Empedocles was a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher and a citizen of Agrigentum, a Greek city in Sicily. Empedocles' philosophy is best known for being the origin of the cosmogenic theory of the four Classical elements. He also proposed powers...

Aristophanes, son of Philippus, of the deme Cydathenaus, was a prolific and much acclaimed comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete. These, together with fragments of some of his other plays,...

The Persian Empire's military machine was powerful and ponderous. When Darius finally came to meet him, Alexander was already in southern Turkey. The situation for the Greeks was serious. They were still in the mountains, trying to find a s...

Battle of Gaugamela (331 BC). Clash between the forces of Alexander the Great and Darius III of Persia that brought the fall of the Persian empire. Attempting to stop Alexander's incursions, Darius prepared a battleground on the Plain of Ga...

The Hellenistic period is the period of ancient Greek and eastern Mediterranean history between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the emergence of the Roman Empire as signified by the Battle of Actium in 31 BC and the subsequen...

Ashoka Maurya, commonly known as Ashoka and also as Ashoka the Great, was an Indian emperor of the Maurya Dynasty who ruled almost all of the Indian subcontinent from ca. 269 BCE to 232 BCE. One of India's greatest emperors, Ashoka reigned...

Titus Maccius Plautus, commonly known as "Plautus", was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest surviving intact works in Latin literature. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by the innovator of...

The Siege of Syracuse by the Roman Republic took place in 214–212 BC, at the end of which the Magna Graecia Hellenistic city of Syracuse, located on the east coast of Sicily, fell. The Romans stormed the city after a protracted siege giving...

Ptolemy V Epiphanes (reigned 204–181 BC), son of Ptolemy IV Philopator and Arsinoe III of Egypt, was the fifth ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty. He became ruler at the age of five, and under a series of regents the kingdom was paralyzed. The...

Gaius Lucilius, the earliest Roman satirist, of whose writings only fragments remain, was a Roman citizen of the equestrian class, born at Suessa Aurunca in Campania. The dates assigned by Jerome for his birth and death are 148 BC and 103 B...

Spartacus was a Thracian gladiator who, along with Crixus, Gannicus, Castus, and Oenomaus, was one of the escaped slave leaders in the Third Servile War, a major slave uprising against the Roman Republic. Little is known about him beyond th...

Juba II or Juba II of Numidia (52/50 BC – AD 23) was a king of Numidia and then later moved to Mauretania. His first wife was Cleopatra Selene II, daughter of Greek Ptolemaic Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt and Roman triumvir Mark Antony. J...

The Battle of Pharsalus was a decisive battle of Caesar's Civil War. On 9 August 48 BC at Pharsalus in central Greece, Gaius Julius Caesar and his allies formed up opposite the army of the republic under the command of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnu...

The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilisation, characterised by an autocratic form of government, headed by an Emperor, and large territorial holdings around the Mediterranean Sea in Europe, Africa, the M...

Pliny the Younger, was a lawyer, author, and magistrate of Ancient Rome. Pliny's uncle, Pliny the Elder, helped raise and educate him. They were both witnesses to the eruption of Vesuvius on 24 August 79 AD. Pliny is known for his hundreds...