The Old World

Shakespeare invented the Latin phrase in 1599. The Roman sources are different. Suetonius reports that Caesar said nothing — or, if anything, the Greek phrase *καὶ σύ, τέκνον* ('you too, my child?') to Brutus before pulling his toga over his head. Plutarch agrees on the toga gesture and says Caesar gave up resistance when he saw Brutus among his attackers. The Latin tag *Et tu, Brute?* is one of the most-quoted lines in English literature and has nothing to do with the historical record.

The Ptolemaic dynasty was founded in 323 BC by Ptolemy I Soter, one of Alexander the Great's senior Macedonian generals, who took Egypt at Alexander's death. The dynasty ruled Egypt for 275 years and never spoke Egyptian at court — Greek was the language of administration the whole time. Cleopatra VII, the last Ptolemy, was the first to bother learning the Egyptian language. She killed herself in 30 BC after losing the war with Octavian, ending three centuries of Greek rule over Egypt.

Caesar arrived in Alexandria in 48 BC chasing Pompey (who had just been murdered at the Egyptian beach where he landed) and stayed long enough for Cleopatra to bear Caesarion in June 47 BC. Mark Antony arrived in 41 BC and produced twins (Alexander Helios, Cleopatra Selene II) in 40 BC and a younger son (Ptolemy Philadelphus) in 36 BC. Caesarion was executed by Octavian after Cleopatra's suicide. The twins were raised in Rome by Octavian's sister Octavia.

Pompeii was buried under roughly 20 feet of pumice and ash by the end of the eruption — enough to bury entire two-story buildings up to their rooftops. Herculaneum, on the western flank of Vesuvius, was buried under much more (about 70 feet of pyroclastic flow material) because the volcano's first major lateral surge went west. The 20-foot depth at Pompeii preserved the town in extraordinary detail and is why the bodies, the wall paintings, and even the loaves of bread in the ovens survived to be excavated.

The traditional foundation date is 21 April 753 BC — the day Romulus killed his twin Remus in a dispute about which hill to build the city on. The date was a Roman religious-political calculation, working backward from later dynastic chronologies; modern archaeology suggests continuous settlement on the Palatine hill from approximately the 8th century BC, broadly consistent with the date but with no specific evidence for the twin-wolf-fratricide narrative. 509 BC is the founding of the Roman Republic (the expulsion of the last king Tarquinius Superbus). 600 BC is roughly when the historical urban-Roman state becomes archaeologically visible.

Octavian's fleet under his admiral Agrippa beat Antony and Cleopatra at Actium. Antony killed himself first, on the false rumour that Cleopatra was already dead; she followed him a few weeks later. Pompey had been dead for seventeen years by then — Caesar had defeated him at Pharsalus in 48 BC, and he'd been murdered in Egypt shortly after. Caesar himself had been assassinated thirteen years earlier on the Ides of March.

Alexander died in the palace at Babylon (modern Iraq) on 10 or 11 June 323 BC after a ten-day fever. The cause is still disputed — typhoid, West Nile, malaria, alcoholic complications, and slow poisoning have all had defenders. He never made it home; his body was hijacked by his general Ptolemy and brought to Alexandria, where it became a major tourist attraction for the next several centuries until the tomb was lost in late antiquity. He had personally burned Persepolis nine years earlier.

King Hiero II had commissioned a gold crown but suspected the goldsmith of substituting some silver. Archimedes realised in the bath that an object's volume could be measured by the water it displaces — and that comparing the displacement of the crown with that of a pure-gold reference of the same weight would reveal the fraud. The story comes from Vitruvius (writing about 250 years later) and may be embellished. The Eureka technique is now substantially recognised as a real Archimedean principle (the law of buoyancy), independently developed in his treatise *On Floating Bodies*. The mirror/burning-glass war machine is a separate (and probably apocryphal) story from the siege of Syracuse.

Justinian's 529 imperial edict prohibited pagans from teaching philosophy or law. Damascius — the last head of the Academy — closed the institution and led six other senior philosophers east to seek asylum at the Sasanian court of Khosrow I. They returned to Roman territory three years later under a clause of the 532 Treaty of Eternal Peace that guaranteed their legal protection. Theodosius I's 391 decree had earlier closed the pagan temples (the Serapeum at Alexandria was destroyed under it) but did not specifically close the Athenian schools.

Cleisthenes's reforms in 508/507 BC reorganised the Athenian citizen body into ten new tribes and introduced the lot-based council that ran daily business. Pericles in the mid-5th century pushed direct popular participation further. The system lasted about 180 years before Macedonian conquest in 322 BC suppressed it. Participation was restricted to adult male citizens — roughly 30,000–60,000 men out of a city population of perhaps 300,000 including women, slaves, and resident foreigners. Demosthenes was a 4th-century BC orator at the tail end of democratic Athens, not its founder. The Bronze Age date predates Greek writing entirely.

29 May 1453, after a 53-day siege. The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, died fighting at the walls; his body was never reliably identified. The siege gun — built by the Hungarian engineer Orban — had a 27-foot bronze barrel and fired stone balls weighing 600 pounds. The 1204 sack was the Fourth Crusade's catastrophic detour; the Byzantines recovered the city in 1261. Manzikert (1071) was the earlier Seljuk Turkish victory that lost most of Anatolia. The 1683 Siege of Vienna was 230 years later, after the Ottomans had become a different kind of empire.

Cannae killed approximately 50,000–70,000 Romans in roughly four hours, including one of the two consuls and about 80 senators. The single-day death toll wasn't exceeded by a Western army until the first day of the Somme in July 1916, 2,132 years later. Hannibal's tactical formation — a deliberate convex bow in his centre that withdrew under Roman pressure while his African infantry on the wings closed in from both sides — is still studied at every military academy. Rome didn't surrender. Within fifteen years it had destroyed Carthage.

The snake-bite story comes from Plutarch (writing about 130 years later) and is the tradition that has dominated subsequent European literature and visual art. Modern medical scepticism notes that cobra venom usually kills slowly and painfully — not the quick dignified death the traditional story describes — and proposes alternatives (a fast-acting poison concealed in a hollow comb, suffocation, even Octavian-arranged murder). The basket of figs detail is in Plutarch and may be folklore. Cleopatra was 39. Her son Caesarion was executed by Octavian within weeks.

Eratosthenes knew that on the summer solstice, the sun was directly overhead at Syene (modern Aswan), because it lit the bottom of a deep well. At Alexandria on the same day, a vertical pole cast a shadow at an angle of about 7.2 degrees. Since 7.2° is one-fiftieth of a circle, the distance between Alexandria and Syene had to be one-fiftieth of the Earth's circumference. He knew the distance (about 5,000 stadia, by professional surveyors who measured it by counting camel paces). The arithmetic gave a circumference of approximately 250,000 stadia — about 40,000 km, within two percent of the modern value. He had no instruments more complex than a pole.

Polybius, the most reliable source, gives 37. They were probably North African forest elephants — a smaller subspecies than the Indian war elephant, now extinct, that the Carthaginians used in earlier wars. By the time Hannibal reached the Italian plains, only a handful were still alive. By the time of the Battle of Trebia later that winter, only one was left; Hannibal personally rode it. The 200-elephant figure belongs to Pyrrhus's much earlier Italian campaign of 280 BC.

Approximately 60 senators were in the conspiracy, although only a fraction were active in the actual stabbing in the Theatre of Pompey. The 23 wounds reported in the autopsy weren't all from the same person. Brutus and Cassius were the political organisers; the stabbing itself was a group act, with each conspirator expected to make a personal contribution. Caesar's body lay where it fell for some hours before being recovered. None of the assassins survived the resulting civil war; Brutus and Cassius died at Philippi in 42 BC.

Built under Ptolemy II Philadelphus around 280 BC at the entrance to Alexandria's harbour. Estimated height between 103 and 118 metres — the tallest human-built structure in the world for most of its existence. A series of medieval earthquakes (956, 1303, 1323 AD) progressively destroyed it. The Mamluk Sultan Qaitbay used its remaining stones to build a citadel on the same site in 1480; the Qaitbay Citadel still stands. The lighthouse design — multiple stepped tiers (square base, octagonal middle, cylindrical top) with a fire and reflector at the summit — set the template for the entire subsequent European lighthouse tradition.

79 AD has stuck since antiquity. The August date came from a corrupt manuscript reading of Pliny the Younger's letters and has been steadily eroded by archaeology: woollen cloaks on victim bodies, autumn-harvest material in shops, and most decisively a charcoal inscription dated 17 October found in House V.6 in 2018. An October eruption — about 24 October — is now consensus. Pliny the Elder died on the second day of the eruption while trying to mount a naval rescue from Misenum.

The Republic lasted from 509 BC to approximately 27 BC — about 482 years. The legendary trigger was the rape of Lucretia by Tarquin's son, which produced an aristocratic revolt under Lucius Junius Brutus that expelled the Tarquin dynasty. 753 BC was the traditional Roman foundation date for the city itself. 264 BC was the start of the First Punic War. 27 BC is the Augustan settlement that effectively ended the Republic.

Synesius was made Bishop of Ptolemais in 410 AD by the Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria — the same Theophilus who had destroyed the Serapeum nineteen years earlier. He accepted only on the explicit condition that he could keep his wife, his philosophical views (he did not believe in the literal resurrection of the body), and his hunting. He governed the see for three years before dying of an unidentified illness around 413. Hypatia was murdered by an Alexandrian mob two years later, in 415.

The Antikythera mechanism uses about 35 interlocking bronze gears to model the motion of the sun, moon, and (probably) the five visible planets, with a complete eclipse-prediction system based on the Saros cycle. The shipwreck dates to roughly 60 BC; the mechanism was probably built around 100 BC, in the eastern Mediterranean Greek scientific tradition associated with Hipparchus of Rhodes. Nothing of comparable mechanical sophistication is known until medieval Islamic astronomical instruments more than a thousand years later. The original existence of such a device was so improbable that the academic mainstream took most of the 20th century to accept it.

The Hipparchian catalogue contained approximately 850 stars, with positions in ecliptic coordinates accurate to about one degree and brightnesses on a 1-to-6 magnitude scale (the direct ancestor of the modern stellar magnitude system). The catalogue itself was lost; it survives substantially through inclusion in Ptolemy's *Almagest* (c. 150 AD), where Ptolemy substantially preserved Hipparchus's data with minor updates. A 2022 multispectral imaging project at St Catherine's Monastery in Sinai recovered fragments of the original Hipparchian Greek text from a palimpsest — the first direct recovery of any portion of the catalogue. Telescopes were 1,700 years in the future.

Hipparchus noticed that the stars had shifted about 2 degrees relative to the equinox points since the older Alexandrian observations. He was about 30 percent low on the rate but the discovery itself was the first detection of any systematic motion of the whole celestial sphere — caused, as we now know, by the Earth's axis wobbling like a top on a 26,000-year cycle. Aristarchus had been earlier (3rd century BC) and proposed heliocentrism — also correct, also ignored. Eratosthenes was the librarian. Ptolemy lived three centuries after Hipparchus and preserved most of Hipparchus's work in the *Almagest*.

A new star — what we now call a Type Ia supernova, SN 1572 — appeared in Cassiopeia and remained visible for sixteen months. Aristotelian cosmology held that the celestial sphere above the moon was unchanging; a new star above the moon was, by the prevailing theory, impossible. Tycho's parallax measurements demonstrated that the star sat well beyond the moon, demolishing the Aristotelian unchanging-heavens doctrine on observational grounds. His pamphlet *De Nova Stella* (1573) was one of the foundational publications of European astronomy. The other answers describe imagined celestial phenomena rather than the actual 1572 event.

Cleopatra Selene II married Juba II of Mauretania around 25 BC. Both had been raised in the same Roman aristocratic household; Augustus gave them Mauretania as a client kingdom. Their capital, Iol, was renamed Caesarea (modern Cherchell, Algeria). Numidia had been Juba's father's kingdom but was annexed by Rome after the father's suicide in 46 BC. Cappadocia had its own Roman client dynasty. The Bosporan kingdom was a different Roman client kingdom around the Sea of Azov — Cleopatra Selene had nothing to do with it.