One of my professors way back used the example of the ancient Greek steam engine as an argument against slavery. Since people could be forced to work, there was no interest in labor-saving devices, thus setting back the advancement of mankind, what...2,000 years or so.
It is also an effective argument against unlimited immigration.
Was it capable of doing an amount of work at least comparable to that required to harvest and transport the necessary fuel? The first steam engines in Europe were used to pump water out of mines; they were so horrendously inefficient that if they weren't directly adjacent to the mines it would have taken more work to haul the fuel than could be done by the engines. Did the Greeks have sufficient understanding of the underlying physics to make a steam engine that could operate efficiently?