Working miracles in ancient Alexandria: Hero and his writings

Hero of Alexandria, likely a contemporary of the Roman emperor Nero, is one of the many ancient Greek authors whose work, for us, represents a whole tradition of ancient thought-in this case, mechanics.Anyone who has ever ventured into the five stately Teubner volumes collecting his writings (plus a halo of fragments and an extensive Near Eastern transmission) has, however, perhaps experienced a certain feeling of being helpless in the vast expanse of texts mostly starring tubes, wheels, diagrams, and numbers.Now there is relief.In The Mechanical Tradition of Hero of Alexandria, Courtney Ann Roby provides us with, as far as I can see, the first monographic guide to the Corpus Heronicum.Roby describes the corpus as "a system of interlocking information flows" (17), which is a fitting image for the corpora of a number of ancient authors, including the medical author Galen and the geographer Strabo (and certainly too for the book under review).Roby's book is divided into three parts.The first (Chaps.2-3) explores how Hero presents and solves technical problems, drawing from a long tradition that he transforms and codifies for intellectual engineers at least up to the Renaissance.The second part (Chap.4) is structured as a thought experiment.Roby hypothetically imagines three historical contexts-Ptolemaic, Early Roman, and later Imperial Alexandriaand explores which aspects of Hero's corpus would align with each of these settings.This experimental framework enables Roby to engage with the entire tradition of Greek theoretical mechanics and applied mathematics.The third part (Chap.5) offers a succinct survey of Hero's impact on the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, tracing his works and concepts through a beautiful stream of names, places, and baroque frontispieces.