The dataset discussed in this chapter is coinage, specifically the first coinage minted in the Aegean Basin. The start of this chapter considers to what extent coinage was first used as either an economic or a political tool, and, therefore, whether any patterns in the dataset will reveal more about political or economic networks. In presenting continuities of the dataset using a network analytical model, this chapter illustrates how the spread of coinage across the Aegean from Ionian innovators is indicative of a pattern in the spread of technology. This pattern is juxtaposed with the distribution of amphoras pattern, indicating that there is a qualitatively similar economic pattern, albeit separated with a large time-lag. This pattern is a useful reminder that different types of economic network laid the foundations for one another, and that material evidence may not always be contemporary with the formation of networks.

This chapter begins by considering the pattern of archaeology in Greece form the past 100 years that has generated huge datasets – and that these datasets have been largely under deployed in making historical conclusions about Greece of the seventh and sixth centuries BC. After reviewing the history of scholarship on ‘Archaic Greece’ (and the relative quietness of scholarship on this topic in the most recent decades) this chapter considers ways in which the huge amount of data from Archaic Greece could be organised and analysed. Various methods from the Digital Humanities are considered, with discussion focusing also on data cleaning and organisation, before proposing that network analysis will be a useful framework for this study in making clear the ways in which the first communities of Archaic Greece formed economic and political alliances – and rivalries – with one another.

The Hippocratic treatise Diseases 4 is well known for explaining corporeal processes through vivid analogies with plants, cupping glasses, bronze vessels, swirling wine sediment, coagulating cheese, and blocked oil flasks. Scholars have often applied a heuristic dichotomy to these arguments, evaluating whether they are “mechanistic” (i.e., rely solely on recognizable physical forces) or “vitalistic” (i.e., attribute special capacities to living tissues and parts). Comparisons to implements tend to line up on the former side, while plant analogies support the latter. Rather than focus on delineating these two types of explanations, this chapter emphasizes that the author draws both sets of comparative objects from the therapies, implements, and techniques that a physician would have either administered to the body or encountered in the more general practice of medicine. Whether comparing the attractive capacity of the four inner “springs” (head, heart, gallbladder, spleen) to medicinal plants drawing up particular nutriment from the soil, or likening these same springs to bronze vessels, Diseases 4 amalgamates medical tools and the bodies that they treat. Its view of corporeality therefore emerges at the physical and conceptual interface between flesh and the therapeutic technologies that affect it, as the body absorbs and enfolds medical tools and substances.

This chapter presents the several modes of reduction of the shoulder described by Hippocrates in On Joints 2–7 and evaluates them in relation to the phenomenon of leverage and the ancient tool, the lever (mochlos). It argues that Hippocrates’ understanding of leverage is a feature of his expertise as iētros and did not derive from any separate mechanical or scientific knowledge. This is especially interesting, since Hippocrates knew of the lever and some of its uses, but he describes techniques involving the reciprocal forces exerted between the patient’s dislocated bones and the physician’s own body. The chapter makes use of the analytic distinction between ostension and ostensive definition to characterize this expertise. It distinguishes among experience of physical forces, art that arises from such experience, and the physical principles of leverage that emerged a century or more later. There are references to On Fractures and On the Art.

Poetic, literary and philosophical dreams of automata in the ancient world tended to focus on humanoid or at least mammalian entities. Yet when automata are realised in practice, they are considerably different in quality.This chapter explores the gap between the automata of ancient fantasy and reality, in terms of their physical nature and the concepts and categories with which they were implicated (statues, slaves, theatre, the divine).  It asks how far the sense of wonder that is associated with automata changed over time and how far it (ever) depended on a naturalistic or realistic reproduction of the body, human or animal. I argue that although the earliest known automata seem to have made gestures towards naturalism, both in terms of movement and other activities (if not in how these effects were realised), interest rapidly moved towards mechanical wonder (as Hero of Alexandria suggests) and theatrical wonder rather than any kind of naturalistic wonder. Perversely, the more technically sophisticated ancient automata became, the less the interest in mimicking human or animal bodies. The explanation may be sought partly in the non-naturalistic nature of ancient mimesis and partly in the changing status and sophistication of ancient mechanics. As a result, the path from ancient automata to modern notions of the robot or android is not at all straightforward.

The second chapter focuses on a key and highly contested figure of European legal modernity: Robert Joseph Pothier. A visionary whose legal creativity was wholly projected into the future for some, and a lucid and pragmatic seventeenth-century mind for others, Pothier, working with preexisting materials facilitated the conceptual leap from medieval divided dominium to modern property as unitary and robust dominium.

This chapter explores two scripts of thauma (marvel/wonder) regarding the interior of the human body: the first derives from the Aristotelian idea that a purpose can be assigned to virtually everything in the world, our interior organs included; as soon as the design within our bodies has been figured out, our interior instantly enters the realm of the beautiful. The second script of marvel pertains to the idea that there are little ‘machines’ and ‘sub-machines’ inside of us, with their own complex structures and their own distinctive power to make us marvel at their artistry and efficiency. Considerable attention has been paid recently on the reevaluation of the presumed polarity between teleology and mechanics in ancient Greek philosophy and medicine. Rather than assume a mutually exclusive relationship between the two, scholars argue that the two models can be seen as converging and combining with each other in a number of significant ways. An organ which looks like a machine is still working with a specific purpose; in fact, its machine-like design can be adduced as a confirmation of the fact that nature did everything in wisdom. Differences, however, persist, and one of them relates to the important issue that teleology ascribes the purpose of things to an invisible force, whereas a mēchanē has a human constructor. To argue that the body can be figurally understood in analogy with a machine can thus be seen as opening, among other things, new avenues concerning the question of how we look at and appreciate the body’s marvellous properties: kallos in this case, while still being thought to ultimately derive from a superhuman designer, is simultaneously more concretely understood and appreciated in practice with direct reference to the inventiveness of the human mind.

In several works and passages, Galen reports on the model of the heart as developed by Erasistratus. Already in 1995 (published in 1997), Heinrich von Staden pointed to the parallel between Erasistratus’ model and the force pump. This technical device, which belongs to the technical apparatus developed in the frame of ancient water-supply systems, was indeed codified in textual and probably even diagrammatic form for the first time by the contemporary Ctesibius during the third century. This chapter first revisits Galen’s reports to define Erasistratus’ model of the heart technically and precisely. Subsequently, it analyzes a series of ancient works and fragments from the Hellenistic period until the second century to establish the extent to which such parallelisms are historically justified on the level of the scientific reflections of the time. In the background, the analysis of archeological findings of periods are considered to show that, contrary to what is usually assumed, the realm of practical activities and engineering might have been strongly influenced by the anatomic knowledge of antiquity.

Giovanni Baptista Morgagni (1682–1771), Professor of Anatomy at Padua, produced the most important studies in the eighteenth century on the De Medicina of the Roman encyclopediast A. Cornelius Celsus.  Morgagni’s intensive reading of Celsus combined his own medical experience with philological emendation.  Morgagni contextualized Celsus’ text within a theoretical framework of an empirically ordered transhistorical investigation of the structure, function, and pathology of the human body.  Here ancient and modern disciplinary authorities engaged with the same evidence available to the senses.  Morgagni’s argument in part contrasted Celsus’ humoralist evidence that bladder stones originate in the substance of the urine with Friedrich Hoffmann’s (1660–1742) argument that bladder stones originate in the iatromechanist action of the kidneys.  Morgagni’s emendations continue to mark our own contemporary editions of Celsus’ Latin text.

The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that Theophrastus, in De ventis 56, employs material principles to explain certain features of both living beings and inanimate things, and that the unknown author of Problemata physica 1.24, having been influenced by Theophrastus, uses these same principles but in a different way, treating the parts of certain artifacts as models of, or analogous to, parts of the human body. Special attention is given to both Theophrastus’ discussion of Notos, the south wind, and to De ventis 56–58, in which he deals explicitly with the effects of winds on the human condition. (A revised version of Mayhew’s edition of the text of De ventis 56, with a detailed apparatus criticus, is included in an appendix.)

The idea of the body as a machine constitutes one of the central analogies in early modern Western thought. From Descartes’ Treatise of Man (written in the 1630s) to the Iatromechanist School of medicine, and from La Mettrie’s Man a Machine (1747) and de Vaucanson’s automata to science fiction’s fascination with cyborgs, robots and androids, mechanical models have been employed to reproduce and mimic one aspect or another of life itself. One of the aims of the present collection of essays has been to show that the conceptual origins of this early modern body–machine concept can be traced back to texts, scientific theories and ideas of classical antiquity. The technological artefact – be it a simple device or a more complex machine – in the texts and authors which we have been exploring does not stand in isolation from the flesh, bones, fluids and organs that make up the human body; on the contrary, they intersect with the latter in a number of significant ways.