Egil Skallagrimsson (10th century Viking-era poet)
“It is rare to find
one to trust
amongst men who dwell
beneath Odin’s gallows,
for the dark-minded
destroyer of kin
swaps his brother’s
death for treasure.”
Lü Buwei was a prominent minister of Qin during the decades before the kings of Qin formally became emperors. He began his career as a simple merchant, and, because of his keen mind for strategy and administration, his business was extremely profitable. Nevertheless, his career trajectory would dramatically change after a trip to the city of Handan, the capital of the state of Zhao.
While in Handan, Lü Buwei encountered a Qin nobleman being held there as a diplomatic hostage—the man’s name was Zichu. He was one of more than twenty sons fathered by Lord Anguo, who had become the crown prince of Qin around 267 BCE. As such, Zichu was a member of the Qin royal family, but he was still considered low enough in the succession to be given away by his king as a hostage to assure peace between Qin and Zhao. Nevertheless, with a potential heir to the kingdom of Qin at his fingertips, Lü Buwei decided to give up the life of a merchant for that of a politician.
Lü Buwei offered his services to Zichu, promising to help the prince rise through the ranks of the royal family to ultimate power. His only demand was that the prosperity be reciprocated—if Zichu became wealthy and powerful, Lü Buwei wanted his fair share of the rewards. Zichu agreed to the proposal and his new advisor immediately set to work, organizing the political ascendance of his patron.
After traveling back to Qin, Lü Buwei impressively managed to get Zichu elevated above his many brothers and named as Lord Anguo’s heir.
Lü Buwei then enjoyed the benefits of his patron’s rise to prominence. His wealth grew and he lived with an extremely beautiful concubine. Her beauty was such that it made other people envious—even the crown prince was enamored. After one particular bout of drinking, Zichu proclaimed that he wanted the concubine for himself. Lü Buwei, obviously, was deeply offended, but could not refuse a request from a crown prince of Qin. The concubine joined the prince’s household, but, according to rumor, she was already pregnant before this move occurred.
The concubine gave birth to a son named Zheng around 259 BCE, shortly after she left Lü Buwei for Zichu. At the end of that decade, King Zhaoxiang of Qin died (in 251 BCE) and Lord Anguo succeeded to the throne as King Xiaowen, making Zichu the new heir apparent. King Xiaowen did not live long, causing Zichu to quickly ascend to the throne around 250 BCE, under the name King Zhuangxiang. During this time, the concubine who gave birth to Prince Zheng was elevated to the rank of queen and Lü Buwei was rewarded with the title of marquis of Wenxin. King Zhuangxiang, like his father, also had a short reign—he died around 247 BCE, leaving his twelve or thirteen-year-old son as the next king of Qin. With the death of King Zhuangxiang and the ascendance of King Zheng (the future First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty), the former concubine-turned-queen’s title became that of queen dowager.
![19th century copy of a 1609 Chinese portrait of QIn Shihuangdi, [Public Domain] via Creative Commons](https://i0.wp.com/thehistorianshut.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/19th-century-copy-of-a-1609-chinese-portrait-of-qin-shihuangdi-public-domain-via-creative-commons.jpg?resize=458%2C616&ssl=1)
(19th century copy of a 1609 Chinese portrait of Qin Shihuangdi, [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)
The new child-king appointed Lü Buwei as prime minister of Qin and basically let his chief advisors rule the kingdom in his stead for the first few years of his reign. During this period of little oversight, Lü Buwei and the queen dowager (his former concubine) were said to have reignited their old passion for each other. At first, Lü Buwei did not fear the consequences of discovery—the king, he thought, was too young to notice the affair and Zheng affectionately thought of Lü Buwei as something of an uncle. Yet, as King Zheng (the future First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty) began to grow into a competent ruler, Lü Buwei began to rethink the situation.
According to the Grand Historian, Sima Qian (145-90 BCE), Lü Buwei pieced together an outrageous plan to end his affair with the king’s mother. The account of the odd debacle is so bizarre and tabloidesque that it was likely embellished for dramatic effect, or at least based on a heavy dose of folklore and rumor. Nevertheless, some of the core elements of the story must have been true.
As the story goes, Lü Buwei decided to divert the queen dowager’s affections to another man. To ensure that the plan worked, he scoured the land for a man of…ahem…great size. The winner of this contest of manhood was a certain Lao Ai. Following Lü Buwei’s advice, Lao Ai put on one of the most ridiculous displays of courtship ever recorded. He supposedly stuck his member through the hole of a wooden carriage wheel as if his appendage were its axel and, accompanied by seductive music, he carried (or possibly rolled) the wheel around a stage. The unique performance was supposedly done purposely in front of a crowd filled with the queen dowager’s informants, so that she would inevitably hear of Lao Ai’s impressive abilities.
As Lü Buwei had hoped, the queen dowager was captivated by what she heard from her spies. The prime minister encouraged her interest and arranged a way for the queen dowager and Lao Ai to be together. According to the story, Lü Buwei falsified a criminal charge against Lao Ai and put the man through a pretend castration. Now, as a fake eunuch, Lao Ai could freely spend time with the queen dowager.
Lü Buwei’s plan worked perfectly—the queen dowager never had a second thought about her former partner and supposedly fell deeply in love with her imposter eunuch. Yet, the plan soon backfired. Lao Ai became extremely powerful, gaining the rank of marquis of Changxin. Around 238 BCE, two rumors reached the ear of the maturing King Zheng. The first was whisperings of Lao Ai not being a real eunuch. The second, more dangerous, rumor was that Lao Ai was planning a rebellion against the king. With this information, King Zheng mobilized his forces and crushed Lao Ai’s unprepared rebel army at Xianyang. Lao Ai survived the battle and fled, but he was quickly captured and executed. Lao Ai’s family was also punished—one version of the story claimed that three generations of his kin were executed, another simply stated that his clan was massacred.
With Lao Ai discovered, it did not take long for King Zheng to learn of Lü Buwei’s involvement in the rebel’s rise to power. In 237 BCE, Lü Buwei was removed from the office of prime minister and ejected from the capital city. In 235 BCE, after the king’s suspicions and anger showed no signs of subsiding, Lü Buwei drank poison so as to spare his family from the increasing possibility of a mass execution like that done to the clan of Lao Ai.
Written by C. Keith Hansley.
Top Picture Attribution: (Career of Xu Xianqing Huanji Tu 18, c. 1590s, [Public Domain] via Creative Commons).
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For most of Emperor Tiberius’ reign (r. 14-37), a man named Sextus Marius was the richest man in the Roman-controlled Iberian Peninsula. His enormous wealth came from several productive copper and gold mines, which supplied an enviable stream of income. Around the year 33, however, Sextus Marius’ fortune was about to dramatically turn.
During the reign of Tiberius, trials of misconduct, corruption and treason seemed to constantly occur. For about half of his reign, Tiberius was fairly lenient in the endless court cases and many of the people charged with crimes by the Senate were released on Tiberius’ command during this early period. Most of the high-profile judicial deaths that did occur in Tiberius’ opening years happened because of defendants who committed suicide before the trial was concluded. Yet, several events occurred in the middle of Tiberius’ reign that made the emperor noticeably more bitter and tyrannical. The three most significant incidents included the death of the emperor’s son, Drusus (d. 23, possibly by assassination), the death of Tiberius’ mother, Livia (d. 29), and the execution of the emperor’s chief advisor, Sejanus (d. 31), after he was allegedly discovered to have organized the earlier assassination of Tiberius’ son. By the year 27, Tiberius had already retreated from Rome to the Island of Capri, and after the death of his mother and the execution of Sejanus, the emperor seemingly lost interest in caring for his empire, allowing corruption and oppression to flourish.
So, when the wealthy Sextus Marius was called before the Senate to stand trial in the year 33, Emperor Tiberius was no longer his old, more forgiving, self. The charges that Sextus Marius had been called forth to answer were those of committing incest with his daughter, a claim of unknown validity. The 1st-2nd century historian and statesman, Tacitus (c. 56-117), for his part, believed that the charges were false, but he was also an obsessive critic of Tiberius, suspicious of everything that happened during the emperor’s reign. Whatever the truth, the Senate found Sextus Marius guilty of the crime and condemned him to death. He was executed by being thrown off the steep Tarpeian Rock, in Rome. Tacitus theorized that the death had been a conspiracy led by Tiberius, for, after the execution, the emperor seized all of the man’s numerous copper and gold mines.
Written by C. Keith Hansley.
Picture Attribution: (“Punishment of Cassius”, by Augustyn Mirys (c. 1700-1790)-Public Domain).
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Geoffrey Chaucer (English poet, c. 1342-1400)
“The busy lark, the messenger of day,
Sings salutation to the morning grey,
And fiery Phoebus rising up so bright
Sets all the Orient laughting with the light,
And with his streams he dries the dewy sheaves
And silver droplets hanging on the leaves.”
All cultures and civilizations have curious quirks and hobbies. In medieval Scandinavia, most notably Denmark, there seemed to have been an odd tradition of people throwing leftover bones at others. In historical records and Icelandic sagas, this interesting practice usually occurred in the halls of the Scandinavian nobility, where feasts were held and discarded bones were prevalent.
The intensity of these bone-throwing incidents could vary greatly. People sometimes threw bones as a light-hearted game during a feast—basically a food fight. Alternatively, facing volleys of thrown bones could be used as a punishment for breaking the law, disobeying the nobility, or simply behaving in an unmanly fashion. For instance, in The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki (written around the 14th century), the semi-mythical 6th-century Swedish warrior, Svipdag, saved a man named Hott, who was literally buried under a pile of bones. The greasy leftovers had been thrown at him by the courtiers of King Hrolf, a king of Denmark from the Skjoldung Dynasty. In the story, Svipdag pulled Hott out of the pile of bones, cleaned him off, and sat with him on a bench in the hall. When one of the courtiers present in the room threw a knucklebone in Hott’s direction, Svipdag caught it mid-air and launched it back with enough force to kill the assailant—after that, no one threw bones at Hott again. Hott was rebranded with the name, Hjalti, and eventually became a renowned champion for King Hrolf. On a more grounded historical basis, King Cnut I of Denmark (r. 1016-1035) was said to have punished guards that broke the law by having them sit down while members of the king’s household and other guests pelted them with bones.
As happened in the story of Hott from Hrolf’s Saga, the practice of bone throwing could become deadly. In some instances, the bones were thrown with such violence that it resembled stoning. As the term “boning” sounds either extremely risqué or like a culinary bone-removal technique, we will just continue to say “throwing bones.” Nevertheless, enough deaths eventually occurred from people being fatally pelted with bones that numerous law codes throughout the Scandinavian world specifically listed the act of killing a person with a thrown bone as a punishable crime.
Written by C. Keith Hansley.
Picture Attribution: (Odin entertaining guests in Valhalla, by Emil Doepler (1855–1922), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons).
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Athens and Sparta, the two most prominent powers in Greece, were already struggling to coexist years before the Greco-Persian Wars ended around 449-448 BCE. After the Greek forces delivered a significant defeat to the Persian Navy at Salamis in 480 BCE, followed quickly by an impressive victory over the Persian army at the Battle of Plataea in 479 BCE, the cities of Athens and Sparta were cemented as proud and prestigious leaders of the Hellenistic world. Gravitating to the powerful states, the cities of Greece divided themselves between leagues led by the two rival powers. Most cities encircling the Aegean Sea aligned themselves with the sea power of Athens, eventually becoming subordinated into an Athenian empire. Similarly, the city-states in the Peloponnesus (with the exception of Argos) banded together under the leadership of mighty Sparta in the Peloponnesian League.
As early as 460 BCE, while the Greco-Persian War was still ongoing, Athens and Sparta began to fight in skirmishes and battles. A peace treaty technically halted the open conflict, but Athens and Sparta continued to undermine each other’s interests in proxy wars between neutral states and league allies. Nevertheless, a full open war between Athens and Sparta was successfully delayed for decades, until 431 BCE, the year in which the Great Peloponnesian War began.
Sparta and its allies declared war on Athens in 431 BCE, claiming that the Athenians had broken the peace treaty by attacking Spartan allies and affiliates. Thebes (on the Spartan side) opened up the conflict by launching a failed attack on Plataea, an ally of Athens. During the first few years of the Peloponnesian War, both sides were sizing each other up, not knowing how to best employ their resources and manpower. In the year 431, the militaries on both sides of the conflict performed relatively poorly. King Archidamus II of Sparta led a Peloponnesian coalition into Athenian-controlled Attica to raid the countryside, while their enemies took shelter behind the walls of Athens. The Peloponnesians stayed in Attica for as long as their supplies could support their army (less than a year), then they simply marched home. In a similar move, the Athenians sent a fleet to raid the Peloponnesian coast. The fleet made gains in some locations, but was repelled in others. Eventually, the ships rerouted to meet up with a huge Athenian army that was raiding near the city of Megara. After reuniting and pillaging the countryside for a time, the Athenians withdrew home to Athens before the year’s end.
In 430 BCE, both sides of the war again prepared for more pillaging and raiding. King Archidamus II led a second army of Peloponnesians into Attica to ravage the countryside, and the Athenians released another fleet to prowl the Peloponnesian coastline. This time, however, the Peloponnesians would have an unexpected biological ally—a plague. According to the Thucydides (c. 460-400 BCE), the plague originated somewhere in Ethiopia and traveled first through Egypt and then through Persia to wreck havoc on the city of Athens. Thucydides, an Athenian military leader and historian, had the displeasure of personally experiencing the deadly plague. He even caught the illness, himself, but thankfully he survived to write his famous text, the History of the Peloponnesian War.
The city of Athens in 430 BCE was exceptionally susceptible to disease. Refugees from vulnerable regions of Attica had poured into Athens, quickly overpopulating the city. The newcomers had to live in huts and shanties that were poorly ventilated and generally unclean. Those who could not live in simple huts found shelter in local temples, but even those sacred spaces would eventually be filled with the dead and dying.
Thucydides described the symptoms of the plague in great detail—to the extent that critics call his account overly dramatic. Nevertheless, his words paint a decent picture of what the Athenian population faced. He wrote that symptoms of the plague first affected the head and, over the course of seven-to-eight days, the effects spread downward through the rest of the body, usually resulting in death. The first signs were red, irritated eyes and a foul-smelling, bleeding mouth and throat. This was combined with sneezing and a rough voice, which could lead to an inability to speak. As the plague spread down into the torso, the patient also suffered from persistent fits of coughing and abdominal pain. The stomach and intestines were also affected, causing vomiting and diarrhea. Other miscellaneous symptoms mentioned by Thucydides included the onset of an insatiable thirst, restless anxiety, insomnia, the appearance of pustules and a painful sensitivity to touch. The plague led to a staggering death toll in Athens—anywhere from 25%-66% of the Athenian population lost their lives to the sickness.
In Thucydides’ opinion, the most tragic observation that he made during the plague was the breakdown of law, order and morality. He wrote that a palpable gloom of morbid and fatalistic emotion descended on Athens. As more and more people thought their death was nigh, they began to take whatever pleasure, wealth or revenge they wanted, regardless of the consequences.
Even though the plague did enormous damage to Athens, the Athenians recovered with enough strength to keep the war going for nearly three decades, and they often appeared to be on the winning side. Nevertheless, after the war had expanded all the way to Sicily, the Athenian navy was finally defeated in several key sea battles, the last being the Battle of Aegospotami in 405 BCE, in which the Spartans captured most of the Athenian fleet. The next year, Athens surrendered to the Peloponnesians.
Written by C. Keith Hansley.
Picture Attribution: (The Plague at Ashdod, by Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)
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Svipdag (legendary Swedish warrior who supposedly lived around the 6th century)
“Men must try, if they are to advance. Without effort, no one learns which way luck will turn.”
In the year 27, around the time Emperor Tiberius decided to leave Rome in order to spend the rest of his reign in isolation, an enterprising former-slave by the name of Atilius launched his plan to make a fortune by profiting from the insatiable Roman appetite for entertainment. The infamous result of his scheme was notable enough to be mentioned by the historians, Tacitus (c. 56-117) and Suetonius (c. 69-122).
Atilius’ plan, according to Tacitus, was to make as much money as he could by entertaining the Roman population, while at the same time minimizing his business expenses as much as possible. With this in mind, he began constructing an amphitheatre in the town of Fidenae, located a short distance to the north of Rome. Atilius obtained a full docket of gladiators and pressured for the arena to be completed with utmost speed so that he could start making money.
In this greedy frame of mind, Atilius encouraged his builders to cut corners, exchanging safety for haste. For his first error, he did not lay a sturdy foundation for his amphitheatre. Instead, he started building on uncertain ground. The amphitheatre, itself, was built of wood—which was not uncommon—but, once again, speed of construction was emphasized over quality. Despite the questionable assembly of the haphazardly made structure, Atilius’ amphitheatre must have looked convincingly presentable once it was completed. After running a laudable advertising campaign, his opening gladiatorial show managed to attract the attention of tens-of-thousands of spectators.
The Roman population must have either been ignorant of Atilius’ construction methods, or simply did not care, for on the day of the grand opening, endless masses of Romans arrived at Fidenae to see the show. Thousands upon thousands of spectators shuffled into the rickety wooden amphitheatre to find their splintery seats. Just as he had dreamed, Atilius achieved a full house on his opening day, packing men, women and children into his cheaply made venue. There is no telling how long the show actually lasted. Hopefully, the unsuspecting onlookers received some enjoyment before tragedy brought the gladiatorial games crashing to an end.
Although Atilius’ amphitheatre had enough enticing aesthetics to lure tens of thousands of people inside, it was not adequately built to handle the weight of so many people. Eventually, the creaking of the wood gave way to loud cracks, and the cheering of the crowds turned into screams. While the structure was fully packed, the amphitheatre suffered a total collapse, crushing and trapping thousands of people in the rubble. Many of those who did not die instantly during the collapse, later succumbed to their injuries during the days it took to excavate the survivors from the debris. The casualties resulting from the incident were enormous—Suetonius claimed 20,000 people died in the collapse, but Tacitus raised the number to 50,000. Ironically, Atilius was not among the injured.
According to Tacitus, the incident inspired an outpouring of good will from the leading Roman citizens. The wealthy were said to have opened up their villas to provide shelter to the injured. Medical aid, as well as food and drink, was also donated in great abundance to those affected by the catastrophe. The Roman Senate, too, did their part in the aftermath of the tragedy. They hunted down Atilius and sentenced him to exile. Finally, to prevent future deaths, the Senate also imposed heavy regulations on the entertainment industry.
Written by C. Keith Hansley.
Picture Attribution: (Roman amphitheatre painted by Viviano Codazzi (1604-1670) and Domenico Gargiulo (1609-1675), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons).
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