No music machines from Antiquity have survived to the present, nor do we know much about the lost ones. Nevertheless there are several proofs of their existence and that the possibility of music machines was considered. Plato (427-347 BC), for example, imagined the whole universe to be like a sounding machine, and human music was only an imitation of the universal music. Based on this idea and observations of the sky, Archimedes (ca. 287-212 BC) built a model of the sun, the moon and the five planets as a machine driven by hydraulic power. Aristoteles (384-322 BC) compared machines to slaves and thought that masters would no longer need slaves if machines could do things like playing the kithara. Since Ktesibios (3rd century BC) many music machines, including the water organ, have been developed. In the works of Hero of Alexandria (probably from the first century AD), many automatic machines were described in detail.

H. G.