Ancient history

• The oldest surviving text of Latin prose is a manual of agriculture and recipes, including the placenta cake

  As we discussed in a previous article, barely one percent of all the literature produced by the Romans in Antiquity has survived to this day. The oldest surviving Latin text is a hymn recited by the priests of Mars at their annual feast, found inscribed on a stone in Rome in 1777. Latin literature

• The Farnese Atlas, the first known representation of the Celestial Sphere

  Atlas or Atlante was one of the titans of Greek mythology, son of Iapetus and the oceanic Climene, and brother of Prometheus. After the war against the Olympian gods, Zeus condemned him to hold the vault of heaven (or celestial sphere) on his shoulders for all eternity. Herodotus claimed that Atlan

• How a 4th-century bishop preserved the longest text on Phoenician religion to survive

  It remains shocking that from the people who invented the alphabet and by extension taught half the world to write, the Phoenicians, nothing of their literature has come down to us except for three fragments of papyrus. It is true that some 10,000 stone inscriptions and pottery fragments are preser

• The last 5 battles of the Western Roman Empire

  Historiographically, the year 476 AD is considered. like that of the end of the Western Roman Empire, being its last emperor Romulus Augustulus. It was not something that happened suddenly but rather as a result of an evolutionary process that began centuries ago, throughout which Rome suffered a pr

• The first mention of the word Abracadabra, in a Roman medical work from the 2nd century AD.

  When reading or hearing the expression Abracadabra we immediately think of witchcraft, enchantments, magic, and the like. Until a few years ago many magicians used it in their shows, and possibly there are those who continue to do so. The buzzword is not a modern invention, in fact neither its antiq

• Caesar, besieged with Cleopatra in Alexandria, had his ships burned to prevent retreat

  If we talk about the sieges that Julius Caesar experienced, Alesia will immediately come to mind, where he defeated the Gallic leader Vercingetorix after a month and a half of fighting and after having himself been besieged, when an enemy army unexpectedly appeared in the rear. He precisely he would

• The impostors who tried to impersonate Nero after the death of the Roman emperor

  The imposture sums up in History a series of episodes as amazing as they are fascinating and, sometimes, even funny. There are a multitude of individuals who, brandishing impudence as a flag, have elbowed their way into the books for their impudence in assuming alien personalities and living at the

• Megasthenes, the Greek geographer of the 3rd century BC. who described the Himalayas and calculated the longitude and latitude of India

  As with many lost works of antiquity, its content can be partially reconstructed by citations from later authors. This is what happened, for example, with the Phoenician story of Sanjuniatón. And also with the work of Megasthenes entitled Indica , where he recounts his journey to India in the 3rd ce

• Secessio plebis, the Roman antecedent of the general strike in which the people left the city

  Although the right to strike was not regulated until the 20th century, work stoppages were carried out for various reasons since ancient times, the first documented case being that of the workers of Set Maat (today Deir el-Medina, Egypt) during the reign of of Ramses III. We know this thanks to the

• How Aristotle's personal library came to Rome, almost 300 years after his death

  Throughout history, books have been a highly valued commodity. Its trade dates back many centuries to the invention of supports such as papyrus and parchment, and the creation of libraries by accumulating and copying copies gave rise to collections as famous as that of Alexandria. Unfortunately man

• The large island mentioned by Herodotus that disappeared from maps in the 15th century

  This is not the only case, throughout history there are reports of islands that have disappeared due to natural causes and catastrophes, as well as ghost islands placed on maps by zealous cartographers to unmask plagiarism and unfair competition. However, the case that concerns us here has certain c

• How the ancient Greeks invented a telegraph system to transmit messages over a distance

  The history of cryptography is almost as old as that of human language. It is known that the ancient Egyptians, Chinese, Indians or Greeks already used more or less sophisticated message encryption methods, as shown by some surviving documentary examples. Generally associated with the military fiel

• The Egyptian-Phoenician expedition that circumnavigated Africa more than 2,500 years ago

  The fact that the African continent was an unknown place for the most part until the second half of the 19th century does not mean that it did not accumulate numerous explorations to try to unravel its mysteries. And they were not only made in the Contemporary Age because the rosary of them goes bac

• Stoic opposition, the philosophers who challenged the Roman emperors

  Exercising opposition to an established government is part of the political game and democratic systems assume it as something normal. But where power is absolute, things become more difficult and the problem is that, throughout history, this has been the general trend. That is why it is surprising

• The Iliad and the Odyssey are only two of the eight poems in the Epic Cycle that narrate the Trojan War

  The Epic Cycle , also called Trojan Cycle for recounting events related to the Trojan War, they are a collection of eight poems composed in dactylic hexameter, the traditional type of verse in Greco-Latin epics. The two most famous, because they have been preserved complete, are The Iliad and The O

• Marco Claudio Marcelo, the "Sword of Rome" who tirelessly fought Hannibal

  If you remember, a few months ago we published an article dedicated to Quinto Fabio Máximo, five times Roman consul and dictator who was in charge of reading the declaration of war to Carthage and saved the capital of the Republic from its conquest by Hannibal, which is why which was nicknamed the S

• Bucephalus and Péritas, the animals whose names Alexander the Great gave to two cities

  Does the name of Alexandria Bucéfala (or Bucéfala to dry, or Bucephalia) ring a bell? It was a city that Alexander the Great founded in 326 BC. on the west bank of the river Hydaspes and which he named after his prized horse, the famous Bucephalus, who had just died in battle at the age of thirty (a

• The only Greco-Roman temple in the former Soviet Union

  While it existed, the Soviet Union encompassed a vast expanse of territory, including the Ukrainian, Georgian, and Russian Black Sea coasts. Along these lines, numerous Greek colonies were founded in ancient times, such as Chersonesus, Theodosia, Phanagoria, Pitio or Dioscuríade, among others, later

• Leonidas of Rhodes, the athlete who held the record for Olympic victories for more than 2,000 years

  Citius, altius, fortius . The slogan of the Olympic Games, which is not really a classic but created by Pierre de Coubertin to inaugurate the 1896 edition, taking it from the frontispiece of a French school, means Faster, higher, stronger. Of these three adjectives, today we are going to focus on th

• How Thales of Miletus Earned a Small Fortune, to Prove the Usefulness of Philosophy

  Thales of Miletus was already considered by Aristotle as the first Greek philosopher. Born around the year 624 B.C. he is today recognized as the forerunner of modern science, in the sense that he tried to explain the world through theories and hypotheses, moving away from the traditional mythologic