Ancient history

• Celia Concordia, the last vestal of Rome

  One of the most iconic corners of the Roman Forum is a fragment of the wall of a cella surrounded by five Corinthian columns that, supported on a podium, support the remains of a linteled entablature with frieze and architrave. It is what remains of the ancient temple of Vesta, which guarded the s

• Quintus Fabius Pictor, the first Roman historian, wrote in Greek

  If we ask for the names of historians of Ancient Rome, surely Titus Livy, Plutarch, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Dio Cassius, Polybius will come out... Most of them have in common being of Greek origin, although some were Roman and others obtained citizenship, but there is one thing on which they una

• The history of the Sibylline Books, the prophecies consulted by the Romans, destroyed by Stilicho in the 5th century

  If we pay attention to what Claudius Namaciano (a Gallo-Roman poet of the 5th century AD) tells in his work De reditu suo libri duo , the famous general Flavius ​​Stilicho ordered the burning of the Sibylline Books to thus silence the use that opponents made of them against his government. At firs

• When Hasdrubal crossed the Alps faster than Hannibal, to bring him reinforcements

  How many battles do we know of the Second Punic War? The most famous, without a doubt, are those of Cannae, Trebia, Zama and Lake Trasimeno, all of them carried out, on the Carthaginian side, by Hannibal Barca. But there were many more - not in vain were seventeen long years of conflict - and some n

• Lucius Sicio Dentatus, the Roman who is considered the bravest soldier of all time

  Would anyone know who was probably the best warrior of all time? I am not talking about generals or chiefs but about those who were in the front line, fighting with the troops. Surely names like El Cid, Tlahuicole, Diego García de Paredes, Miyamoto Musashi or Tzilacaltzin, to name a few, will come t

• The Euphrates Tunnel, the world's first underground passage, built over 4,000 years ago

  The Greek historian of the 1st century B.C. Diodorus of Sicily collects in his Bibliotheca historica a surprising fact:the construction in Babylon of an underground passage under the Euphrates river, an engineering prodigy that would not be repeated until the 19th century. Diodorus says: The Semir

• Pyramus and Thisbe, the mythical Mesopotamian lovers who originated the story of Romeo and Juliet

  Someone once said that everything in literature has been invented since Homer. The truth is that some works are earlier and although they lack that touch of refinement, they laid the foundations for a multitude of themes that would later be dealt with again and again by different authors. In that

• Tito Tacio, the king who wanted to avenge the affront of the kidnapping of the Sabine women and ended up joining Rome

  If all nations have foundational myths that constitute their foundations, even though they are often as much or more fantasy than reality, ancient Rome was so prodigal in them that it is very difficult to know where history ends and where legend begins. . In this sense, Romulus, its mythical founder

• The false shipwreck fraud perpetrated in ancient Rome by the contractor Marco Postumio Pirgense

  If someone believes that corruption is an exclusive phenomenon of our days, they are completely wrong; There have always been swindlers, profiteers and opportunists, and in history there are a few who are amply accredited, since the beginning of time. And, of course, ancient Rome was not going to be

• Tree rings could determine the date of the great eruption of the island of Tera in the year 1560 BC.

  When researcher Charlotte Pearson examined a palm-sized piece of ancient tree, she noted that one of the rings seemed unusually small. Three years later, and armed with new methodology and technology, she discovered that this ring could mark the year that the volcano of Tera (the Greek island of San

• Eurymedon, the battle in which the Athenians disguised themselves as Persians, and marked the beginning of the end of the Persian Wars

  The Persian Wars pitted the Greeks against the Persians for fifty-nine years in the second half of the 5th century BC. for the control of the so-called Asiatic Greece, the western part of the Anatolian peninsula (Ionia, Eólida and Dórida) and its islands, all of it of Hellenic culture. The Persian E

• Marcus Aponius Saturninus, the man whose sleeping nods during an auction were turned into bids by Caligula

  Caligulas reign has gone down in history as a period of terror and madness that some books and movies have taken advantage of:naming his horse consul, putting his legions to collect shells on the beach, forcing senators wives to prostitute yourself... Current historiography questions the veracity

• Xanthippus, the Spartan general in the service of Carthage who prevented the city from being conquered by the Romans

  The First Punic War opened the long series of three contests between Rome and Carthage for control of the western Mediterranean. As is known, the Romans managed to prevail in all of them, but to do so they had to overcome critical moments. If in the second conflict the protagonist of them was Hannib

• Lucilius, the Roman poet who invented literary satire

  The dictionary of the R.A.E. generically defines satire as a “sharp, pungent, biting speech or saying, aimed at censuring or ridiculing” . Something that must be as old as speech itself and, therefore, without an assigned inventor. Now, when it is taken to literature, it adopts its own form, a compo

• The Cantabrian circle and other combat tactics that the Romans learned in the Asturian-Cantabrian wars

  Since Tercios seem to have become fashionable for some time now, it is possible that more than one reader knows what the conch was. It was a combat tactic developed by heavy cavalry and blacksmiths between the 16th and 17th centuries against the closed formation of an enemy third or unit, whose bris

• Cremera, the battle between Romans and Etruscans in which only one of the 306 males of the gens Fabia survived

  The gens Fabia almost monopolized the power of Ancient Rome during the last quarter of the 5th century BC. Up to seven successive consulates chained between the years 485 and 479 BC. to later disappear from the lists for a while. The reason was because they perished en masse at the Battle of Cremera

• How Themistocles distracted the Spartans to rebuild the walls of Athens without them knowing

  During the Second Persian War, the Persians burned and razed Athens twice. The first under the direction of Xerxes himself in 480 BC, and the second with Mardonius the following year, in 479 BC. In 480 BC, after his victory at Thermopylae, Xerxes advanced on Attica and took the capital, whose popu

• Horacio Cocles, the hero who fought alone on a bridge defending Rome from an invasion

  What better way for a man to die than to meet his terrible fate, defending the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods? This excerpt from a poem that the English writer, historian and politician Thomas Macaulay wrote in his work The lays of Ancient Rome (Cantos de la Antigua Roma, 1842), r

• Hellanodicas, the organizers and judges of the Olympic Games of Antiquity

  The myth tells that Evadne, who was the daughter of Poseidon, had a son with Apollo, of which she was ashamed, and therefore she abandoned him to her fate. But the boy survived thanks to two snakes feeding him honey, until someone found him lying among violets and gave him the name Yamo. When he w

• Linothorax, the linen breastplate used by hoplites in Ancient Greece as an alternative to bronze

  In general, people have a somewhat stereotyped perception of the iconography of the warriors of Ancient Greece, ignoring that the Hellenic panoplies varied greatly from those heavy Mycenaean bronze plate armor to the absence of any body protection in later centuries - except the pilo type helmet s-.