the story.Footnote ³³ Ironically, the Bacchae goes on to make a far clearer statement about the perils of failing to see and to recognise the divine than it does about the potential dangers of seeing the divine.Footnote ³⁴ From the very outset, then, and preceding all action in the play, the first few lines and the mythic background to the plot put the effects of divine epiphany and the issues of divine form front and centre.

The interplay between visual and verbal cues allowing the audience to identify the character they see as Dionysus creates a benchmark for how characters in the play should subsequently respond to the sight of the stranger, and how they should receive his rites. The disguised Dionysus recounts how he has traversed many parts of Asia establishing his rites ‘so as to be a visible god for mankind’ (ἵν’ εἴην ἐμφανὴς δαίμων βροτοῖς).Footnote ³⁵ The connectedness of ritual and epiphany is clear, alerting the audience to the fact that Dionysiac rites are what enable worshippers to encounter their god in a deeply personal way. Alongside dance, music, prayers, and libation, the deity also marks out the importance of ritual objects (fawn skins, thyrsoi) to bring about the religiously induced change of state that happened to worshippers during mystic initiation.Footnote ³⁶ The parodos then reinforces this visually.Footnote ³⁷ As has been noted, the chorus’ entry would have been theatrically impactful as the actors were equipped with many cultic accoutrements referred to in their song: thyrsoi, ivy crowns, snakes, branches, fawn skins, wool, and, critically, tympana.Footnote ³⁸ Hitting their drums and tossing their bodies, the chorus sing about the blessed state of those who truly know the god Dionysus. As Helene Foley observes, both Dionysus in the prologue and the chorus in the parodos place extraordinary emphasis on presenting the god’s divine status through non-verbal means: spectacle, costume, and sound.Footnote ³⁹ Building on this observation, we can note that there is, in the parodos, specific emphasis on the aetiology of Bacchic rites and on the origins of objects used to connect with the divine. The chorus give us a sense of how both elements have long histories during which time they were first invented, then created and passed on to man. The tympanon, in particular, is singled out and the chorus explain that it was invented by the Korybantes, then combined with the Phrygian pipes and given to Rhea, from whom it was eventually passed to the satyrs and arrived in the hands of the maenads.Footnote ⁴⁰ The notion that the objects and rites – or, as later referred to generally, the technai of the godFootnote ⁴¹ – are what allow divine encounter and manufacture divine presence is pervasive throughout the play. The mēchanē is one more tool, one more application of technē, which facilitates Bacchic contact, and we shall see why it is particularly pertinent to Dionysus.

The first epiphanic form of Dionysus presented in the play is as a mortal. The audience observe this form of the divine themselves in the prologue, and then through the eyes of Pentheus in the first episode. Despite noting that the Stranger has fragrant hair and light-coloured locks, is wine-coloured in the face, and has the graces of Aphrodite in his eyesFootnote ⁴² – telling signs in the tradition of the god’s Homeric Hymn that he is dealing with DionysusFootnote ⁴³ – the foolish theomach fails to recognise the divine nature of Dionysus and the legitimacy of the rites performed in his honour. Instead, he orders the Stranger to be captured and brought to him in chains in order to kill him.Footnote ⁴⁴ Successful in his capture of this ‘beast’, a servant appears with a calm Dionysus whose hands have been bound.Footnote ⁴⁵ We will learn later, during a crucial scene of epiphanic revelation, that this proved useless as he was miraculously able to free himself.Footnote ⁴⁶ More immediately we hear that attempts similarly to restrain and imprison the maenads failed as ‘the chains were loosed from their feet of their own accord, and keys opened doors with no mortal hand to turn them.’ (αὐτόματα δ᾿ αὐταῖς δεσμὰ διελύθη ποδῶν κλῇδές τ᾿ ἀνῆκαν θύρετρ᾿ ἄνευ θνητῆς χερός.).Footnote ⁴⁷ Spontaneous animation of the inanimate is a clear mark of divine involvement. As noted by Eric Csapo, there is something particularly Dionysian about spontaneous movement and spontaneity more broadly.Footnote ⁴⁸ Dionysus is renowned, especially following prominent structuralist readings of the Bacchae, for his ability to confuse binaries: human/beast, man/woman, restraint/frenzy, domestic/periphery, reality/illusion, to give some examples.Footnote ⁴⁹ Spontaneity or automation is another avenue for the god’s influence to manifest itself as the division between animate and inanimate becomes mutable under Dionysian auspices. This is no doubt why the two examples of automata given in Hero of Alexandria’s treatise on the topic relate to Dionysus: one is an automated shrine to the god, the other an automated miniature theatre.Footnote ⁵⁰ Dionysus’ connection with spontaneous movement and automation is already present in the god’s Homeric Hymn. Put in a similar position to Pentheus, a group of Tyrrhenian pirates fail to recognise the god and attempt, to no avail, to bind the god; the shackles fall away mysteriously: ‘And they meant to bind him in grievous bonds; but the bonds would not contain him, the osiers fell clear away from his hands and feet’ (καὶ δεσμοῖς ἔθελον δεῖν ἀργαλέοισιν / τὸν δ᾿ οὐκ ἴσχανε δεσμά, λύγοι δ᾿ ἀπὸ τηλόσ᾿ ἔπιπτον / χειρῶν ἠδὲ ποδῶ).Footnote ⁵¹

Autonomous movement is also one of the telling signs of Dionysus’ presence in the ‘palace miracle’Footnote ⁵² – the most multilayered of Dionysus’ Bacchae epiphanies, possibly the most visually arresting scene in the play, and certainly the most hotly contested.Footnote ⁵³ What is perceived as unnatural trembling of the man-made structureFootnote ⁵⁴ is given an underlying meteorological force as Dionysus impels cooperation from an earthquake personified.Footnote ⁵⁵ The booming voice of the unseen god heard from within also commands a fire to light up spontaneously at the tomb of Semele accompanied by a thunderbolt.Footnote ⁵⁶ It is impossible to know what happened on the ancient stage and to what extent each of these elements were visually represented.Footnote ⁵⁷ Even if entirely contained to the imagination, this was a flaunting of Dionysiac divine potential and of what it represents in the human realm. Dionysus’ presence in this scene is at once auditory, intangible, and amorphous as well as deeply materialised, palpable through meteorological effects, and, in one clever Euripidean move, acting autonomously through man-made objects on multiple levels. The miraculously loosening fetters are props on stage, fetters in the tragedy and symbols of freedom; the palace is the physical skēnē structure, the palace of Theban ruling family, and the political order the palace represents.Footnote ⁵⁸

Linked to Dionysus’ ability to provoke spontaneous movement in the man-made world is his propensity for creating plenitude in the natural world. Already alluded to in first choral ode,Footnote ⁵⁹ the motif of natural abundance is then fully revealed in the first messenger speech through reference to the wondrous appearance of springs of water, wine, milk, and honey.Footnote ⁶⁰ Again, this is a theme introduced at least as early as the Homeric Hymn where Dionysus makes wine gush forth and vines, ivy, grapes, and berries grow around the ship.Footnote ⁶¹ Natural plenitude and artificial automation – what we might term the general ‘vibrancy’ of Dionysiac matter to use Jane Bennett’s adjectiveFootnote ⁶² – are integral and unique to Dionysiac epiphany and the motif will take its most spectacular form in the use of the mēchanē at the end of the play. Essential to the use of the mēchanē in Bacchae is the fact that it is clearly a man-made mechanism, and the epiphanic value thus comes from seeing its component parts move of their own accord – the play having conditioned the viewer to understand that this aligns with Dionysus’ influence – to allow the god to reveal himself in a final, decisive form. While other tragedies use the mēchanē to make statements about theology and epiphany in general, Bacchae harnesses the machine’s defining features to make statements very specific to Dionysiac epiphany, which is in turn part of a broader exploration within the play of the ways that Dionysus’ divine aura can be experienced and recognised.

When Pentheus is persuaded by Dionysus to disguise himself as a maenad to infiltrate their revelry, it becomes apparent as soon as the king comes out in full cultic gear that the transformation involved more than just a new costume. The inspired state of maenadism that Pentheus now literally and symbolically wears – and which we saw the chorus introduce so powerfully in the parodos – has utterly entranced the king to the point of modifying his vision:Footnote ⁶³

To make sense of this part of the play, scholars have pointed to Dionysus’ link to wine and attribute Pentheus’ double vision to a state of intoxication. Yet Richard Seaford has also suggested that the sense of this passage relies on understanding the allusion to the role of the mirror in Dionysiac mystery cult.Footnote ⁶⁵ Evidence from catoptric manuals supports Seaford’s position. Catoptric texts attest to the use of mirrors for epiphanic purposes and one arrangement described, for example, makes specific reference to distorting human features and projecting bulls’ heads.Footnote ⁶⁶ Given this evidence, it is reasonable to see Pentheus’ outburst here as a reference to the manufacture of a catoptrically manipulated epiphany used to make Dionysus appear as a bull.

The Bacchae began with Dionysus disguising himself in human form to appear in the mortal realm. Seeing and acknowledging the human Stranger as the god Dionysus is thus established as a premise for the play. As the tragedy progresses, the vocabulary of Dionysiac epiphany in enriched by having him enact a variety of miracles centred around spontaneity and plenitude to mark his presence in different ways. In the course of these manifestations, the chorus become increasingly eager to see the god in his most godlike form, and by the fourth stasimon, there is a direct appeal for Dionysus to appear before them, precisely alluding to the many shapes that he might take:

It is plausible that here too there is an allusion to catoptric epiphany since we know that fashioning mirrors to produce many-headed figures was a favourite trick of catoptric manuals.Footnote ⁶⁸ The mēchanē is the final dramatic answer to the chorus’ appeal to the god to reveal himself where the man-made machine allows Dionysus, at last, to appear as unmistakably divine. The audience witness the mechanics of the machine working to present to them, as well as to Cadmus and Agave, the god whom we have seen enacting spontaneous movement of the man-made world. At last, the smiling mask of ambiguous personality when lifted up of its own accord on the mēchanē takes on an unmistakable divine character to all who witness it.Footnote ⁶⁹

The first lines of Dionysus’ mechanical entry are unfortunately lost in an extensive lacuna.Footnote ⁷⁰ The text picks up again with the god’s prophecies to Cadmus on how the rest of the old man’s life will play out.Footnote ⁷¹ Despite the lack of verbal cue securely placing Dionysus on the machine at this point in the play, the scholarly consensus is that the god entered for his final speech on the mēchanē.Footnote ⁷² Aside from his predictions for the future, Dionysus’ mechanical arrival allows him to offer strong reproaches to Cadmus and Agave for being too late in their eventual understanding of the god that was before them.Footnote ⁷³ Visually, however, Dionysus on the mēchanē does far more than this. Given the variety of epiphanic forms that have been rehearsed over the course of the play, Dionysus appearing in a way that gave room for no doubt about his divinity finally allows divine retribution to be enacted and the play to come to a close. Though at this point, the audience has lost their superior epistemological position over the characters in the play in recognising the god,Footnote ⁷⁴ the actor wearing a mask pretending to be Dionysus pretending to be a human is now indisputably divine.Footnote ⁷⁵ If the mask facilitates the actor becoming the god, the mēchanē facilitates the (actor masked as a) god disguised as a mortal to (re)assert his divine status. Bacchae’s interest for the study of mechanical epiphany lies precisely in the way that the divine has taken so many forms throughout the course of the tragedy.Footnote ⁷⁶ The epiphanies have expanded to occupy a great amount of the theatrical space: the orchestra floor, the auditory field, the skēnē, and now the semantically loaded, disconnected bubble of theatrical space which the mechanics of the crane are uniquely able to create. As in the case of Helen, a reading of the Bacchae that integrates the theological value of the mechanical epiphany renders the formulaic choral exodus less banal, instead allowing Bacchae to close with one last final nod towards the many morphai of the divine.Footnote ⁷⁷

As well as the waves of epiphany within the play, the context of the Great Dionysia suspended layers of Dionysiac epiphany over the spectators’ viewing experience of the play too.Footnote ⁷⁸ As we have seen, Bacchae revolves around recognising divine manifestations of Dionysus – the most theatrical of which the god orchestrates through harnessing the unique spectacle offered by the mēchanē to authenticate divine epiphany – and the dangers that failing to recognise the god might provoke. This plot is embedded within a festival whose ultimate framework is also an epiphanic experience of Dionysus, based around commemorating the deity’s first appearance to the Athenians. On that initial instance, the god was not smoothly integrated into the city at all. Rather, failing to properly venerate the deity, all Athenian men were afflicted with a terrible, incurable disease on their genitals. The cure, an oracle pronounced, was to hold the god in all reverence, notably by publicly constructing and displaying phalloi in honour of the god.Footnote ⁷⁹ The aetiological myth of the Great Dionysia serves as a reminder that recognition of Dionysus is always a loaded moment which can end happily or tragically.Footnote ⁸⁰ The festival itself re-enacts precisely this anxiety, as well as simultaneously displaying its solution. Bacchae, then, comments not just on the genre of tragedy, as various successful meta-tragic readings of the play have shown,Footnote ⁸¹ but also on the context in which it is performed, the context within which the audience presently sat and watched the dramatic performances, (the statue of) Dionysus himself sitting among them.

Mēchanē and Space: Euripides’ Heracles and Sophocles’ Philoctetes

Euripides’ Heracles questions the notion of divine justice and presents competing wishes of individual gods upon the human world. The mēchanē plays a critical role in this exploration thanks to its ability to create an isolated bubble of disconnected space between unseen Olympus and the city on stage (Thebes), offering a unique dramatic location for theologising and deferring the moment of divine intrusion. The machine permits two supernatural figures – Iris and Lyssa – to hover unattached for the duration of a heated exchange regarding the appropriateness of an intervention on Hera’s behalf. The audience are privy to divine deliberation of which the characters below remain unaware. The eventual departures of the goddesses in different directions offer a striking visual message on the divided will of the gods and the repercussions in the human realm.

Euripides’ Heracles presents in two very clear halves. The play opens with the protagonist’s family – his mortal father, Amphitryon, his wife, Megara, and his three sons – sitting as suppliants at the altar of Zeus Soter waiting for Heracles to return from his final labour in Hades to rescue them from their plight. As it seems increasingly unlikely that the hero will return, and given the threat of death upon them by the usurper Lycus, they decide instead to take their own lives.Footnote ⁸² Heracles does, in fact, return in time to save his family and exact vengeance on Lycus. The king’s death is over quickly,Footnote ⁸³ and not presented in a very dramatic fashion, but is necessary to conclude the first half of the action and to usher in the second half of the play with its new themes, far more pertinent to the discussion at hand.

There follows the third stasimonFootnote ⁸⁴ and then the abrupt epiphany of Lyssa and Iris. To G. W. Bond, it is uncertain whether the deities were on the mēchanē or on the theologeion on the roof.Footnote ⁸⁵ His hesitation may stem from Oliver Taplin’s suggestion that the use of the roof would have allowed Lyssa and Iris to enter ‘more abruptly’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Mastronarde, on the other hand, in his investigation of the use of the mēchanē in Attic drama, sees the Heracles as one of the plays which offers clear verbal cues for the use of the machine.Footnote ⁸⁷ He points out that it is nonsensical for the two deities to appear on the roof by a stair or ladder from behind the skēnē and then for them to depart the same way again since the text makes very clear that in their exits, one goddess is raised aloft (pedairous’) while the other descends (dysomesth’).Footnote ⁸⁸ The mēchanē seems, then, to be the most logical choice in terms of stagecraft, and the ensuing discussion centred around the appropriateness of the crane to the visual epiphany might further substantiate Mastronarde’s position. In terms of visual symbolism too, the rising and arcing motion of the mēchanē suited the cosmic nature of Iris as the rainbow, as it suited the twin stars, the Dioscuri, as well.

Heracles’ unusual mid-play ex machina epiphany was no doubt intended to be highly dramatic. The internal audience, the chorus, are terrified by the apparition (phasma) visible above the house.Footnote ⁸⁹ The chorus’ panic and feeble attempts to run away are interrupted by Iris’ address. She identifies herself and Lyssa, with whom she appears, and explains that they do not intend to hurt the city, but a single man. Lyssa is referred to as servant (latris) to the gods; this is not, as some have read it, a term of derision, but rather places respectful emphasis on the performance of service she owes to higher divine beings.Footnote ⁹⁰ Indeed, Iris as a messenger of the gods is herself a kind of medium making the assemblage of the actor playing the divine being placed the mēchanē a strikingly clear example of the deus ex machina working through the logic of hypermediacy.Footnote ⁹¹ The emphasis on Iris as channel will be necessary given that her personal opinion on what is to follow is at odds with those of Iris and Hera, and she is thus forced to act in a way that is inconsistent with her personal beliefs. She acts here as an archetypal medium effacing herself in the service of those whose will she communicates, akin to the functioning of the crane itself.

Iris explains that the man they are after is Heracles, whom she and Hera are finally free to attack since he has finished his labours. As with the Dioscuri in the Helen, who would have interfered earlier had they not been overruled by fate and the other gods, Heracles again expresses that had Heracles not been under Zeus’ divine protection the divine intervention would have come sooner.Footnote ⁹² This notion of delayed interference creates delimitations in the ‘rules’ of epiphany according to broader power structures in the supernatural realm. The individual whims of deities are, it seems, placed in a hierarchy, though this is not, as we are about to see, in order to protect mortals by any means. This detail tells us more about how Greek divinities are perceived to interact among themselves than it does about the relations of the Greek gods to their worshippers, despite the repercussions being played out in the mortal realm.

Iris also explains that Lyssa is due to inflict a child-killing frenzy onto Heracles as punishment for being the son of Zeus by another woman. According to Hera and Iris, if Heracles is not punished, the gods will be of no consequence (oudamou) and mortals will instead be great (megala).Footnote ⁹³ Superficially, Iris’ arguments appear to be about divine justice and keeping a balanced cosmic order, yet we, as an audience, are very conscious that Heracles has in fact done nothing wrong.Footnote ⁹⁴ On the contrary, he is responsible for many praiseworthy actions on behalf of both humans and the gods, some of which we hear second-hand in the first stasimon, witness first-hand in the rescue of his family, and learn of again in Lyssa’s speech advising against Hera and Iris’ plan.Footnote ⁹⁵ The questionable nature of Iris’ statement is even clearer given the positive theodicy just expressed in the third stasimon. Faith in divine justice is a major theme of that choral song,Footnote ⁹⁶ which brings into far greater relief the contrast with divine plans in the mēchanē scene.Footnote ⁹⁷ Sourvinou-Inwood argues that the audience’s knowledge of the Heracles myth would have been activated to think of moments when the hero possibly acted hubristically and thus deserved his fate.Footnote ⁹⁸ But even Iris, on her own and on Hera’s behalf, fails to present such arguments, for had Heracles truly committed hybris then Hera would have been entitled to punish him. Instead, Heracles dramatises the discrepancy between what is just and the tragic actions that follow by the two deities presenting their opposing points of view in the hermetically sealed space created by the mēchanē.

In response to Lyssa’s praise of Heracles and word of warning, Iris snaps at Lyssa in agitated trochaic tetrameters not to try to correct Hera’s and her mēchanēmata.Footnote ⁹⁹ There must be a meta-theatrical pun intended here: attention is being drawn to the way in which the mechanical intervention into the plot at this point is precisely the machination that will bring about a reversal of fortune for the protagonist. The moment of divine epiphany is presented as a clear fork in the road, and Lyssa is trying to set Iris on the more desirable track (ἐς τὸ λῶιον ἐμβιβάζω σ’ ἴχνος).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This is made visually evident by the presence of two deities with conflicting ideas on the issue who, despite having used the same mode of entry, depart in distinct manners. The mēchanē allows for the arrival of the goddesses, deliberation of the situation before them, contemplation of multiple possible resolutions to the human conundrum. The metaphorical ichnos to be chosen is rendered very real when Lyssa, agreeing against her will to enact unjust madness on Heracles, sends Iris back up to Olympus on foot while she herself then sinks down invisibly (presumably first onto the roof and then down into the skēnē):Footnote ¹⁰¹

As a whole, the ex machina scene of Heracles dramatises divided divine will, which is why it would not have been appropriate for Hera herself to have been sent. A single deity epiphany would not have been able to illustrate the tensions of divine justice in the way that Iris and Lyssa do. In order to show this division in divine opinion, the mēchanē is employed to physically detach the goddesses from the setting of Thebes. The crane is used simultaneously to connect Olympus and Thebes as well as to create emphasis on the space between the two places. This speaks extraordinarily well to Aristotle’s slightly later idea of metaxy in sense perception where it is precisely distance that makes perception possible.Footnote ¹⁰³ While natural philosophers before him had stressed the importance of contact to explain sensation, Aristotle stressed heterogeneity between organ and medium. In the case of divine perception, it is rather unsurprising that a model of mediation that relies on distance and heterogeneity suits better since the entities to be bridged belong to completely separate ontological categories. The actual moment of divine epiphany in Heracles is quite literally suspended to emphasise the deliberations surrounding an epiphanic intervention that otherwise occur with mortal knowledge. The mēchanē is the ideal tool for the playwright to stage the ‘functionings’ of the epiphany which works as much in a literal sense – with the visible mechanics suspending Iris and Lyssa – as it does to represent symbolically the interior mechanisms of divine intervention which rely on the baunastic and human to transmit the ephemeral divine.

*

In Sophocles’ Philoctetes, Heracles intervenes ex machina at the very last minute to nudge the tragedy back onto the course of the familiar Greek myth and ensure the sack of Troy.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Overtaken by compassion for the crippled Philoctetes, Neoptolemus is about to disobey Odysseus and lead Philoctetes to his home in Oeta when Heracles appears in order to ensure that they head to Troy instead. This is one of the most consequential divine interventions in the corpus of extant tragedy in terms of plot, and in this sense it fits comfortably with the conventional use attributed to the machine by many scholars. In its structural function, Heracles’ entrance in Philoctetes can be compared with the deus ex machina in Euripides’ Orestes, for example, where Apollo’s entrance is similarly used to guarantee that events will conform with the traditional story. Using the mēchanē to bring about a previously determined resolution does not, however, render it empty of other meanings. In Orestes, the mēchanē not only redirects action, but also creates authoritative sacred space given that the tragedy has escalated to the point of having human characters act as divine agents from the rooftop orchestrating the events around them.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ I would like to suggest that the mēchanē in the Philoctetes also does more than alter the direction of the plot, and that Heracles’ epiphany works with other spatial explorations within the play to introduce the vertical plane in a way which uniquely connects the protagonist Philoctetes to the demigod Heracles.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The many myths surrounding the life of Philoctetes would have been familiar to an Athenian audience from archaic poetry as well as from various classical plays – including by Aeschylus and Euripides – which dealt with this tragic hero’s story.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The major innovation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, however, was recasting Lemnos as a completely barren, uninhabited island.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This, combined with the unusual choice to employ only one eisodos – leading to and from the ship – helped to characterise the stage space as uniquely inhospitable: a literal dead end.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The Lemnos of Sophocles’ Philoctetes was a place into which one would not want to venture deeper, and a place from which no one emerged, emphasising Philoctetes’ confinement and isolation. Add to this the fact that the story revolves around getting Philoctetes (and Heracles’ bow) off the island, and we appreciate how the audience are encouraged throughout the play to imagine other spaces which are not presented before them, but to which the plot connects them. Repeated references are made to Neoptolemus’ home in Skyros, for example, as well as to Philoctetes’ home in Oeta.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Above all, it is Troy that is mentioned without respite from the beginning to the end of the play.Footnote ¹¹¹ Philoctetes generally exploits the tensions between seen and unseen spaces, and Heracles’ mechanical epiphany again points laterally to the very same imagined spaces of Troy and OetaFootnote ¹¹² not simply for the sake of repetition, but to contrast with the unseen home of the gods from which he comes, which introduces the vertical axis into the spatial dynamics of the tragedy.Footnote ¹¹³ Troy is presented as a place that will finally offer Philoctetes relief from his diseased leg, and as a city that will fall to the Greeks when Heracles’ bow kills Paris. The spoils of this victory will lead Philoctetes back to his home town of Oeta at last.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The constant references to Oeta in Philoctetes should be read not merely as the desperate calls of a crippled protagonist yearning for home, but also as a way to draw links between the mortal Philoctetes and the divine Heracles. The mythological pasts of the two characters are intimately connected through location since Philoctetes’ home was the site of Heracles’ last labour and death.Footnote ¹¹⁵

If their pasts are connected through horizontal space, the futures of the two heroes are connected by vertical space, and Heracles on the mēchanē is able not just to allude to or introduce this new axis into the plot, but to create it before the eyes of the audience as a final manoeuvre in the play’s exploration of space.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Though all ex machina interventions introduce the vertical axis and tend to have an element of prophecy, Heracles’ epiphany is different in that he uses his own life as mimetic exemplum for how Philoctetes’ will end. The life of Heracles, which passed through labours to eternal glory, is the predicted pattern of Philoctetes’ life:

Linked through labours (ponoi), the future apparently holds a life of great renown (euklea bion) for Philoctetes just as it has delivered eternal glory (athanaton aretēn) to Heracles.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In the ordinary myths surrounding Philoctetes’ life, this was not what followed for that hero,Footnote ¹¹⁹ but it was perhaps picked up as a theme in Sophocles’ lost Philoctetes at Troy.Footnote ¹²⁰

Regardless of what the future held for Philoctetes, Heracles’ claims in the deus ex machina scene rely on his previous apotheosis. Heracles’ new-found divine status has already been referred to at various points in the play alongside Philoctetes’ help in achieving it.Footnote ¹²¹ Athanaton aretēn in the passage just cited can also mean ‘the glory of immortality’ where the double meaning works with the ambivalence of Heracles’ divine status. Yet part of the point here must surely be that Heracles’ apotheosis is being presented as a ‘technological’ transformation of sorts which the mēchanē facilitates. The mechanical epiphany reinforces the attainment of apotheosis visually, and a touch meta-theatrically: [having suffered and endured this many labours] I achieved eternal glory/the glory of immortality, as you can see. Since Heracles’ divine status has been achieved, and we now know that Philoctetes’ projected future involves his gaining eternal glory as well, the mēchanē works to connect the present with the future, and Heracles with Philoctetes, along the vertical plane so that Heracles is the future of Philoctetes. Heracles makes reference to this axis immediately upon his descent, stating he has come from his home in heaven for Philoctetes’ sake (τὴν σὴν δ᾿ ἥκω χάριν οὐρανίας / ἕδρας προλιπών).Footnote ¹²² The reference to this distant, unseen space puts the action into a broader cosmological context quite suddenly. Yet the epiphany of Heracles on the mēchanē does not just manifest the god before the eyes of Philoctetes, it also works as a vision in which he sees himself reflected: a novel Sophoclean touch to the notion of divine epiphany.

There is every chance that the connection between Heracles and Philoctetes was theatrically represented too, perhaps by mimicry of gesture or position, or similarities in mask design or costuming. Certainly, the playwright exploited the ability of the mēchanē to create an unattached sacred space which Philoctetes, it is implied, will eventually have a share of, in one form or another. It would make far less sense if Heracles were making such claims simply on the skēnē roof. It is not often in tragedy that characters in the play are deemed to be able to access the vertical plane (Medea is another interesting case treated later in this chapter)Footnote ¹²³ and this choice serves at least in part to alert us to complexities of the integration of deified heroes within the divine–human paradigm of ancient Greek religion. Throughout the play, Philoctetes’ movements were restricted by disease and, as we have seen, the stage space intentionally confined. Unexpectedly, the mechanical epiphany opens a hitherto unknown axis and Olympus is the first entirely new space in the tragedy which will be accessible to Philoctetes. This works directly thanks to the parallels drawn with Heracles in the deus ex machina scene. Further, the obvious mechanics of the crane serve to point to a new dimension of space which the tragedy has so far excluded from its explorations along the horizontal axis.

As pointed out by Charles Segal, given his condition and the nature of the island of Lemnos, Philoctetes relies on various technēmata for survival.Footnote ¹²⁴ The Odysseus of Sophocles’ Philoctetes is the polymēchanos par excellence who, against Neoptolemus’ wishes, wants to use technē kakē to get Philoctetes’ bow.Footnote ¹²⁵ It is precisely the tension between technē and bia as appropriate ways to obtain their end goal that Neoptolemus and Odysseus cannot agree on.Footnote ¹²⁶ Is there, then, some dramatic irony in the mēchanē – a most ingenious example of technē whose status as such is precisely flagged by the visible mechanics – being the ultimate solution to getting Philoctetes to acquiesce in taking the bow to Troy? Such a reading could support the view of scholars who, emphasising the doubling of the actor, see Heracles as Odysseus’ final cunning trick.Footnote ¹²⁷ Alternatively, and more convincingly in my opinion, one could see this as a comment on divine technē as the ultimate tool: more ingenious than any mortal technē, stronger than any human bia, and more persuasive than any logos given that what Heracles offers from the mēchanē is authoritative muthos.Footnote ¹²⁸

Mēchanē and Ontology: Euripides’ Orestes and Medea

Euripides’ Orestes picks up where his Electra would have finished had it not been for the mechanical intervention of the Dioscuri in the latter play.Footnote ¹²⁹ Lacking the advice given by Castor and Pollux, Orestes has not fled to Athens to clutch the bretas of Athena and purify himself and has not been acquitted for his actions. The opening of Orestes stages a frightful alternative reality: Orestes is being tortured by visions of the FuriesFootnote ¹³⁰ and the citizens of Argos will soon vote that he and his sister be stoned to death as punishment for matricide.Footnote ¹³¹ The siblings are allowed instead to take their own lives, and they plan, with their loyal friend Pylades, to take Helen down with them, until Electra comes up with a plot twist. She suggests holding Hermione hostage to force Menelaus to change the vote of the people, allowing Orestes and herself to go free. Having failed to kill Helen, who was whisked away by the gods at the crucial moment, Pylades and Electra armed with torches, and Orestes with a knife to Hermione’s throat, then appear above the house.Footnote ¹³² Finally, however, Orestes is upstaged by Apollo and Helen’s entrance on the mēchanē, which creates for the audience a spectacular and clearly stratified tableau of gods and humans on which to end.Footnote ¹³³

When the action of the Orestes had escalated to such a level that neither the orchestra nor the skēnē roof sufficed to contain it any longer, the mēchanē offered the playwright a space superior to the roof in quality and in height in order to demarcate the divine. This reinforces the preceding discussion concerning how the mēchanē’s unique spatial and material characteristics proved theologically and dramatically useful. As with the Helen and the Medea, the mēchanē in the Orestes serves to differentiate who is god and who is human and thus the knowledge and actions appropriate to each category. The ex machina epiphany of the Orestes does not simply contrast divine knowledge and human ignorance, however, but also stages the issue of humans simulating divine epiphany, an issue pertinent both within the play and, more broadly, within contemporary Greek religion.

That Orestes is adopting divine posturing through his intervention on the roof is evident not just from his elevated position, but also by the stopping action of his initial utterance, and by his general attempts at concluding the drama.Footnote ¹³⁴ More subtly, however, Helen’s miraculous vanishing earlier in the play becomes vital to understanding the eventual resolution between Orestes’ simulated epiphany and the true, mechanical, epiphanic form. Helen’s fate is the subject of the heated exchange between Orestes from the roof and Menelaus below. It allows a hierarchised discrepancy of knowledge to be set up between Menelaus and Orestes, mimicking the distance between divine knowledge and mortal ignorance so typical to deus ex machina scenes (including this one later). Menelaus is incorrectly convinced that Helen has been killed by Orestes; Orestes knows that this is not the case. The importance of Helen’s fate in distinguishing the two levels of human and pseudo-divine knowledge helps to explain her prominence in Apollo’s ex machina speech when, finally, a third and conclusive solution is put forth by Apollo. The three theories concerning Helen speak directly to the three visual ontologies: Menelaus who, from the ground, thinks Helen is dead;Footnote ¹³⁵ Orestes acting as god from the skēnē roof who knows he did not manage to kill Helen, and thinks she has inexplicably vanished;Footnote ¹³⁶ the mēchanē and Apollo who, standing beside Helen herself, explains that she has been divinely extricated from the mortal world in order for a cult to be set up in her honour.Footnote ¹³⁷

While the play ultimately discredits Orestes’ simulated epiphany, it also entertains the notion enough to create three, and not two, levels of knowledge. At first his arrival might seem legitimate, halting the action as an ex machina deity does,Footnote ¹³⁸ but the physical threats – to smash Menelaus over the head with a stone, for exampleFootnote ¹³⁹ – promptly reveal the failure of his simulation. The fact that Orestes stands with a knife at the throat of his future bride further dismantles any pretence at divine omniscience.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Questioning divine intervention in the human realm is pertinent to the plot of the play as a whole, most of all as it relates to Apollo’s role in Orestes’ matricide.Footnote ¹⁴¹ When the issue is finally resolved in the ex machina scene, Orestes breathes a sigh of relief in the realisation that Apollo is not a pseudomantis and that his prophecies have not come from some avenging spirit (alastōr).Footnote ¹⁴²

Ultimately, Orestes’ interference is convincing because he looks just like (an actor playing) a god might look. In other words, Orestes’ simulated epiphany works because Greek gods were often anthropomorphic. The danger in such a system is, as we saw in Helen and Bacchae, misidentifying divine presence, or, worse and as dramatised here, falsifying divine presence.Footnote ¹⁴³ As in the case of the Dioscuri in Helen, in Orestes the mechanical is the authentic epiphany and the mechanics are what authenticate the epiphany, differentiating Orestes from Apollo. The mēchanē and the human body of the masked actor become one ontological unit in an ex machina epiphany, giving a different visual quality to the anthropomorphised divine appearance, a visual quality which Orestes lacks. One cannot ignore the meta-theatrical dimension of all of this since, at the end of the day, Apollo too remains an actor ‘playing god’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Simulated epiphanies would have fitted comfortably within the religious expectations of the audience. Enacted epiphanies are attested from the Bronze Age until the time of Pausanias, at least. The best-known case is Phye’s false epiphany as Athena, accompanying Peisistratus’ triumphant return to power at Athens in 556/5 BCE.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ There, Herodotus’ incredulity in relating the story is key, alerting us to the fact that performed epiphanies did provoke some ambivalence in Greek culture. Equally, the Athenians are said to have accepted the spectacle entirely. As noted by scholars, enacted epiphanies such as Phye’s rely on the common practice of ritual re-enactment undertaken by priestly personnel.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The very same plurality of viewing and of reconciling of ontologies that underscored simulated epiphanies was at stake in theatrical epiphanies. Greek worshippers were evidently comfortable with resolving these modes of viewing. In staging this simulated epiphany beside (or below, as it were) the genuine epiphany, Orestes is doing in theatrical terms what we find on contemporary visual evidence such as votive reliefs and vases which, as has been increasingly acknowledged, depict in complex ways the concerns surrounding humans, gods, their interaction, and their depiction.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ By virtue of the complexity that the plot affords the visual scenario, Orestes explores the authenticity of anthropomorphic divine presence and what it means to be divine. In such an exploration, the object of the mēchanē becomes a vital marker of genuine divine presence, used to tease out the ontologies of gods, of humans, of actors.

*

Euripides’ Medea staged in 431 BCE is one of the earliest plays in which the use of the mēchanē can be securely attested.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ We must remember, however, that though Medea is an early play in the extant corpus, Euripides had already been competing in dramatic performances for twenty-four years by the time he staged this tragedy, and that there is every chance that audiences were already familiar with the deus ex machina when they saw this play.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Based on later uses of the machine in Euripidean tragedy, scholars stress that the Medea in many ways subverts expectations and thus relies on the audience understanding its more ‘orthodox’ uses. Although one of the aims of this part of the book is to challenge the notion of orthodoxy when it comes to the use of the mēchanē, there is still some value in delaying the discussion of this play until last, so as both to understand better the arguments of past scholars, and to bring elements into question with the support of the previous case studies.

The mechanical appearance of Medea on the crane at the very end of the play allows her to escape from Corinth to Athens after having committed the atrocious murders of her children and Jason’s bride-to-be. Euripides’ use of the mēchanē in Medea is unique, most strikingly because it is the only extant tragedy that puts a human character on the crane. This fact, combined with its prominence in the Aristotelian discussion, has meant that this deus ex machina scene has received more detailed attention than others. Scholars have overwhelmingly argued that Medea’s placement on the machine allowed her as a human agent to perform the ‘normal’ functions of a deus ex machinaFootnote ¹⁵⁰ – wrapping up the plot, explaining the aetiology of cult, predicting the future of the characters, etcetera.Footnote ¹⁵¹ As this discussion has tried to show, however, the mēchanē did more than simply fulfil functional roles. Further, there are various instances in the extant corpus of tragedy when characters fulfil these ‘normal’ functions of the deus without being on the mēchanē. In the Heraclidae, for example, Eurystheus before his death gives instructions for his burial, reveals a Delphic oracle which gives his buried corpse protective powers for Athens in future wars, and forbids a cult of his grave.Footnote ¹⁵² In the Hecuba Polymestor prophesies the transformation of Hecuba and the deaths of Agamemnon and Cassandra.Footnote ¹⁵³ In the Heracles, Theseus is introduced late in the play to help to bring the plot to a close, and the last part of Theseus’ closing speech to Heracles acts in many ways as the deus ex machina does in other plays: Theseus tells Heracles to follow him to Athens to be cleansed of the killings and to receive a portion of his friend’s wealth, and goes on to explain the aetiology of the cult of Heracles in Athens.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The formal structural features which scholars typically attribute to the deus ex machina do not need the mechanical, and the inclusion of these elements in the exodus of the Medea therefore cannot account for why Medea needs to be ‘on high’.

Scholars have also argued that, since the mēchanē was a location otherwise reserved for deities, the use of the machine was intended to endow upon Medea some sort of divine or at least ‘quasi-divine’ status, allowing her to become a deus.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ This reading of the use of the mēchanē allows scholars to maintain various consequent views: that Medea visually symbolises the moral chaos and disintegration of all normal values which the play as a whole produces; that the escape demonstrates the complicity of divinity (and particularly Zeus) in Medea’s revenge; that Medea is divine retribution incarnate, punishing Jason’s betrayal of oaths taken in the name of gods; that Medea is a vengeful individual who has lost her humanity by her cruel action against her own offspring.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

While it is conceivable that ancient tragedians used the mēchanē for apotheosis scenes, the extant corpus contains no such instances. Closer inspection, as noted by Bernard Knox, reveals a preference for not showing apotheosis scenes on stage.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Peleus in the Andromache is told that he will become a theos, and is given a rendezvous for this to happen, but the actual event does not take place on stage.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Helen at the end of her eponymous play is given a similar assurance by the Dioscuri but, again, it does not occur on stage.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ In Philoctetes, as we have seen, Heracles’ prior apotheosis is an implied model for Philoctetes’ future, which will, in fact, never eventuate, on stage or otherwise. The closest to an onstage apotheosis is Helen in Orestes when she appears with Apollo during the deus ex machina scene on her way to rejoin Castor and Pollux.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ She is entirely silent in this scene, however (a fact which itself casts some doubt over her appearance on the mēchanē at all), and though the epiphany does discuss Helen’s future divine status, Apollo is overwhelmingly concerned with Orestes’ fate following the matricide. While this does not strictly rule out the possibility that Euripides pioneered the mēchanē for apotheosis in Medea, there are, I think, more compelling readings.

Maurice Cunningham, in an early article, offers a sophisticated interpretation of Medea’s ex machina scene, following a generally laudable methodology which places emphasis on sight as the main conveyer of meaning in ancient drama. Further, he is nuanced in what he means when he says that putting Medea on the mēchanē makes her a theos, noting that this does not, contrary to our modern religious assumptions, necessarily suggest the idea of good but rather of overwhelming power without responsibility.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Most importantly, Cunningham’s argument is that Medea has suffered a loss of humanity but, critically, she has not been fortunate enough to become a goddess. Cunningham rightly argues that Euripides offers an image of the woman converted into ‘something of the awful, implacable, inhuman character of a theos’, but that this remains a visual metaphor and that the play ultimately seeks to show that Medea has not truly become divine.Footnote ¹⁶² She is, as we know, not off to Olympus but is going to go to Athens to live with Aegeus.Footnote ¹⁶³ I would add to Cunningham’s argument that Aegeus’ already minor role in the play would be completely redundant if Medea’s final appearance were a true apotheosis for in that case, she would not need a Greek city to offer her asylum after the murders.

Whether or not we accept the notion that Medea becomes divine at the end of the play, the mere fact that the question of her divinity can be debated ultimately depends on the mēchanē’s potential for creating alternative stage spaces and, foremost among these in Greek tragedy, are the frequent links made with Olympus. In a way, then, this ‘anomalous use’ in the Medea justifies our current exploration of the deus ex machina as an underappreciated form of epiphany, even if this does not mean that she was presented as a divine figure. On the contrary, the choice of staging brings into relief how, though she might try to act like one, Medea is not a goddess. Her imperatives do not have the same force as those of a divinity who appears on the mēchanē epiphanically, for example. While ‘Cease your toil!’ (παῦσαι πόνου τοῦδ᾿)Footnote ¹⁶⁴ is a familiar divine command from on high, the later imperatives ‘Go home and bury your wife!’ (στεῖχε πρὸς οἴκους καὶ θάπτ᾿ ἄλοχον)Footnote ¹⁶⁵ are more the embittered barks of a former lover than they are divine orders. If Orestes uses the roof space as his arena for ‘playing god’ in Orestes, Medea takes this notion even further in having Medea on the mēchanē try to do the same. Ultimately, however, the point to be made is that divinity is not merely about the space you inhabit or the commands that you hurl. The crane is the perfect tool for this kind of pointed commentary on the nature of human and divine thanks to its ability for suspension: it literally holds up the character to the audience for their contemplation in an area of theatrical space that is neither the human realm, visible below, nor the unseeable realm of Olympus. In the conflation of the mēchanē’s spatial and ontological functions we see, as in Heracles, the way that the ‘space between’ (or metaxy) is an integral feature of this object as a religious medium.

Medea’s humanity is not the only noteworthy element to this play’s use of the mēchanē. The deployment of the machine is also unique in that it subverts a clear expectation set up by Euripides; at just the moment when the audience expects Medea’s dead children to appear on the ekkyklēma, the corpses instead appear aloft with their murderer mother.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ This makes the use of the mēchanē in this play – especially the way that the crane extends scenic space and imbues it with meaning – an even stronger way of achieving theatrical surprise than in other plays. The audience, whose gaze is firmly directed down into the orchestra, waiting to see the corpses of the dead children break through the doors of the skēnē on a rolling platform – and no doubt wondering how on earth Medea will make her escape from the house – suddenly and unexpectedly has a novel spatial dimension imposed upon them. Bearings need to be readjusted, as do the expectations of what this intervention means. The very first thing Medea does atop the mēchanē is draw firm attention to the way that she is not physically where the characters in the play, and the audience in turn, expect her to be. She does this by asking why the gates to the house are being rattled to look for her.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ ‘Look!’ she may as well have called out, ‘I’m up here, not down there where you’re looking!’.

Medea’s appearance ex machina not only emphasises the peculiar place she finds herself, but also, through repetition of the notion that she is out of touch, stresses the physical remoteness which the mēchanē offers her: ‘But your hand can never touch me: such is the chariot Helios my grandfather has given me to ward off a hostile hand.’ (χειρὶ δ’ οὐ ψαύσεις ποτέ· τοιόνδ’ ὄχημα πατρὸς Ἥλιος πατὴρ δίδωσιν ἡμῖν, ἔρυμα πολεμίας χερός.)Footnote ¹⁶⁸ This denial of haptic contact in the context of the deus ex machina is seen in other tragedies too, and usually stresses the distinct ontology of the divine. Here, however, the mēchanē’s height put Medea quite literally out of reach of punishment at the hands of Jason and Creon. The space which the mēchanē creates is not, as in other plays, a channel or passage between realms of human and divine but should instead be considered a moral and ideological free zone where Medea can, controversially, justify the infanticide that she has committed in terms of the unfairness that she herself experienced at the hands of Jason. Medea’s engagement with Jason from atop the mēchanē is far more protracted an interaction than any other extant ex machina deity in other plays. Whatever one may make of Euripides’ view on the many issues that come up in the final exchange between the couple – Greek versus barbarian values, the role of men and women in society, divine justice, sexual politics, grief and vengeance, the sanctity of marriage and of vows – the mēchanē allows for the discussion to be staged after the infanticide without Medea’s life being at risk, and thus without Jason’s power over Medea rendering the whole scene moot. Instead, she is afforded some power of her own by being able to deny Jason the final contact with his children that he desires.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ The extension and definitive rupture of space which this ex machina facilitates adds another dimension to the explorations of space discussed earlier in this chapter. While the mēchanē supporting Iris and Lyssa in Heracles also creates isolated space, connections are explicitly drawn back up to Olympus, and down to the action on stage.

Another unusual feature of the mēchanē in Medea is the appearance of the corpses of her children in the chariot of Helios with Medea.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ We should probably not imagine a full-blown chariot suspended on the crane but rather the crane decorated in some way or another to represent a chariot.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Medea’s reliance on the divine chariot of her grandfather is poignant. Had he wanted to, Euripides could presumably have had Medea whisk herself away using either her own magic or some unspecified divine influence of Helios.Footnote ¹⁷² Invocations are made to Helios at various points in the play both by Medea and by the chorus.Footnote ¹⁷³ Medea’s escape was visually unique in that she and the corpses of her children were not suspended, giving an impression of unattachment as was probably the case in other ex machina interventions. Instead, the protagonist relies on the magical chariot made by divine technē (Hephaistos’ according to later traditions)Footnote ¹⁷⁴ as an external mechanism with her guiding deity in absentia. Medea is presented not as divine, but as having access to a divine instrument. In this she resembles Achilles equipped with arms forged by Hephaistos, Perseus with the shield of Athena, or Cassandra who received the gift of prophecy from Apollo. Compared to the other plays we have discussed so far in this section, Medea re-characterises the mēchanē from a mechanism used by the divine for epiphanic intervention to a divine creation and tool of the gods which can be lent to humans as needed or deserved.

Medea’s appearance ex machina in Helios’ chariot also introduces imagery of East and West and focalises the audience’s attention on transitions between these realms. When the theme of Medea as barbarian has been studied, the mēchanē usually fits into the picture only as a space fit for an ‘other’: a woman, a witch, and a barbarian.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ In this vein, Denys Page long ago argued that it was because Medea was not Greek that she could kill her children and escape in a magic chariot.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Medea’s foreignness is certainly a key theme in the play: she sets herself up as a foreigner in contrast to the Corinthian women of the chorus whom she addresses early on;Footnote ¹⁷⁷ she calls herself a barbaros;Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Jason repeatedly calls attention to her non-Greek ethnicity.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Further, however, frequent allusions are made to the crossing of the boundary that divides the world of Medea from Greece.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Rather than simply being ‘allowed’ aloft on the mēchanē because she is ‘other’, we should see the mēchanē as part of the thematisation of East–West in the play and its emphasis on transitioning across boundaries. The nurse begins the play’s prologue in the following way:

Full of desperation in her contrary-to-fact wish, the nurse expresses a desire first, that the Argo had never made its voyage to Colchis and the Symplegades, and second, that the ship had never been constructed at all. Successfully crossing the Symplegades or ‘Clashing Rocks’ constituted the first of the triumphs of the Argonautic expedition which eventually led to the capture of the Golden Fleece. As well as introducing relevant history to contextualise the story and showing the emotional state of the situation Medea finds herself in, the play begins with an image of violent rocks which spontaneously clash together and a description that plunges us into an unknown location from which, according to the nurse’s stitching together of the story, Medea has been brought to Corinth into her current plight. The Chorus pick up the image of the Symplegades again in the fifth stasimon in a periphrastic reference to Medea: ‘you who left behind the inhospitable strait where the dark blue Symplegades clash’ (κυανεᾶν λιποῦσα Συμπληγάδων πετρᾶν ἀξενωτάταν ἐσβολάν).Footnote ¹⁸² The Symplegades were in origin a mythical obstacle to traverse from the everyday world to a distant magical realm.Footnote ¹⁸³ At the same time, these rocks also guarded the entrance to the Black Sea and prevented the passage between East and West, at least until Jason’s ruse, thanks to Phineus’ advice. The Symplegades thus serve to remind the audience of Medea’s foreignness and, further, draw attention to the way that her origins are bound up with the transgression of boundaries: East and West, human and supernatural.

The second part of the nurse’s wish forefronts how crossing this boundary was achieved by a man-made vessel, the Argo, whose hull as much as oars were constructed out of pinewood by the hands of great men. The play will end with the image of Medea spontaneously transported to Athens and a new phase of life on Helios’ winged chariot. Jason foreshadows Medea’s true means of escape when he says that ‘she will have to hide herself beneath the earth or soar aloft to heaven’ (δεῖ γάρ νιν ἤτοι γῆς γε κρυφθῆναι κάτω ἢ πτηνὸν ἆραι σῶμ᾿ ἐς αἰθέρος βάθος).Footnote ¹⁸⁴ In the actual ex machina moment, there is no need to mention the specific construction of the chariot since instead the deployment of the mēchanē enables the audience to visualise the parallel themselves. The play’s bookends are telling. Medea starts by describing the Argo’s travels to Colchis through the metaphor of flight (diaptasthai) and, although Mastronarde notes that such an image for the propulsion of a ship is traditional,Footnote ¹⁸⁵ this does not stand in the way of the image of the metaphorically winged vehicle being picked up in the form of the chariot ex machina at the end of the play. The Symplegades and the Argo ‘flying’ through the rocks are the point of origin for the play, the chronological beginning of the Argonautic expedition, the geographical border of East and West, and the mythical boundary between the everyday and the supernatural. This frames the fact that Medea was forced to leave her home in Colchis – the territory at the eastern extreme of the Black Sea – and has ended up exiled westwards in Corinth where she now finds herself, distraught. Medea then closes with the chariot of the Sun God – in which Helios is known to traverse East to West daily – transporting Medea out of Corinth to Athens, where she will find asylum and a(nother) new beginning. The image of the Symplegades, then, introduces the themes of East and West (or Greek and Barbarian) and mortal and supernatural, as well as emphasising the passages between these apparently somewhat malleable concepts. That the Argo was built in order to traverse this boundary speaks directly to Medea’s escape specifically upon Helios’ chariot, upon the mēchanē. These are not just metaphors. Vehicles offer a set of ‘cultural techniques’ for navigating the relationship between ontological realms in ancient Greek literature and thought more broadly: from Hades’ chariot and psychopomp Charon’s boat to the chariot of Plato’s Phaedrus, for example. In Kittlerian terms, media are here providing the models for theological concepts and, crucially, Euripides makes sure to count the mēchanē within this set of cultural techniques.Footnote ¹⁸⁶

The play ends with an altered version of the choral anapaests that we have seen bring Helen and Bacchae to a close.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ The first line is πολλῶν ταμίας Ζεὺς ἐν Ὀλύμπῳ instead of the usual πολλαὶ μορφαὶ τῶν δαιμονίων. This subtle shift changes the preoccupation from a general concern about divine form, to a specific comment on Zeus as dispenser. Ordinarily, as we have seen, the first line of the formula is key in referring explicitly to the deus ex machina as a specific form of divine epiphany into the human realm, but here, since Medea’s placement on the mēchanē is not epiphanic as in the other plays, Euripides deploys a first line that emphasises the role of Zeus instead.Footnote ¹⁸⁸