alternatehistory.com

A little known (the world in general) fact is that the Ancient Greeks had created complex machinery. They built a rig for raising and lowering actors onto stages. Priests used one to part people from their money. It was only a matter of time before some enterprising Greek, likely a stagehand, tried to applying the concept to a more productive endeavor.

However, the Romans, not seeing anything particularly useful about these machines, destroyed them, setting progress back a thousand years.

What would it take to give the Greeks enough time to discover the industrial value of the machine, and what would its effects be? Bonus points if it also includes the steam engine.
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