The Mechanical Tradition of Hero of Alexandria

The first book on Hero, a key figure in the history of technology in antiquity and the early modern period.

Courtney Ann Roby (Author)

9781316516232, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 July 2023

320 pages, 15 colour illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.611 kg

Hero of Alexandria was a figure of great importance not only for ancient technology but also for the medieval and early modern traditions that drew on his work. In this book Courtney Roby presents Hero's key strategies for developing, solving, and contextualizing technical problems, not only in his own lifetime but as an influential tradition of creating accessible technical treatises spanning multiple disciplines. While Hero's historical biography is all but impossible to reconstruct, she examines “Hero” as a corpus, a textual tradition of technical problem-solving capable of incorporating textual transformations like interpolation, epitomization, and translation, as well as intermedial transformation from text to artifact. Key themes include ancient and early modern technical readerships, the relationship between mathematics and mechanics, the materiality of manuscript and printed texts, and the shifting cultural contexts for scientific and technical literature.

1. Introduction
2. Systems of Explanation
3. Theorizing the World
4. Hero in Context
5. Hero in the Age of Print
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA]