4 stories mention Plutarch on DeadlyCurious.
For over a thousand years the Pythia of Delphi prophesied from a tripod in the temple of Apollo, in an altered state the ancients attributed to a sweet-smelling breath rising from the earth. Long dismissed as legend, the vapours returned to science in 2001, when geologists found the temple sits on intersecting faults seeping intoxicating hydrocarbon gases — a theory still argued over.
Read the story →Cleopatra VII killed herself at Alexandria on approximately 10 August 30 BCE, eleven days after her partner Mark Antony's suicide and three weeks after the city's fall to Octavian. The conventional account of the Egyptian cobra concealed in a basket of figs is first attested by Plutarch a century later. A 2010 reanalysis by Christoph Schaefer argued for a self-administered poison mixture as the more plausible cause of death.
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 →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 →