Synthetic Life & Immortality: Ancient Greek Futurism
Hellenic automata, god-kings, a Promethean race and visiting the moon
Opening Orientation
They say Lucian of Samosata satirised Antonius Diogenes’ book Of the Wonderful Things Beyond Thule, and in doing so accidentally invented the genre of science fiction. More on this later. Did the ancient Greeks possess a futurist worldview, a vision of progress toward human transcendence and cosmic mastery? We saw in my last piece how Greek technology and science went further than many often realise, but couldn’t sustain the institutional ratchet that supported later European progress. But what about in their philosophies, religious stories and cosmological outlook? Can we look here to find evidence of Greek futurism?
The evidence does not support a single, settled doctrine of progress of the kind familiar from the Enlightenment. Many of the most authoritative scholarly studies have explicitly disagreed on how strong the Greek commitment to progress actually was. But, the evidence does cluster across philosophy, mythology, institutional life, material culture and Hellenistic political theology - enough that I would argue for a recognisable, recurrent stance in which a) the cosmos is, in principle, intelligible by reason, b) the human being can in some sense bridge the gap to the divine by means of techne, episteme, virtue or political achievement, and c) systematic effort by individuals, schools, polities and dynasties was directed toward that bridging. The picture that emerges is not exactly futurism as we might understand it today, but more of a recurring proto-futurist worldview, aWeltanschauung wherein human excellence and will could, even for a moment, attempt to reach beyond mere mortality and confront the eternal divine.
I’ve structured this piece in two halves, the first dealing with philosophy, religion, athletics and so on, the second examining the ancient Greek curiosity for robots and beings that were ‘made, not born’. Hopefully I will demonstrate that the idiosyncratic form of Greco or Hellenic futurism was real, and that it laid the foundation for later Western science fiction.
Part One
From this world of injustice, of insolent apostasy from the primeval one-ness of all things, Anaximander flees into a metaphysical fortress from which he leans out, letting his gaze sweep the horizon. At last, after long pensive silence, he puts a question to all creatures: ‘What is your existence worth? And if it is worthless, why are you here?’
- Philosophy In The Tragic Age Of The Greeks, Nietzsche
Philosophical Fragments and Texts
The Milesians (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes) are the first to make the move from a mythic to a material explanation for the world. Cornford argues in From Religion to Philosophy (1912), the pre-Socratic concepts of Destiny, Logos, Soul and Substance carry forward the structures of myth in rationalised form. Cornford takes a position that Greek philosophy in-itself is myth purified by reason, rather than myth followed by its repudiation. To my mind this is directly relevant to the question of a materialist-yet-idealist stance, that the materialism of the Ionians is from the start oriented toward grasping or locating a unifying principle (archē) that is simultaneously physical and normative. This move is frankly odd, compared to most human systems of thought - and explains why the pre-Socratics are alien upon first encounter, with their cosmic explanations ordered by strangely abstracted physical phenomena, like water or fire.
To take Heraclitus, he appears to declare that the Logos is both a physical principle (fire and transformation, the hidden harmony of antagonistic opposites) and a rational order knowable by some humans. The Logos is common (xynos) accessible to anyone who learns to listen to nature. This is a philosophy of materialism (cosmic process is fire-flux) and idealism (a unifying intelligibility) combined by a single genius. For Anaxagoras, Nous (Mind) is the cosmic ordering principle that initiates the rotation separating the originally mixed elements. Plato in the Phaedo (97b–99c) records Socrates’ disappointment that Anaxagoras did not follow through teleologically, but Anaxagoras’s framework interestingly combines material monism (everything is mixed in everything) with a directing intelligence.
Empedocles argues that the cycle of Love (Philotes) and Strife (Neikos) over the four roots is a closed cosmology with an explicit claim to ‘salvation’ in his Katharmoi (Purifications) - the daimon falls and through transmigration may ‘in the end become gods, highest in honour’. The fusion of physics and aspiration is, again, strange and unusual. Famously Democritus and Leucippus brought forth the idea of atomism - the most obviously materialist Greek system - worrying generations of Christian thinkers during and after the Renaissance. Democritus also appears to have an explicitly progressive view of cultural history, as humans developed technai gradually under necessity, with no Golden Age and no decline.
Another well known quote“Of all things the measure is a human being, of those that are that they are, of those that are not that they are not” was actually Protagoras preserved through hostile witnesses (Plato’s Theaetetus and Sextus Empiricus’ Protagoras). Traditionally this has come down to us as Plato reading Protagoras as radical relativism, but recent scholarship emphasises that in the Protagoras ‘Great Speech’, he tells a Promethean myth in which humans, lacking natural endowments, must develop the political and technical arts to survive, and that this development is genuinely progressive. As a kind of anthropological narrative, it is one of the strongest pieces of textual evidence for a proto-futurist vision within Greek thought.
Plato is paradoxical in this project, and will be the subject of a future article. He is the ultimate Greek philosopher of ascent, yet his cosmology is fundamentally backward-looking - the Forms are eternal, the world of becoming is a copy. A few examples:
The Symposium‘s ladder - the lover ascends from particular bodies to all bodies, to souls, to laws and institutions, to knowledge and finally to the Form of Beauty itself. This structure is progressive, but for the individual.
The Republic‘s Cave is the philosopher’s ascent from shadows to sunlight, a programme of cognitive and ethical transformation.
The Timaeus - the Demiurge is a craftsman-god who orders the chōra using the Forms as paradigms. The cosmos is a living creature endowed with soul and intelligence.
The most intriguing concept though has to be Homoiōsis theōi, which means ‘becoming like god’, with the qualifier ‘as far as is possible’. The principle appears in Theaetetus, with parallels in Republic, Phaedrus (where the soul assimilates to its patron god), and Timaeus. Scholarship (Sedley, The Ideal of Godlikeness 1999; Stern-Gillet on Plotinus and the Theaetetus 2019; Brill volume New Explorations in Plato’s Theaetetus, 2022) has shown that homoiōsis theōi became the telos of human life in Middle Platonism (eg Eudorus of Alexandria), was central for Philo of Alexandria, Plutarch, Alcinous’s Didaskalikos, and was fundamental for Plotinus and the Neoplatonists. As an ethical stance, largely concerned with cultivating virtue and wisdom (phronēsis), ‘becoming like god’ reflects one of ancient Greek’s ultimate transcendence-orientation positions - the philosophical telos of life for the entire Platonist tradition, is to become as much like god as a human being can.
Aristotle’s eudaimonia is the actualisation of a specific human capacity (ergon), the highest form of which is the bios theoretikos (the contemplative life. Aristotle uses the language of athanatizein, meaning ‘to immortalise oneself’, the recurring Greek ideal. His surviving treatises cover logic, physics, biology, psychology, ethics, politics, rhetoric, poetics and metaphysics, and could be easily described as the first systematic attempt to categorise all knowledge under unified principles.
Turning to other Hellenic schools of thought, we find in Stoicism (including Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, the Roman Stoics) that the cosmos is a single rational living being permeated by logos/pneuma. This can be defined as ‘to live according to nature’ (homologoumenōs tē physei zēn), meaning man should align his reason with the cosmic Logos. This is simultaneously materialist (Stoic physics is corporealist, god is an immanent fiery breath, not transcendent), teleological (the cosmos is providentially ordered), and idealist-aspirational (the sage is the only truly free, truly happy being, the sage is in a real sense divine, he is ‘equal to Zeus’, in Chrysippus’s formulation). The doctrine of ekpyrōsis (cosmic conflagration) and eternal recurrence is a cyclical one, rather than our own linearly open-ended vision of the universe.
Epicureanism could be described as atomist materialism, with no providence, where gods exist but are indifferent and the philosophical goal is ataraxia (freedom from disturbance). Lucretius Book V offers us an example of a progressive anthropology in which human history rises from an animalistic beginning through the discovery of fire, language, agriculture, metallurgy and law, with explicit awareness that these are human achievements. Many have highlighted this as one of the clearest ancient progressivisms.
What we can point to across these schools is the underlying conviction that the cosmos has an intelligible, knoweable order, and that human reason is capable of grasping it. To do so actually changes the human being and makes him freer, happier, more virtuous and most crucially more like the divine. Whether this counts as proto-futurist depends on definition, since Greek thought was not progressivist about civilisation, but certainly was progressivist about the individual person. Between civilisation and Man as an individual was the institution, such as the school, the library or the ruler cult. Although Greece is considered the birthplace of democracy, perhaps what we have here is an elitist vision for human overcoming or human ascendance, the institution as a crucible for becoming-as-close-to-a-god-as-possible (could we say parapotheosis?).
Mythology
Here sit I, forming mortals
After my image;
A race resembling me,
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy, to be glad,
And thee to scorn,
As I!
- Prometheus, Goethe, 1789
In Hesiod, Prometheus is a trickster whose gift of fire is punished by the creation of Pandora and the loss of an earlier innocence. In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, the Titan delivers the Catalogue of the Arts - claiming to have taught humans house building, astronomy, numbers, writing, animal domestication, sailing, medicine, the gift of prophecy and metallurgy. Prometheus has thus rescued humanity from a sad, primitive condition. For Aeschylus, the story of Prometheus is a profoundly progressivist vision of human prehistory. The Titan myth encodes the idea that human civilisation is the result of transgressive acquisition of divine knowledge, without doubt a recognisably proto-Faustian, proto-futurist motif.
Heracles is a prime example of apotheosis through achievement. His Twelve Labours, originally a punishment, become his path to deification. This is fundamental for Hellenistic ideology, we later see Alexander, Macedonian kings generally and the Ptolemies all claiming Heraclid descent. Achilles’ choice at the crossroads between a long obscure life or a short glorious one, was and remains the ultimate heroic ideal, one in which mortality is exchanged for kleos aphthiton (undying fame), a form of transcendence-through-deeds (likely an older Indo-European ideal). The hero cult itself, often involving the worship of dead heroes at their tombs, was institutionalised in every Greek city - empirical evidence that ordinary Greeks believed extraordinary humans could achieve a quasi-divine status.
The Derveni Papyrus (c. 340 BC, our earliest substantial Orphic document) and the gold tablets from Thurii, Hipponion, and Pelinna (4th–3rd centuries BC) document a soul-itinerary in which the soul, falling into the body, must purify itself through successive lives to reunite with the divine (”I have flown out of the sorrowful weary wheel... happy and blessed one, you shall be a god instead of a mortal” - Thurii tablet). The Pythagorean tradition (transmitted via Aristotle, Iamblichus, Porphyry) shares this structure. This is not progress in the civilisational sense, but in the soul-trajectory sense it is starkly progressive: the telos is becoming divine.
More mythology will be covered below, including the stories of Hephaestus, Daedalus, Icarus, Medea, Jason and Pandora.
Attitudes Toward Knowledge and Inquiry
In his History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides says, “I have written my work not as an essay to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time” (ktēma es aiei). This is one of the most explicit ancient claims to knowledge transcending its immediate context. It’s not hard to find scholarship (Thucydides: A Possession for All Time; Thucydides and the Invention of Political Science) which treats the phrase as evidence for a self-conscious production of transferable knowledge of human affairs based on the evergreen predictability of human nature.
Similarly Herodotus opens by announcing that he writes ‘so that human achievements may not become forgotten in time’ and ‘so that great and marvellous deeds - some performed by Greeks, some by barbarians - may not be without their glory’. Herodotus’s project is comparative ethnography combined with inquiry into causation, namely why did the Greeks and Persians come to war? For both historians their attitude towards knowledge shares a conviction that the past is knowable, legible, that it exists as part of human activity. They put weight on autopsia - seeing things for oneself, and on the testimony of credible witnesses.
In medical matters we have Hippocrates’ On the Sacred Disease (late 5th century BC ), which opens by rejecting the divine explanation for epilepsy: ‘It is not, in my opinion, any more divine or more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause’. Is this a foundational document of methodological naturalism? His other works, On Ancient Medicine and Airs, Waters, Places also demonstrate this profoundly radical new approach - medicine is a technē with reproducible methods, environmental causation is real, medical knowledge is a cumulative and progressive system.
The Lyceum was the first systematic research institution in the Western tradition. Its treasures include zoological observations (the History of Animals, Parts of Animals, Generation of Animals, drawing on a programme of empirical observation including dissection and reports from across Alexander’s expedition) and a collection of 158 city constitutions (only the Athenian Constitution survives). By any measure this was an attempt to categorise all human disciplines, to map all of human knowledge. Whilst impressive, the Lyceum was eventually overshadowed by the Mouseion Library (literally ‘shrine of the Muses’), which also aimed to gather and collect the world’s knowledge. Founded under Ptolemy I Soter (probably advised by Demetrius of Phaleron, c. 295 BCE) and developed under Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the Mouseion grew into a research institution, a library, a status symbol and an ideological statement of Ptolemaic aspiration to encompass the oikoumenē. Ships entering Alexandria’s harbour had to surrender any scrolls aboard for copying. It was an unprecedented institutional programme for the accumulation of universal thought, housing Euclid, Eratosthenes (who measured the circumference of the Earth), Archimedes (briefly), Aristarchus of Samos (heliocentric hypothesis), Hipparchus, Herophilus and Erasistratus (anatomy and dissection of human cadavers, with possibly vivisection of condemned criminals reported by Celsus).
Greek attitudes to knowledge, from Thucydides to Eratosthenes, revealed their genius for pursuing systematic and grounded scientific truth. When historians say that Greece is the foundation of Western civilisation, it’s to these men they point. We still use terms and concepts from Greek medicine, mathematics, anthropology & history, zoology, biology, political and rhetoric in the present - and will continue to do so far into the future.
Visual and Material Culture
The Archaic kouros presents the male nude as an ideal, the youthful body held up as a near-divine standard. The Classical revolution (eg Polykleitos’s Doryphoros, Myron’s Discobolus) introduced the contrapposto and proportional system, the human body re-imagined as a mathematically determinable ideal. An alien idea to the Christian/post-Christian West, but the exact same vocabulary of forms applies to both gods and athletes, developing from a more generic template to a rigorously quantitative one. The set of divine proportions, drawn from the human body itself, becomes canonical from the 5th century onwards, finding new expression eventually in the Italian Renaissance. Greece laid down a vision of the body which has stood the test of time, and remains highly influential in contemporary dreams of science fiction and future progress, the vision that divine and human bodies are aesthetically continuous. The smooth, symmetrical forms of sci-fi lore are the direct descendants of Greece dreaming.
The Parthenon frieze (mid-5th century BC, Phidian programme) goes further than even this. It depicts the Panathenaic procession, on the east frieze, with the gods seated in attendance. The compositional decision to place the Athenian people themselves in a continuous narrative space with the Olympians is unprecedented. Scholar John Boardman argues that the figures represent the heroic dead of Marathon, unorthodox and contested but an hypothesis that still presents human beings as capable of ascending to godly heights by their actions:
There is no other myth-heroic or myth-historical Panathenaia to suit the occasion so we are forced back to a mortal one or a version of a mortal one. In classical Athens of these years there was one group of mortal Athenian citizens who, by their actions, had acquired the right to their depiction on public buildings and in the company of the gods: these are the men who fought at Marathon
- The Parthenon Frieze — Another View (1977) J. Boardman
The shift in portraiture from idealised Classicism to individualised Hellenism has long been debated and discussed (see Smith’s 1988 Hellenistic Royal Portraits or Stewart’s 1993 Faces of Power). Lysippus’s portraits of Alexander, with his famous upturned head, dishevelled hair, and leonine gaze, established the iconography of the heroic individual. The Boxer At Rest (c. 100 BC) manages to render fatigue, scars and profound emotional weight through bronze, the Dying Gaul portrays the barbarian or gladiator as a tragic individual. This shift in pathos coheres with the Hellenistic political reality of charismatic monarchy with the period’s interest in individual achievement and psychological interiority.
Finally we could point to Greek classical coinage, and how it carries gods, heroes, civic emblems. Beginning with Alexander’s posthumous image on Lysimachus’s tetradrachms, his deified portrait actually wearing the ram horns of Zeus-Ammon, the living ruler begins to appears with divine attributes (diadem, horn of Ammon, radiate crown). This is the material expression of the king-as-god ideology, the man who could rise above this mortal coil.
Social Behaviour and Institutions
The Olympic (traditional date 776 BC), Pythian, Isthmian and Nemean games together formed the ‘circuit’, or periodos. These games were a religious-competitive complex: the athletes competed naked (gymnos) before the gods, the victors were crowned with vegetal wreaths (olive at Olympia, laurel at Delphi) the victor was isotheos (‘equal to a god’) in Pindar’s epinician odes. Pindar repeatedly warns athletes not to ‘seek to become a god’ whilst celebrating that they have come very close. The games institutionalised, for over a millennium, the public test of human excellence against a divine standard. Men who perhaps sought godhood in their heart-of-hearts had the chance to unleash this desire before their peers, in a culture for whom competition was life.
Self-deification through philosophical, martial and athletic means was therefore possible, if only temporarily. Alexander of course went further, inspired by the measure of the ultimate semi-divines - Achilles, Hercules. During a visit to the Oracle of Ammon at Siwa (330s BC) the priest reportedly addressed Alexander as the ‘son of Zeus-Ammon’, and when he visited the ruins of Didyma the sacred spring burst into life again. He attempted to introduce the Persian act of prostration (proskynēsis) at the Macedonian court, which was vehemently resisted by his fellow Greeks - a refusal which Xenophon had earlier cited as a distinguishing mark of Hellenic freedom against Xerxes (‘As tokens of these victories we may, indeed, still behold the trophies, but the strongest witness to them is the freedom of the states in which you were born and bred; for to no human creature do you pay homage as master, but to the gods alone’ - Anabasis). Modern scholarship is divided on how much Alexander himself believed, and the differences in attitude towards Alexander’s apotheosis by Greeks and non-Greeks. What is clear is that by his death the apparatus of his deification was sufficiently developed that the Diadochi continued and elaborated upon it.
Alexander was not alone however - Hellenic attitudes towards human ascension to godhood, and the god-king cults/institutions which naturally followed, show us that the concept had some social elasticity and that extraordinary men could be accorded an extraordinary reception. Historian Angelos Chaniotis in his 2003 chapter The Divinity of Hellenistic Rulers (in A Companion to the Hellenistic World) argues for a genuine theological-political doctrine that outstanding human benefactors (euergetai) can rightly receive divine honours - including the Athenian cult to Demetrius Poliorcetes, the Ptolemaic state dynastic cult (the Theoi Adelphoi, the Theoi Euergetai, etc.) and the Seleucids category of divine kingship. The honours here include temples, priesthoods, sacrifices, festivals, and games. Altogether this is structural alignment with the philosophical doctrine of homoiōsis theōi, ancient Greece and its cosmopolitan offspring was really a society in which becoming-divine through achievement was a publicly available possibility. Where man can rise to such heights, and not just inherit them, there treads the possibility that man through deed can become more, that strife and competition and vision reveal new horizons.
Part Two
Made, Not Born - Artificial Life & Biotechne
Adrienne Mayor’s Gods and Robots (2018) is the most exploratory book-length treatment of the idea that Greek mythology contains forms of speculative, science-fictional thought. In her reading the Greeks imagined automata, biotechnical creations, AI, prosthetics, and human enhancement before they could build them, and these imaginings have trickled through Western civilisation, impacting creative and ethical thought to the present day. Its true that many if not all human societies have some kind of animistic strata, and some explicitly describe the animation of dead, inert matter by an external force. What truly separates ancient sci-fi from pure magic is the divide between things that are born, not made and things that are made, not born.
