7 stories mention Pliny the Elder on DeadlyCurious.
Pliny the Elder commanded the Roman naval fleet at Misenum on 24 August 79 AD when Vesuvius erupted. He ordered the fleet to evacuate civilians from the affected shore. He died on the beach at Stabiae approximately twenty hours later, probably of a heart attack triggered by inhaled volcanic gas. His nephew Pliny the Younger wrote the eyewitness account.
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 →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 →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 →King Mausolus died in 353 BC. His widow built him a tomb so spectacular that for two thousand years every grand tomb in Europe was called by his name.
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 →For sixteen hundred years the Pharos of Alexandria threw light over a sea. Three earthquakes finished what nothing else could.
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