Αρχαία ελληνική μυθολογία και τεχνολογία – Θεοδόσης Π. Τάσιος

Theodosis P. Tassios is ninety-six years old, has been writing about Greek antiquity longer than most of his audience has been alive, and walks onto the Dimitris Mitropoulos stage to make the same argument he has been refining for decades — that Greek mythology was, in part, a record of technological imagination. You sit in a hall built for symphony orchestras and listen to a civil engineer trace Hephaestus's automata, Daedalus's wings, and Prometheus's fire as engineering propositions before they were poetic ones.

Tassios has earned the chair. Born in Kastoria in 1930, raised in Megara, he studied civil engineering at the National Technical University of Athens and stayed for sixty years — Professor Emeritus there, member of the Torino Academy of Sciences, president of the Hellenic Society for the Study of Ancient Greek Technology, author of more than four hundred and thirty scientific papers and fifty books. The Medal of the City of Paris and the International Award of Merit in Structural Engineering came for the modern engineering work; the Ancient Greek Technology argument is the one he keeps returning to. The Bodossaki Lectures on Demand archive partners on the talk. Aris Katopodis joins as the historian counterweight.

The audience is not the typical Megaron concert crowd. You see engineers, science teachers, and humanities scholars who follow this particular cycle, plus the readership Tassios has built across forty years of Greek-language books and op-eds. People take notes. People want the slides afterward.

| Aspect | Detail | |---|---| | Setting | Dimitris Mitropoulos Hall, Megaron Plus lecture cycle | | Vibe | Scholarly, generationally mixed, attentive | | Sound | Single voice, occasional projector audio | | Door | Reservation through webtics.megaron.gr, two tickets per person |

The talk runs in two parts. The first sweeps quickly through cosmology, the twelve Olympians, the sea, the underworld, athletics, eros, and the bestiary, looking for moments where a myth describes a technical impulse before the technology existed. The second slows down on Hephaestus's forge, Athena's loom, the labors of Heracles, Prometheus and the gift of fire, and the Daedalus complex — flight, the labyrinth, the artificial cow — and treats each as a thought experiment that anticipates what later engineers would build.

If you came expecting Joseph Campbell's monomyth or the symbolic readings that dominate undergraduate mythology classes, this is a different lens. But if you have ever wondered why the Greeks needed to imagine a god of crafts before they had a steam engine, Tassios has spent his life on that question.

The Megaron sits on Vasilissis Sofias, walking distance from Megaro Mousikis metro station — the venue is directly above the platform exit. Reservations open 28 May 2026 through webtics.megaron.gr; admission requires the booked ticket, capped at two per person.

Most of Tassios's recent talks live in the Bodossaki video archive afterward — this one happens in a hall with two thousand other people first.