ca. 250 BC: Several Roman poets - Cicero, Ovid and Pappus - report about a mechanical sphere brought to Rome after the capture of Syracusae in 212 BC. It is said that General Marcus Marcellus (268-208 BC), who conquered the city, had taken two mechanisms - one for himself and the other donated to a temple in Rome. The device imitated the motions of the sun and the moon as well as the five planets known at that time. This model may have been kept in motion by the flow of water. Most likely it is the brainchild of Archimedes (287-212 BC). In his vague description over a century later, Cicero (106-43 BC) tells of seeing it and claimed that it actually represented the periods of the moon and the apparent motion of the sun with such accuracy that it would, over a short period, show their eclipses. Since astronomy was a branch of mathematics in Archimedes' time, he undoubtedly considered this and his other astronomical inventions much more important than those which could be put to practical use. Pappus of Alexandria (ca. AD 340) stated that Archimedes had written a now lost manuscript on the construction of these mechanisms.

The discovery of the Antikythera proved that such devices already existed during antiquity. The Antikythera is an ancient mechanical calculator found in a ships wreck off the island of Antikythera in 1900. Subsequent investigation, particularly in 2006, dated the device of brass to about 150-100 BC. Most stunning about it is that it has a differential gear. Technological artifacts of similar complexity did not reappear until a thousand years later. The modern scientists who have reconstructed the Antikythera mechanism agree that it was too sophisticated to have been a one-off device. This adds support to the idea that there was an ancient Greek tradition of complex mechanical technology that was later transmitted to the Islamic world, where similarly complex mechanical devices were built.