10 stories from this century.
On 2 August 216 BC, Hannibal's outnumbered army enveloped and destroyed the largest force Rome had ever fielded — ancient figures run to 50,000-70,000 dead in a day. Rome refused to negotiate, armed slaves, and fought on. Cannae remains the model of the battle of annihilation, still taught at every war college; winning it did not win the war.
Read the story →China's First Emperor was buried in 210 BC beneath a man-made mountain near Xi'an, guarded — the historian Sima Qian wrote — by crossbow traps, with rivers of mercury flowing across a model of his empire. In 1974 farmers digging a well found his terracotta army. The burial chamber itself has never been opened — and the soil above it really is laced with mercury.
Read the story →Archimedes was asked by King Hiero II of Syracuse to determine whether a goldsmith had fraudulently substituted silver for some of the gold in a royal crown. The principle of displacement — that a submerged body displaces a volume of water equal to its own volume — occurred to Archimedes in the public bath. He reportedly ran home shouting "Eureka!" without dressing. The first surviving record of the story is Vitruvius, two centuries later.
Read the story →Hannibal Barca crossed the Alps in October 218 BCE with 37 war elephants. All but one were dead within four months. At the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE, Hannibal's 80 fresh African elephants panicked at Roman trumpet signals, turned, and trampled their own infantry. The defeat ended the Second Punic War and Carthaginian power.
Read the story →Pyrrhus of Epirus — the king whose costly victories produced the term "Pyrrhic victory" — was killed in street fighting at Argos in 272 BCE. He was stunned by a roof tile thrown by an elderly woman defending her son inside her house and was decapitated by a Macedonian soldier moments later. He was approximately 47.
Read the story →The Colossus of Rhodes stood for fifty-four years and lay in ruins for nearly nine hundred. A Jewish merchant from Edessa bought the bronze.
Read the story →After two years of siege, the Romans broke into Syracuse. A junior soldier found a seventy-five-year-old man drawing in the sand and made the worst mistake of his career.
Read the story →He used balance points to discover the volumes of curved solids, then proved them with strict geometry. The Greeks called it forbidden. He called it the Method.
Read the story →Around 240 BC the chief librarian at Alexandria measured the planet's circumference using two shadows and a piece of arithmetic. He was off by about two percent.
Read the story →For sixteen hundred years the Pharos of Alexandria threw light over a sea. Three earthquakes finished what nothing else could.
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