The Mechanical Tradition of Hero of Alexandria

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.

• Situates Hero culturally through his styles of contextualizing and solving problems, since a traditional biography cannot be constructed
• Includes several diagrams of artifacts and problems from Hero's corpus as well as extensive images from his early print tradition
• Connects Hero's work in antiquity to the medieval and early modern traditions of work in his name