14 stories from this century.
Classical and medieval tradition holds that Archimedes used a system of polished bronze mirrors to focus sunlight on the Roman ships besieging Syracuse, setting them on fire. The story is first attested 350 years after the siege. Modern experimental reconstructions have produced ambiguous results.
Read the story →Marcus Claudius Marcellus took Syracuse in 212 BC after a two-year siege. He had ordered Archimedes spared. He arrived at the mathematician's house to find him dead by a Roman soldier's spear. Marcellus had the killer executed, gave Archimedes a state funeral, and is recorded as having wept publicly at the destruction of the captured city.
Read the story →A major earthquake struck Rhodes in 226 BC, destroying the Colossus and substantial portions of the city. The substantial Hellenistic Mediterranean response — substantial coordinated grain shipments, building-reconstruction subsidies, and naval-military assistance from substantially every major Hellenistic kingdom — was the first internationally-coordinated disaster aid campaign documented in European history.
Read the story →Syene — modern Aswan, in upper Egypt — sits almost exactly on the Tropic of Cancer. At noon on the summer solstice, the sun stands directly overhead and a vertical pole casts no shadow. Eratosthenes used the difference between the Syene noon and the simultaneous Alexandrian noon to compute the Earth's circumference around 240 BC.
Read the story →Several late-antique sources record that Archimedes used parabolic bronze mirrors during the 213 BC siege of Syracuse to focus sunlight onto Roman ships and set them on fire. The story first appears 700 years after the event. Modern reconstructions show the technique is technically possible but operationally implausible.
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 a pupil of the Greek master sculptor Lysippus and the principal architect of the Colossus of Rhodes. He spent twelve years (294–282 BC) directing the construction. By one of two competing legends, he killed himself when a crack appeared in the finished statue's leg. The other legend says his commissioners short-paid him into bankruptcy.
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 →Serapis was a deliberately syncretic Greco-Egyptian deity created under Ptolemy I around 305 BC to unite the Ptolemaic kingdom's Greek and Egyptian populations under a shared imperial cult. The Serapis cult flourished across the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean for six centuries before the 391 AD Christian suppression substantially erased it.
Read the story →Eratosthenes's famous measurement of the Earth's circumference depended on a peculiar geographical fact about the southern Egyptian town of Syene. On the summer solstice, the Sun stood exactly at the zenith there — a single annual moment that defined the line we now call the Tropic of Cancer.
Read the story →Marcus Claudius Marcellus was the Roman consul who finally captured Syracuse in 212 BC after a two-year siege. He had given specific orders that the mathematician Archimedes was to be taken alive; one of his soldiers killed him anyway. Marcellus wept at the news and had Archimedes buried with full honours.
Read the story →Marcus Claudius Marcellus was the Roman consul who finally took Syracuse in 212 BC after a two-year siege. He had ordered Archimedes spared and reportedly wept when he learned the mathematician had been killed anyway. Three years later Marcellus was ambushed and killed by Hannibal's scouts in southern Italy.
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 →Syene — modern Aswan, at the First Cataract of the Nile — sits almost exactly on the Tropic of Cancer. At noon on the summer solstice the Sun stood directly overhead and cast no shadow. That geographical fact gave Eratosthenes the second measurement he needed to compute the size of the Earth in the 3rd century BC.
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