4 stories from this century.
The Antikythera mechanism was not the only thing on the 60 BC Greek shipwreck. Spongers in 1900 brought up four life-size bronze sculptures and a marble youth that nobody could date. Then they found the planetary computer. The other finds have been quietly upstaged for a century.
Read the story →Cleopatra and Mark Antony had three children. The boys died young. The daughter Cleopatra Selene II was raised by the wife of the man who had killed her parents and married off to a North African client king. She named her son Ptolemy. He was killed by Caligula.
Read the story →According to Plutarch, Mark Antony stripped the library at Pergamon — the second-largest collection in the Hellenistic world — and gave its 200,000 volumes to Cleopatra. The story is probably exaggerated. The library was certainly emptied.
Read the story →On 24 October 79 AD Vesuvius opened above the Bay of Naples and buried two Roman towns under twenty feet of pumice and ash. The people who died in Pompeii were killed in the first wave of the second day, by a cloud of superheated gas at six hundred degrees Celsius.
Read the story →