Chapter 5 - Hero in the Age of Print

Summary

We saw in the last chapter how the Heronian tradition fragmented and flourished in the Byzantine and medieval Islamic worlds. Yet in the Latin west, Hero’s trail went quite cold during this period. A few references suggest that he continued to be characterized as he was in Pappus, as a mechanical author and pneumatic wonder-worker. In the Summa Philosophia of the Pseudo-Grosseteste, Hero is named as an egregius philosophus who strove to demonstrate the void “through clepsydras and siphons and other instruments.”¹ Henricus Aristippus recommends in the preface to his 1156 translation of the Phaedo that his pseudonymous addressee elect to stay in Sicily, where he has access to a rich library of philosophical and scientific texts, including “the mechanica of the philosopher Hero … who argues so subtly about the void.”²