This volume brings ancient Greek and Roman thought into dialogue with contemporary debates on artificial intelligence, cognition, and posthumanism, revealing how agency emerges through relations among humans, gods, technologies, and matter.

With contributions from scholars of classics, philosophy, and cognitive studies, this interdisciplinary volume offers readers new conceptual and methodological tools for understanding intelligence, agency, and responsibility beyond the boundaries of the autonomous human subject. Through innovative readings of ancient philosophy, literature, mythology, religion, and technology, it explores how cognition and action are shaped by social practices, material environments, divine powers, and technological systems. By placing ancient evidence in critical conversation with contemporary theories of embodied and extended cognition, posthumanism, and artificial intelligence, the book challenges familiar distinctions between human and nonhuman, natural and artificial, and agency and mechanism. Rather than presenting antiquity as a precursor to modern technologies, it demonstrates how historical perspectives can transform the very questions we ask about intelligence, creativity, authority, and ethical responsibility today.

Human, Divine, and Material Agency in Classics and Philosophy is suitable for students and scholars of classical studies, ancient philosophy and the history of science and technology. Its interdisciplinary approach makes it particularly valuable to readers interested in bringing ancient perspectives into contemporary philosophical and technological debates.

Jennifer Devereaux is a researcher at Harvard University specializing in artificial intelligence, epistemology, and cognitive science, with expertise in ancient philosophy. Her interdisciplinary work examines how computational systems shape knowledge, reproduce conceptual assumptions, and acquire epistemic authority, bringing historical philosophical inquiry into dialogue with contemporary debates about cognition, reasoning, and technological change.

Anna Novokhatko (Classics, University of Trento) specializes in Greek comedy, metaphor and imagination studies, hermeneutics, cognitive approaches, and Digital Classics. Amongst her monographs is the Guide to Classics and Cognitive Studies (2025), and she is (co-)editor of Measurement and Understanding in Science and Humanities (2023), The Future of Hermeneutics (2026), and Laughter between the gaps: new approaches to Greek comic corpus (2026). Her current research examines audience responses in Greek comedy.