22 stories set here.
On 2 September 31 BC, off western Greece, the fleets of Octavian and of Antony and Cleopatra met at Actium. Cleopatra's squadron broke out mid-battle and Antony followed her, abandoning his fleet and army — which surrendered. Within a year both were dead in Alexandria, Egypt was a Roman province, and Octavian was on his way to becoming Augustus.
Read the story →In 1823 Europe's most famous poet sailed to join the Greek War of Independence, spending his fortune on the cause. At Missolonghi, planning an assault he would never lead, Byron caught fever in April 1824 and was bled to death by his doctors at 36. Greece mourned him as a national hero; Westminster Abbey refused his body.
Read the story →The Christian Holy League fleet of approximately 212 galleys defeated the Ottoman fleet of approximately 251 galleys at the Gulf of Patras off western Greece on 7 October 1571. About 30,000 Ottoman sailors and approximately 7,500 Christian sailors were killed in approximately four hours of close combat. Approximately 12,000 Christian galley slaves chained to Ottoman rowing benches were liberated. It is conventionally the last major naval battle fought primarily with oared galleys.
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 →Socrates was tried for impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens in 399 BCE. The 500-member jury voted 280 to 220 to convict, then by a wider margin to impose death. He drank hemlock at sunset some weeks later in the prison at the western foot of the Acropolis. He was 70.
Read the story →King Leonidas I of Sparta and approximately 7,000 allied Greek troops held the narrow pass of Thermopylae against the Persian invasion army of Xerxes I for three days in August 480 BCE. A Greek defector named Ephialtes showed the Persians a flanking mountain path on the evening of the second day. Leonidas dismissed most of the allied troops on the third morning. The 300 Spartans, plus about 700 Thespians and 400 Thebans who refused to retreat, were killed at the pass.
Read the story →The Knights Hospitaller had governed Rhodes since 1309. In summer 1522 the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent besieged the island with an army of approximately 100,000 against the Hospitallers' 7,500 defenders. The siege ran six months. The Hospitallers surrendered on negotiated terms in December and were given safe passage to Crete.
Read the story →Eudoxus of Cnidus proposed in the 360s BC that the apparent motions of the planets could be explained by a system of 27 concentric rotating spheres centred on the Earth. Aristotle expanded the model to 55 spheres. The framework substantively defined European cosmology until Tycho Brahe.
Read the story →Hippocrates of Chios was a Greek geometer of the late 5th century BC — not the famous physician of Cos. He was the first European mathematician to compute the exact area of a region bounded by curves, an achievement that opened the path Eudoxus and Archimedes would later complete with the method of exhaustion.
Read the story →Hippocrates of Cos and Hippocrates of Chios were near-contemporaries — both Greek, both prominent in their fields, both with the same first name — and were occasionally confused even by ancient sources. One founded the European medical tradition; the other wrote the first textbook of European geometry.
Read the story →Hyperides was one of the ten canonical Attic orators of the 4th century BC. Almost all of his speeches were lost in late antiquity. Three substantial portions were recovered in 2002 from the same Constantinople prayer book that preserves the Archimedes Palimpsest, using multispectral imaging.
Read the story →The same Greek sponge divers who found the [Antikythera mechanism](/articles/antikythera-mechanism) in 1900–1901 brought up a 1.96-metre bronze statue of a young man. He is one of perhaps a dozen complete or near-complete classical Greek bronzes that have survived to the present. He has been in Athens for almost 125 years.
Read the story →Aristarchus of Samos proposed around 270 BC that the Earth orbits the Sun, not the other way around. The classical and late-antique Greek astronomical mainstream — including Hipparchus and Ptolemy — rejected the proposal on empirical grounds. The work survives only through a single passage in Archimedes.
Read the story →Chares of Lindos was the Rhodian sculptor who built the 33-metre bronze Colossus of Rhodes between approximately 292 and 280 BC. He had been a pupil of Lysippos. Late-antique tradition claims he killed himself when he discovered a substantial computational error in the statue's stress profile. The Colossus stood for 54 years and was knocked down by an earthquake in 226 BC.
Read the story →The Knights Hospitaller of Saint John captured Rhodes in 1309 and held it as a sovereign crusader state until Suleiman the Magnificent's siege of 1522. They built the fortifications that still define the Old Town. They lost the island after a six-month siege that the rest of Christian Europe declined to relieve.
Read the story →Plato's Academy was founded around 387 BC and closed by Justinian's edict in 529 AD. For most of that nine-century period the Academy was the institutional core of Greek mathematical and astronomical teaching — the lineage that produced Eudoxus, Aristotle, Theaetetus, and most of the substantively classical Greek mathematical tradition.
Read the story →An earthquake struck Rhodes in approximately 226 BC, knocking down the Colossus, damaging substantial portions of the city walls, and producing widespread Aegean damage. The Hellenistic kings of Egypt, Macedon, Syria, and Pergamon all sent substantial financial and material aid — the first known case of coordinated international disaster diplomacy.
Read the story →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 →In 529 the Emperor Justinian closed the philosophical schools of Athens. The Academy that traced its descent to Plato had operated for almost 900 years. Its surviving teachers, led by Damascius, walked east into Sasanian Persia. Five years later they walked back.
Read the story →Hipparchus of Rhodes catalogued a thousand stars, invented trigonometry, discovered the precession of the equinoxes, and may have built the original of the Antikythera mechanism. Almost none of his writing survives.
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 →Sponge divers found a corroded lump of bronze in 1901. It took a hundred and twenty years to admit what it actually was.
Read the story →