Underdogs have a special place in the hearts of many, whether it’s the upstart Celtic Iceni tribe led by Boudicca revolting against the Romans or the ice-veined Spartans fighting in one of history’s greatest last stands against the Persians at Thermopylae. Either through superior tactics or more technologically advanced weaponry, the outnumbered often achieve some form of victory, whether moral or outright. Here are 10 such examples of great historical underdogs.

10British East India Company
Battle Of Assaye

Arthur Wellesley, the major general of the British forces and future first Duke of Wellington, said this of the battle: It was “the bloodiest for the number that I ever saw.” One of the major battles of the Second Anglo-Maratha War, a conflict between the British East India Company and the Maratha Empire, the Battle of Assaye saw between 6,500–10,000 British soldiers face off against a 40,000–50,000 strong Maratha army.

Unfortunately for the British, their intelligence about the strength and location of their enemy was flawed. Not only were they in the wrong location, but they were much stronger than expected, having recently swelled by several divisions. Luckily for Wellesley, he was a better battlefield general than he was a strategist, as he quickly devised a plan to strike quickly, rather than wait for the reinforcements coming along under the command of Colonel Stevenson. (He had divided his army based on the faulty intelligence he had received, and the rest of his forces were miles away.)

However, the main reason for the British victory was the Maratha army simply didn’t believe that Wellesley would attack while being outnumbered so badly. This surprise led to a rout, one in which 5,000–6,500 soldiers of the Maratha army fell in battle. (The British lost about 1,500.) Later in his life, the Duke of Wellington reminisced about his many military triumphs and concluded that his victory at Assaye was the greatest of them all.

9King David IV And The Georgian Army
Battle Of Didgori

Otherwise known as David the Builder for his role as the architect of the Georgian Golden Age, King David IV of Georgia (the country, not the state) was faced with a problem that had plagued his country for years. The Seljuq Turks, Muslims from present-day Kazakhstan, had control over most of the Georgian state. (Various internal wars and earthquakes also helped to weaken the country’s resolve.) Ascending to the throne at the tender age of 16, David IV gathered together the various feudal lords in the area, formed an army, and began repelling the Seljuq occupiers, refusing to pay them any tribute.

Invigorated by the First Crusade’s success against Muslim armies, David IV initiated his plan to take Tbilisi, a great Georgian city and future capital of the country, which had been under Muslim control for nearly 500 years. So around 56,000 men began marching toward the city, camping at Mount Didgori, some 40 milometers (25 mi) from Tbilisi. Though contemporary records exaggerate the amount of forces facing the Georgians, conservative estimates put it at 100,000–250,000 men.

In a similar vein to Stalin and his infamous Order No. 227 (the “Not one step back!” order), David IV declared that retreat was not an option, barricading the route behind his men with trees and boulders. Then, in an act of treachery, he sent 200 heavily armed cavalrymen to the Seljuq leaders under the pretense that they were deserters. When they arrived, the Georgians attacked, killing the leaders and demoralizing the Muslim army. The Battle of Didgori was on, and it only lasted three hours, with the Seljuq Turks taking heavy losses, both as dead and captured, while the Georgians got off relatively light. (Actual casualty counts are hard to come by.) Tbilisi soon fell, and Georgia had its capital once again.

8Mexican Army
Battle Of Puebla

Picture it: Puebla, Mexico, 1862. The liberal Benito Juarez had been elected as president during the prior year, as the country began to fall into financial ruin, thanks to the enormous foreign debt they had accumulated over the years. Britain, France, and Spain each sent their own navies to Veracruz, demanding payment from the Mexican government. Deals were reached with Britain and Spain, who departed shortly afterward, but Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, saw an opportunity to establish a Mexican empire and refused to negotiate, landing an invading army instead.

Veracruz was stormed first, quite successfully, and the ease of the fighting convinced the French leaders that victory would come quickly throughout the country. Mexico City, the capital of the country, was the target, but a well-fortified city lay in the direct path the French decided to take: the city of Puebla. 6,000 French troops marched on the city, determined to wrest it from the hands of its ragtag band of 2,000 men. (As any military historian would tell you, a ratio of at least 3:1 is necessary for any sieging army.)

However, even with their superior numbers and artillery, the French were rebuffed in their assault. Starting at daybreak on May 5, the fighting lasted until early evening, with the French suffering five times as many casualties as the Mexicans. (Admittedly, the French only lost 500 people.) It was not strategically important—not only did the French ultimately take over the country for a short period, they even took the city itself a year later. But the victory served as a morale boost for the Mexican army, as well as the people of Mexico, who later created a holiday to celebrate the battle: Cinco de Mayo. (However, it is much more widely celebrated in the United States today than anywhere in Mexico, often under the misnomer of Mexican Independence Day.)

7Croatian National Guard
Battle Of Vukovar

When the president of Yugoslavia, Josip Tito, died in 1980, he left behind a fractured country, one cobbled together from formerly different states. (The six socialist republics were Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and Serbia.) Serbian nationalists seized the opportunity and tried to centralize control of the country in their capital city of Belgrade. However, most of the other states wanted to break loose, with Croatia being one of them.

On June 25, 1991, the Croatians declared independence, though sporadic fighting between nationalist groups and police had been taking place since the end of March. Two months later, Serbian forces marched on Vukovar with about 36,000 men, determined to take the city, an important regional center on the eastern border of Croatia. Unfortunately for the Croats, the defending force was only 1,800 strong, with some of the Croatian citizens of the city doing what they could to support the troops.

For 86 days, the defenders held off the Serbians, before they finally surrendered, having ran out of ammo. (Reinforcements from other parts of the country never came.) Casualties on both sides were high, with the Serbian forces losing nearly twice as many men; the Croatian defenders lost nearly all of their men to death or injury. The aftermath of the battle was even worse for the inhabitants of the city, as the Serbs butchered 200 Croats who had taken refuge in the city’s hospital and had been promised safe passage out of the city. Widespread executions by Serbian forces were reported throughout the city as well, as ethnic cleansing began to rear its ugly head.

6English Troops
Battle Of Crecy

Though not as well known or devastating to the French as the Battle of Agincourt some 70 years later, the Battle of Crecy was arguably the most important battle in the entirety of the Hundred Years War. Relatively little attention was paid to the English longbow in the country, a weapon widely seen as one of the most devastating weapons in medieval times. That all changed in 1332 under the instruction of Edward III; he realized a large mass of longbows, fired in unison, could defeat much larger armies.

For 14 years, he built up his army of longbowmen, training and equipping them at a much lower cost than the traditional aristocratic knights who had previously made up his army. In July 1346, somewhere around 10,000 men landed on the French coast, outnumbered by nearly three to one. In fact, the French king at the time, Phillip VI, was so confident in his numerical superiority that he made a list of English knights he planned to take prisoner once they had won. Unlike Agincourt, in which the terrain played a large role in determining the outcome of the battle, Crecy was won simply because no one had really seen the longbow in action, and its novelty proved to be the deciding factor.

The French, as well as many other countries, had often looked at archers as defensive troops, with the crossbow seen as the most superior ranged weapon. However, the English longbowmen could fire six to seven times more arrows per minute, contributing to them killing the French crossbowmen very quickly. Any who retreated were cut down by advancing French horsemen, who took it as a sign of cowardice. In the end, confusion and fear (as well as longbowmen) ravaged the French forces, and at least 10,000 of them met their demise. (An argument could be made this isn’t an underdog victory, as the English enjoyed such a strategic advantage, but it shocked all of Christendom nevertheless.)

5Irish UN Troops
Siege Of Jadotville

The year was 1961. Ireland had only been recently admitted to the UN, as the Soviet Union had vetoed them relentlessly due to their neutrality during World War II, and this was their first peacekeeping operation. Though they weren’t exclusively made up of Irish soldiers (there were Swedish and Indian men as well), the UN troops in the state of Katanga in the Congo numbered only 158 and were very lightly armed. Stationed at the wealthy mining town of Jadotville, the troops were ordered to defend the locals from Katangan militia and Belgian mercenaries.

Having dug trenches, the Irish forces used accurate shooting and timely mortar attacks to repel the 3,000–5,000 strong force trying to storm the town. Somehow, by the end of the fighting, 1,300 of the enemies were either wounded or killed, with only five of the Irish wounded. UN forces tried to make it to the city to provide relief, but they were unable to break through the enemy lines. Out of ammunition, the commander of the Irish forces, Pat Quinlan, was forced to broker a ceasefire. (Or surrender, depending on your opinion.) Much of the Irish population felt they had surrendered, ignoring them on their return and denigrating the memory of anyone who served in Jadotville. However, thanks to the efforts of one of the men, John Gorman, their reputation has since been revived.

Perhaps the most famous quote to come from the conflict was made by Pat Quinlan, the Irish commander of the troops: “We will fight to the last man. Could do with some whiskey.” (Unfortunately, Irish nationalism changed that quote; he had actually requested water.)

4Swedish Soldiers
Battle Of Fraustadt

Though not as decisive nor impressive a victory as the Battle of Narva, a fight in which King Charles XII led a force of Swedes to victory over a Russian army nearly four times its size, the Battle of Fraustadt and the subsequent Swedish victory was one of their best and last in the Great Northern War. Besieged by three separate countries (Russia, Denmark-Norway, and Saxony-Poland), whose leaders sensed weakness in Sweden’s young king, the Swedish army enjoyed several initial successes.

One of those successes took place in 1706 near Fraustadt, a town in western Poland. 18,000 Saxons, Russians, and their mercenaries entrenched themselves a short distance from the outskirts of the town, and 9,000 Swedes did the same. The Swedish general recognized he had a numerical edge in cavalry, nearly three to one, and used that to his advantage. Using a pincer motion and the classic aggression of Swedish generals, he sent his horseman around the enemy’s flanks until they reached the center rear of their main line of defense.

The Saxon and Russian army collapsed at this point, leading to a rout in which only about 1,000 Swedes were either killed or captured and almost 16,000 of the enemy met the same fate. In addition, about 500 Russians who were taken prisoner during the battle were executed as revenge for atrocities the Russian forces were said to have committed in the city of Courland.

3Eastern Jin Soldiers
Battle Of Fei River

Widely considered one of the most important battles in Chinese history, the Battle of Fei River pitted the Eastern Jin dynasty of southern China against the barbarous inhabitants of the Former Qin dynasty of northern China. While the numbers might be exaggerated (a claim you could make against virtually every battle in human history), traditional historical sources say 800,000 soldiers marched from the north to face only 80,000 Eastern Jin Soldiers.

However, the Qin army was mostly made up of random conscripted soldiers, many of whom felt no loyalty toward their commanders or even outright hatred. In addition, they were poorly equipped and even more poorly trained. Fu Jian, the leader of the Qin dynasty, had conquered nearly all of the northern kingdoms of China, with those in the south squarely in his sights. So his men marched toward the lands of the Eastern Jin, successfully capturing many of the border cities.

In 382, Eastern Jin forces, led by the general Xie Xuan, decided to make their final stand at the Fei River, a waterway that is now dried up. The Eastern Jin forces were on one side of the river, and the Qin army was on the other. Xie Xuan sent word to his enemies, asking them to retreat slightly to the west so as to allow his forces to cross the river and commence the battle. When Fu Jin, the emperor of the Qin dynasty, agreed, many of his soldiers believed they had been defeated and panicked. Seizing this opportunity, Xie Xuan struck, killing nearly all of his enemies. By the end of the fighting, there was so much death that one account says: “The dead were so many that they were making a pillow for each other on the ground.” Shortly afterward, the Qin dynasty, devastated by the loss, plunged into civil war.

2Polish Infantry
Battle Of Wizna

Often described as the Polish Thermopylae, the Battle of Wizna saw an extremely outnumbered Polish force defend the city of Wizna against the onslaught of the German army. Though this is commonly seen as the beginning of the German blitzkrieg, the invasion of Poland was conducted through more traditional military means. Nevertheless, the difference in strength was overwhelming: 700 Poles were in the city, facing off against 40,000 Germans. (In fact more recent historians have claimed there may have only been about 360 Poles in the city.)

The fighting broke out on September 7, 1939, and lasted for two and a half days. To boost morale, as the Poles had heard of the vast army which was bearing down on them, the commander of the Polish forces, a man named Wladyslaw Raginis, vowed to not leave any defended position alive. However, the Polish forces quickly found themselves out of ammo, with no hope of reinforcements. In addition, the German commander, Heinz Guderian, threatened to execute every one of the Polish POWs if they didn’t surrender. In the end, Raginis agreed, sending his troops out of the bunker. One of them, Seweryn Bieganski, recalled later: “The captain looked at me warmly and softly urged me to leave. When I was at the exit, I was hit on my back with strong gust, and I heard an explosion.”

While they were unsuccessful in keeping Wizna out of German hands, the defenders did allow Polish leadership and many other soldiers to escape to Western Europe, where they continued the fight against the Nazis.

1Korean Navy
Battle Of Myeongnyang

Originally an army commander, Yi Sun-Sin began his military career fighting the Manchu nomads who roamed Korea’s northern border. A short while later, he was made commander of the Cholla naval district and defeated the Japanese fleet in several battles, thanks in no small part to his kobukson, the famed “turtle ships” of the Joseon dynasty. Due to a plot by a Japanese double agent, Sun-Sin was arrested and tortured for refusing orders that he deemed to be too dangerous. (Which they were, as the double agent wished to destroy the Korean fleet.)

Spared the death penalty but demoted to a lowly rank, Sun-Sin bided his time until the Korean leadership called on him again. The Japanese had mounted another attack and seemed to have turned the tide. Thanks to the many defeats of the general who preceded him, Sun-Sin only had 12 ships left to defend the country with, and he decided to make a last stand in the Myeongnyang Strait, just off the southwest coast of Korea. Though sources differ, the vast agree that at least 133 Japanese ships met him there, determined to end the war once and for all.

Using his knowledge of the ocean around him, as well as the strength of his ships, Sun-Sin routed the Japanese, destroying 31 of their ships while losing none of his own. Part of the massive victory was because the Japanese tended to try and win naval battles in the same vein of the Romans when they faced off against the Carthaginians: They tried to board the enemy ships rather than ram them. This proved fruitless against the kobukson, and Korea was victorious.

Magic and superstition have been present in human societies since the dawn of our species, and ancient Rome was no exception. Some of us would like to believe that the advancement of education and scientific knowledge should be enough to keep superstitious beliefs in check, but many signs around us tell us that superstition is here to stay. Fortune-tellers, cult leaders, horoscope writers, and casino owners (to name a few) know this very well.

This list is about the powerful effect that magic and superstition had on some of the beliefs of ancient Roman society.

10 Magic, Superstition, And Medicine

Some of the medical knowledge in ancient Rome was strongly linked to magic and superstition. Pliny the Elder records a number of health tips that few of us would take seriously. Here are some examples. Do not try this at home without medical supervision. We take no responsibility for the outcome of the following recipes:

Drinking fresh human blood was believed by some to be an effective treatment for epilepsy:

“It is an appalling sight to see wild animals drink the blood of gladiators in the arena, and yet those who suffer from epilepsy think it is the most effective cure for their disease, to absorb a person’s warm blood while he is still breathing and to draw out his actual living soul.” (Natural History, 28.4)

For treating bruises and strains:

“Strains and bruises are treated with wild boar’s dung gathered in spring and dried. This treatment is used for those who have been dragged by a chariot or mangled by its wheels or bruised in any way. Fresh dung also may be smeared on.” (Natural History, 28.237)

If you want to enhance or suppress sexual performance:

“A man’s urine in which a lizard has been drowned is an antaphrodisiac potion; so also are snails and pigeons’ droppings drunk with olive oil and wine. The right section of a vulture’s lung worn as an amulet in a crane’s skin is a powerful aphrodisiac, as is consuming the yolk of five dove eggs mixed with a denarius of pig fat and honey, sparrows or their eggs, or wearing as an amulet a rooster’s right testicle wrapped in ram’s skin.” (30.141)

9 Magic, Superstition, And Pregnancy

Pregnancy in ancient Rome was the cause of considerable anxiety. It is estimated that the number of women who died as a result of childbirth was higher to the number of men who died at war. As a result, a deficit of women suitable for marriage was always an issue in Rome. It is therefore not surprising that there were a few tips on pregnancy circulating around Roman society. Pliny the Elder tells us that:

“[ . . . ] if someone takes a stone or some other missile that has slain three living creatures (a human being, a wild boar, and a bear) at three blows, and throws it over the roof of a house in which there is a pregnant woman, she will immediately give birth, however difficult her labor may be.” (Natural History 28.33)

“If one wishes a child to be born with black eyes, the mother should eat a shrew during the pregnancy.” (Natural History 30.134)

8 Shapeshifters

Many stories circulated among ancient Romans about people changing their shape into animals and other beings. Here is one of these tales. If you think the werewolf legend is relatively new, think again:

“We came to the tombs, and my friend went to do his business among the gravestones, while I moved off singing and counting the stars. Then, when I looked back at my companion, he had taken off all his clothes and laid them at the roadside. My heart was in my mouth; I stood there practically dead. He pissed in a circle around his clothes, and suddenly turned into a wolf. Don’t think I am joking: nothing could induce me to tell lies about this. [ . . . ] He began to howl and ran off into the woods. [ . . . ] then I went to pick up his clothes, but they had all turned to stone.” (Petronius Satyricon 62)

It would not be surprising if at least some people in Rome believed stories like this one.

7 Witchcraft

Long before medieval times, witchcraft was known to the Romans. There is a famous passage in Roman literature describing a grotesque ritual performed by witches who were looking to brew a love potion. They intended to use the potion to gain the heart of a man named Varus, who had resisted the love spells cast by the witches so far.

The details of this ritual are described by the Roman poet, Horace (Epodes 5), who lived during the first century BC: A boy of high birth was kidnapped by a clique of witches. They buried the boy in the ground up to his chin, and they placed some food in the ground close to him, but he was unable to reach it. The witches hoped to starve the boy to death and make his liver grow as a result of the hunger. The boy’s liver was a key ingredient to brew the love potion.

This account is fictional, but it shows the place that witches and their dark arts had in the imagination of some Romans.

6 Interpretation Of Dreams

Like almost all other cultures, some Romans firmly believed in the idea that dreams could forecast the future. In the second century AD, Artemidorus of Daldis wrote a work named The Interpretation of Dreams, compiled in five books. Some of the ways in which he interpreted the meaning of dreams are both specific and curious:

“Dreaming about turnips, rutabagas, and pumpkins presages disappointed hopes, since they are massive [vegetables] but lack nutritional value. They signify surgery and wounding with iron implements for sick people and travelers, respectively, since these vegetables are cut into slices.” (1.67)

“Dreaming that one is eating books foretells advantage to teachers, lecturers, and anyone who earns his livelihood from books, but for everyone else it means sudden death.” (2.45)

5 Reading Animal Entrails

Hundreds of techniques to foretell the future are recorded in ancient Roman documents. We know, for example, that sacrificing animals and trying to read the future by interpreting their entrails was practiced not only in ancient Rome, but also in many other cultures. This magical art was known to the Romans as haruspicy, and a person trained in this art was a haruspex.

Cicero (On Divination: 2.52) claims that Hannibal, the renowned Carthaginian commander who defied Rome in the Second Punic War, was an expert in this technique. While he was still a military advisor (before he became commander), he used to give advice to his superiors based on the messages he could read on the organs of sacrificed animals.

4 Astrology

Trying to predict events based on the position of the celestial bodies was also widely practiced in the Roman world. Some Roman emperors, including Tiberius, Domitian, and Hadrian, believed in divination and astrology and even had some degree of training in these arts. Cassius Dio (Roman History 57.15) claims that Tiberius had a man executed after he had a dream in which he was giving money to that same man. Tiberius believed that he had that dream under the influence of some sort of enchantment.

However, there is evidence that not everyone was persuaded by the astrologer’s claims:

“I am amazed that anyone could continue to put their trust in such people, when the falseness of their predictions is every day made clear by what actually happens.” (Cicero, On Divination: 2.99)

The love-hate relationship that Rome had with astrologers was expressed by Tacitus with his typical directness:

“Astrologers are treacherous to the powerful and unreliable to the merely hopeful; they will always be banned from our state, and yet always retained.” (Histories 1.22)

3 The Shield Of Mars

The Romans believed that the god Jupiter gave the very shield of the god Mars to Nula Pompilius (the second king of Rome). This relic was known as the Ancile. It was believed that if the Ancile was harmed in any way, so would the nation of Rome. In other words, the prosperity of Rome was dependent on the integrity of the Ancile. Therefore, it was decided that the safest place to keep this relic was the Temple of Mars.

The nymph Egeria advised the king of Rome to create eleven identical copies of the shield in order to confuse potential thieves and keep the shield safe. A body of priests known as the Salii were responsible for protecting the Ancile and, ultimately, the prosperity of Rome.

2 The King Of The Wood

A shocking ritual was recorded at the grove of the goddess Diana at Aricia, south of Rome along the Via Appia (the road connecting Rome with Capua), by the shores of Lake Nemi. The grove of Diana had a priest, known as Rex Nemorensis. Those who held the position were always fugitive slaves who became priests by murdering the acting priest. This was the accepted norm of succession for the priesthood of Diana. As a result, the Rex Nemorensis was always on alert, carrying a sword, waiting for the next candidate to challenge him, and fearing for his life. (Strabo, Geography 5.3). This practice is summed up by T. Macaulay:

“From the still glassy lake that sleeps
Beneath Aricia’s trees—
Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain”

The exact justification for this succession rule is not fully understood, and it has sparked the imagination of many historians and writers. Nobody has explored this issue in more depth than Sir James George Frazer, who used the institution of the Rex Nemorensis as a starting point of his colossal anthropological work The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion, published in 1890.

1 Imaginary Beasts

Ancient Roman writers left a number of accounts describing several imaginary animals. Interestingly, most these beasts were exotic, coming from remote locations.

Pliny (Natural History 8.75) describes a half-human, half-horse animal named the hippocentaur. According to his doubtful account, he personally saw one of these beasts shipped from Egypt to the emperor Claudius, preserved inside a container filled with honey.

Aelian also describes some peculiar species of one-horned donkeys and horses found in India. Drinking vessels made out their horns had a unique property: If poison was poured into them, the horns would cancel the effect of the poison, acting as an antidote. (On Animals 3.41).

Aelian (On Animals 9.23) reports the existence of the amphisbaena, a snake with one head at both ends:

“When it is going forward, it uses one head as a tail, the other as a head, and when it is going backward, it uses its heads in the opposite manner.”

Aelian fails to explain what relevance the terms “forward” and “backward” may have when applied to a being with a head at both ends, but we get his point.

It seems we’re obsessed with the end of the world some days. Zombies, massive meteors, or nuclear annihilation—we run the gamut in our fiction and in our fears. But what if we’ve already been through the end of the world? What if we’ve already survived not one, not two, but 10 different doomsday scenarios? Humans are nothing if not resilient and tenacious.

10 The Dust Bowl

Lasting eight years, the Dust Bowl was a severe drought in the 1930s, the roughest time of the Great Depression. It affected parts of Texas, Colorado, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, driving thousands from their states to seek a better life elsewhere.

The combination of over-farming, reliance on a small number of crops, and lack of rainfall led to soil depletion, which turned normally fertile topsoil into fine-particle dust. The storms kicked up by the prevailing west-to-east winds of the Great Plains caused dust clouds to bury entire towns in suffocating grit.

But lest you think it was confined to the Midwest, on April 14, 1935, the dust storms were so massive that they blotted out the Sun in several states (as well as Washington, DC) and ships in the Atlantic Ocean reported dust falling upon their decks. Ironically, a member of Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet was testifying before Congress on the need for soil conservation when the storm hit. He reportedly pointed out the window and stated, “This, gentlemen, is what I’ve been talking about.”

A combination of soil conservation laws and programs as well as rain finally returning to the Plains states in 1939 brought a close to what must have seemed like the end of days to many.

9 The Mongol Conquests

Ruthless and dispassionate, the Mongol hordes descended upon the societies of Asia and Europe like a force of nature. During the 13th century, Genghis Khan forged the many tribes and clans of the central Asian steppes into an effective and devastating war machine, conquering China, the Middle East, Russia, and parts of Europe.

That the Mongols killed many is not in doubt, but the exact number can be hard to pin down. Some regions such as China had excellent census figures, but other places did not (or their records didn’t survive). While we may not know exactly how many people perished as the hordes swept through Eurasia, we do know that there was a sudden drop-off in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—a drop-off that cannot be explained except by the deaths of millions of living, breathing animals.

The Mongols, though, eventually lost momentum and fragmented. Their massive empire eventually fractured and dissolved, a mere 100 years after they started.

8 The Black Plague

Most people are aware of the massive, devastating plague known as the Black Death, which swept through Europe in the 14th century. It is reported to have killed around 50 percent of the European population.

But what many people don’t know is that the Black Death didn’t just affect Europe but Africa, the Middle East, and Asia as well. The plague, caused mainly by the microbe yersenia pestis, was phenomenally virulent.

It spawned not just the plague itself but widespread panic and the rise of crazy superstitions, such as that the disease was caused by God’s displeasure. The disease struck down the rich, poor, weak, powerful, pious, and heretical alike and led to massive social upheavals.

The plague returned periodically afterward but lacked the impact of the 14th-century outburst. Yet it still remains in our collective memory, albeit in the form of a poetic misconception: “Ring Around the Rosie”, which most people believe chronicles the stages (and attempts to prevent) the Black Death. On the contrary this famous nursery rhyme appears to have no connection to the plague—nor, indeed, any sinister origins at all.

7 Potato Famine

In the mid-19th century, the reliance of many working poor upon a single crop (potatoes) led to millions of deaths. Most people associate this disaster with Ireland, and they’re partly right. Ireland did indeed have the most visible manifestation of the “blight.”

But it was definitely not the only country to suffer. The blight actually struck most of northern and central Europe, including Scotland, where it was known as the “Highland Blight” or “Highland Famine.” The blight also affected Belgium and was devastating to the German economies, leading to near total societal collapse as starving workers died in the streets of Europe.

The tragedy was made worse by the fact that in many regions, such as in Ireland, there was more than enough food produced, but governments and merchants alike favored the profits made by selling grain and food overseas.

6 The Thirty Years’ War

Arguably the most famous of the “religious” wars of Europe, the Thirty Years’ War was a series of conflicts pitting one nation against another in an attempt to resolve several matters, including the primacy of Catholicism or Protestantism. Nearly every country in Europe participated in the wars, but the most devastating battles took place in the Holy Roman Empire of Central Europe.

The very nature of the war, which combined political greed with religious obsession, meant that no side was willing to be merciful to the other. The result devastated Germanic cities and states, leaving many municipalities as ghost towns and harvests of staple grains reduced by up to 75 percent.

5 World War II

The last great world conflagration is etched indelibly in history. Every corner of the globe, with the possible exception of the Antarctic, saw combat between the Allied and Axis forces. The result was an utterly devastated Europe and Asia.

During the war, 80 million people died in combat, through pogroms (including the Holocaust), and by starvation. By the end of the war, starvation and deprivation were commonplace as people tried to eke out a living amid the destroyed ruins of once-great cities. No running water, no electricity, no food, and barely any government in Europe, China, and Japan left innocent civilians perched upon the knife’s edge of chaos or death.

To illustrate how devastated the world economy and society was, the United States was producing one of every two products made from 1945 to 1946. The destruction was so complete that the normally isolationist United States Congress was motivated to embark upon an ambitious pair of spending projects to jump-start the world economy and prevent a return to the Great Depression. The Marshall Plan and a similar plan launched in Japan and China spent tens of billions of dollars in reconstruction aid.

4 Smallpox In The Western Hemisphere

Contact with Europeans, even if it had been completely peaceful, would not have been benign for people living in the Americas or the islands of the Pacific. Unknown to the Europeans, a nearly invisible hitchhiker had come along on their 15th- and 16th-century voyages of exploration: smallpox.

Along with other diseases that Europeans had built up a resistance to over the centuries, smallpox devastated native populations in North America, the Caribbean, South America, and Oceania. Over the centuries, conservative estimates of the death toll from the disease put the number at 60–70 percent of native populations. Powerless to stop the disease and seeking refuge from the high fevers and horrible pain, natives prayed to their gods or committed suicide to ease their suffering.

3 The Fall Of Western Rome

Often lamented in medieval literature and bemoaned in Enlightenment writings, the contraction and eventual collapse of the Western half of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD must have seemed like the end of everything. Lasting nearly 1,000 years, Rome had a profound impact upon Mediterranean and European cultures.

Many successor states tried to emulate the pattern of Rome with varying success. However, unlike some of the other apocalypses on this list, the collapse of Western Rome was a drawn-out affair rife with invasions, governmental collapse, and starvation.

Roman Britain, for example, was left to its own devices as the legions withdrew and the Germanic Jutes, Angles, and Saxons invaded, reshaping Britain through conquest. Similarly, Germanic tribes filled the void in Iberia, Gaul, and even the Italian peninsula. Goths, Visigoths, and the infamous Vandals—their names and reputations for brutality persist to this day.

These tribes warred with the people who remained, with each other, and with the Eastern Roman Empire which sought (and failed) to recapture the lost Western Empire. It wasn’t until the eighth century that things began to settle down (sort of) in Western Europe.

2 The Fall Of The Qing Dynasty

China is—and always has been—the most populous place on Earth. Its governments are in charge of the lion’s share of the Earth’s people. Thus, it is no surprise that when one of their governments collapse, it is devastating to the world’s population.

No collapse—and attendant famine—was more pronounced than the end of the Qing dynasty. By the mid-19th century, the Qing dynasty’s fortunes had waned dramatically. Inflation had put even basic foodstuffs out of the reach of ordinary people, greedy bureaucrats and the rich had forced people off their land, and there was a massive influx of the addictive drug opium.

By the mid-18th century, the Chinese had ballooned to nearly 500 million people. So when the economy did collapse in 1876, millions of people starved to death every single year. Add to that the devastation of the First and Second Opium Wars, and the Qing dynasty’s eventual collapse was all but assured. The chaos which ensued led to tens of millions more deaths due to rioting, starvation, war, and disease.

1 Megiddo

The city of Megiddo (aka Tel Megiddo) was an important hub of trade, culture, and power in the ancient world. It was prized by the two major powers of the time—the Assyrians and the Egyptians—so much so that the town was conquered dozens of times in the ancient period.

What’s remarkable about the town is not its conquest but that the memory of those massive, bloody conflicts have worked their way into popular consciousness, mythology, and the three major Abrahamic religions. The battles which raged between Assyria and Egypt, particularly under Thutmose III, were so horrifying and devastating that the later Greek word for the city became synonymous with the end of the world: Armageddon.

It is believed by many devout followers of Abrahamic religions, such as Christianity, that the last battle of all time between the forces of good and evil will occur there. Interestingly, since that cataclysmic battle in the 15th century BC, there have been dozens of battles, big and small, fought in or near Tel Megiddo, including a major battle in World War I between the British and the Ottoman forces.

Michael is a lecturer at two Midwestern universities and loves to work in the creepy, odd, cool, and strange tidbits into his lectures to illustrate just how cool history is.

Considering the Vietnam War was one of the most controversial conflicts in recent history, there is a lot we don’t know about the war. Many of us have heard either only the basics of the war, or we have heard misconceptions about the war. There really is more than meets the eye. In fact, the Vietnam War was filled with many little-known details that never truly reached the public eye, with many details either hidden or distorted by the myths that arose during this time.

10CIA Abandonment Of The Hmong During The ‘Secret War’

In 1965, the CIA began fighting what would later be known as the “Secret War” under the airline Air America, which was owned secretly. By 1961, 9,000 Hmong guerrillas had been recruited to help the airline with its goals. Laos, where these Hmong men were from, claimed to be neutral during the war, but the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) had influence in the country. In 1965, the number of Hmong guerrillas had increased to 20,000, and the true reason for the “Secret War” was fully put into place.

The Hmong were to destroy NVA supply depots, ambush trucks, disrupt supply lines, and generally harass the NVA. When America began to leave Vietnam, Air America was forced to leave Laos, and on June 3, 1974, the last Air America aircraft left Laos, but the Hmong guerrillas were abandoned. Shortly after, the Laos government began to charge the Hmong guerrillas for fighting alongside the CIA, and many fled to the jungle where they have lived since the end of the Vietnam War. Many of these Hmong guerrillas claim that they are still hopeful that the US will one day come rescue them from the jungle, but many still remain in hiding to this day.

9Most Men Volunteered For Service

We often hear stories of men resisting the draft, and even fleeing the country to avoid being drafted. While the draft certainly was a real issue, it was nowhere near what the media and stories from the time make it seem. Three-quarters of all American soldiers had volunteered to be enlisted. More specifically, 9,087,000 military personnel served during the entire war, but only 1,728,344 men were drafted. This was a very low number of draftees compared to other wars.

In fact, in World War II alone, 8,895,135 men were drafted. This made up two-thirds of the entire American World War II military personnel, which is considerably larger than the amount of Vietnam War draftees. So, while the draft was fought and there was a large number of draftees, it was nowhere near as bad as the media and stories from this time make it seem. It’s just one more thing your grandparents exaggerated about.

8Draft Inequality

One of the other issues that was blamed on the draft was social inequality. Most of us have likely heard of this inequality, hearing that the draft was unfair to certain races or certain social classes. Despite this misconception, the draft was completely randomized. Men were chosen based on 366 blue capsules, each containing a day of the year. The very first capsule drawn had the date September 14 inside, so men born on September 14 in the years 1944 to 1950 were all assigned the number one in the lottery, meaning that the draft was fully randomized. Despite this method of drawing, many still believe that the draft was skewed.

This simply wasn’t the case, as 88.4 percent of men who served in the Vietnam War were Caucasian. Additionally, 86.3 percent of the men who died were Caucasian, meaning that the myth of minorities being “cannon fodder” simply isn’t true. Seventy-nine percent of men also had high school diplomas, higher than any other war, and three-quarters of all men were above the poverty line, disproving this social inequality. If anything, it was said that the men who came from wealthier backgrounds were much more likely to die, as they were trained for the most dangerous jobs.

7Payment Of Spies

South Vietnamese spies were important to the United States, but their work was dangerous. The challenge in recruiting these spies was that many came from barter societies, where money did not exist. This led to the use of rice and other commodities as payment, which worked for a while. However, the spies themselves were not getting all of the rice, and there was no need for some of the other commodities. There was a need for a new form of payment.

The solution? Let potential spies browse through the Sears catalog and pick what they wanted. The first order was six red velvet blazer vests with brass buttons, each in exchange for a 20-day mission. The spies would go on to order other garments, such as a large bra used to harvest fruit, and the program only came to a stop when the work became too dangerous.

6Not All Men Were Young

While the Vietnam War was unpopular for many reasons, one of the main criticisms was that it was sending young men to die. While it is true that many men were young when they enlisted, many older men enlisted as well. In fact, the oldest man known to have died in Vietnam was Kenna Clyde Taylor, who was 63 years old at the time of his death. There were also many pairs of father and son who fought in the war, with three of these pairs on the Vietnam Memorial Wall.

Additionally, there wasn’t an enlisted grade with an average age under 20, and the average soldier was 22 years old. Other categories of military personnel held higher averages. For example, the average age of an officer was 28 years old. While some of these men were certainly very young to be enlisted, they weren’t nearly as young as many of us may believe.

5Super Glue

Most of us have heard of the horrible injuries that occur on the battlefield. For the medics tending these wounds, quick thinking was often all that could save a life, as many of these wounds would result in a soldier bleeding out if not treated immediately. So, what did doctors turn to in these situations? Super glue.

The glue was accredited to saving many lives during the Vietnam War, as it was able to quickly stem bleeding as soldiers awaited surgery. While super glue isn’t recommended for quick fixes anymore, unless it’s an emergency, this shows contrast to the advancements made during this time. Essentially, the military had numerous advancements, but was unable to come up with a better quick fix than super glue. It was certainly effective considering the lives it was able to save, and some of us can probably thank super glue for our parents or grandparents being around today.

4Life After The War

There is a common misconception that Vietnam Veterans were treated poorly upon returning home. We’ve all heard the stories of protesters greeting them at the airport to throw garbage or spit on the veterans as they went to greet their families. While this seems way too outrageous to be real, rest assured, it isn’t. However, this wasn’t the case for the overwhelming majority. Some veterans simply stopped mentioning the war, as there was very little reaction to the veterans returning home, making it no different than any other military deployment.

Those who were greeted with a large reaction typically did not find a negative one. In fact, 87 percent of all Americans hold these veterans in high esteem, and many Veterans went on to live successful lives despite the misconception that many resented them. At least 85 percent of all of these veterans successfully transitioned back to civilian life, and are both less likely to be unemployed and have an 18 percent higher personal income compared to non-veterans. They’re also less likely to be imprisoned. In fact, only around .5 percent of all Vietnam veterans have served jail time.

3Cloud Seeding

When we think of the fighting itself, sabotage isn’t our first thought. However, this was something that the United States Army used to its advantage. One of the biggest ways they hoped to sabotage the NVA was through the practice of cloud seeding. The cloud seeding was first practiced in Project Popeye, where over 50 of these experiments took place, and the project had an 82 percent success rate. The cloud seeding would cause additional heavy rains and would effectively stop military movement in the affected areas.

It was also intended to flood specific areas, damage crops, and, in some areas, drastically change the weather. This was also seen as an alternative to bombing, as both would have the same effect on military movement, as the rain would simply make certain roads unusable. However, this project tended to kill fewer people, so it was used in place of bombings.

2The United States Was Not Alone

When we hear of the Vietnam War, we mainly hear of American involvement. While the United States had the highest number of soldiers in Vietnam, troops had backup from South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand. South Korea alone sent 312,853 soldiers to Vietnam between September 1963 and April 1975.

South Korea was also among the deadliest of these “backup” forces, killing 41,000 North Vietnamese soldiers and causing 5,000 civilian casualties. Only 4,687 South Koreans were killed during the war, with estimates of more than 5,000 wounded. The South Koreans had an overall kill ratio of 11 to 1. While South Korea sent the most troops, second only to the US, a large amount of troops came from other countries, such as the 60,000 military personnel from Australia, or the 3,000 from New Zealand during the conflict. It’s too bad the United States keeps hogging the spotlight.

1The Death Card

It’s likely we’ve all seen the ace of spades in the context of the Vietnam War. While Hollywood has taught us a thing or two about how these cards were used, many of us have no idea as to the true story behind this famous symbol. The ace of spades was left on dead Viet Cong soldiers as a warning. The Vietnamese are very superstitious people, and when American troops found out that they were scared of the card, it became widespread.

The only flaw was that it had little to no effect on the Vietnamese. In fact, this psychological warfare was only seen as a campaign by the soldiers: There were no headquarters, intelligence, or Psychological Operation experts behind this campaign. It was actually three lieutenants that asked for the first “Bicycle Secret Weapons,” while none of them had any psychological operation authority. The cards only spread in popularity due to their use as calling cards, which made fellow soldiers want them. So, while it was said that the cards would cause other Viet Cong soldiers to leave, the fear was more likely linked to fear of nearby Americans than of the cards themselves.

We’re all prone to acts of laziness. Maybe we should be washing the dishes, but we’ve instead elected to get drunk and play foosball. Maybe we’re supposed to be writing another article for the list-based website we work at but have instead fallen asleep face-down in a plate of nachos. Whatever. The point is, every single one of us occasionally indulges our lazy side.

But there’s indulging your lazy side, and then there’s dedicating your life to extreme acts of procrastination. The following people all have one thing in common: They took one look at your average lazy person and decided, “I can do better . . . as soon as I can be bothered.”

10 The Oxford English Dictionary Outdated Itself Before Release

Compiling the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was always going to be a monumental task. The last word on British English, the complete OED contains around 228,130 words spread over 20 volumes. When it first received a publishing contract in 1879, it was expected to take 10 whole years to compile. But those stumping up the money hadn’t counted on one fatal problem—the ability of academics to procrastinate like a total boss.

Five years into writing the OED’s first complete edition, the compilers had only gotten as far as the word “ant.” This should have been the wake-up call everyone needed to get them working harder. It wasn’t. Instead, 1889 came and went, and those involved were nowhere near the letter “z.” After 10 years, they’d barely edged out the start of the alphabet.

By the time someone finally sat down and wrote the entry for “Zzz,” the 19th century had ended, Queen Victoria had died, World War I had come and gone, jazz had stepped into existence, and the Wall Street Crash was about to hit. It was 1928, and the newly published complete OED was already out of date. Thanks to their epic bout of procrastination, the editors were forced to immediately get started on the second edition.

9 Jamestown’s Colonists Were Too Busy Partying For Executions

One of the guys who helped establish the colony at Jamestown, Virginia, John Smith was also the Englishman who first met Pocahontas, thereby ensuring Disney immortality for himself. He was also extremely unpopular. Twice during his time at Jamestown, his fellow colonists decided to execute him. Twice, they failed.

The first time, Smith escaped when his name was drawn from a locked box that had been sealed before setting sail from England. Those named were the colony’s new governors, and it was thought better to keep him alive. The second time, the lucky Brit escaped not through the divine machinations of fate or thanks to his own quick wits. He escaped because his executioners were too busy partying.

The only survivor of a Powhatan attack, Smith had been blamed and sentenced to hang. At the time, Jamestown was struggling to fend off mass starvation, and the idea of one less extra mouth to feed must’ve seemed pretty tempting. The night of the execution, the whole town gathered . . . only for 100 new settlers to suddenly arrive with much-needed supplies.

In the wild celebrations that followed, the colonists decided to defer Smith’s execution. Only, they never got round to carrying it out. Thanks to their party-hard tendencies, Smith survived to map 4,000 kilometers (2,500 mi) of territory, shaping future explorations of the New World.

8 Richard Sheridan Redefines Missing Deadlines

In the second half of the 18th century, Richard Sheridan was the toast of London. An Anglo-Irish playwright, Sheridan made his name with light comedies such as School for Scandal. He was almost as famous for his procrastination. Sheridan turned missing deadlines into a kind of extreme sport.

We don’t just mean he handed his manuscripts in late. We don’t even mean he handed his manuscripts in at the last possible second. We mean he handed his finished play to the actors for the first time while it was in the middle of being performed on opening night.

Sheridan had already finished the first two acts of School for Scandal and kept promising the actors that they’d get the rest. He kept promising even as he procrastinated, right up until opening night. When it was time to raise the curtain, and it became apparent that Sheridan really hadn’t finished the play, a borderline crazy plan was devised. Sheridan would keep writing as the play went on, rushing lines down to the actors waiting in the wings. So long as he could keep ahead of the performance, the audience would never know.

Incredibly, this ridiculous non-plan worked. School for Scandal became a massive hit, eventually inspiring the plays of Oscar Wilde.

7 The Crematorium Owner Who Made Laziness Terrifying

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a crematorium owner. Now also imagine that your crematorium has just broken. What do you do?

If you said, “Pay to have it fixed,” congratulations—you’re a sane human being. Ray Brent Marsh was evidently neither of those things. When the oven of his Georgia crematorium gave up the ghost in the late 1990s, Marsh decided that it’d be less of a hassle to just secretly bury the corpses in his backyard and give the families urns full of concrete dust so they wouldn’t notice.

That’s right: Marsh was so lazy that he preferred to do the much harder job of digging a pit and burying bodies than the much easier one of picking up the phone and ringing for a crematorium repair guy. He just didn’t just do this once or twice, either. When police finally raided the premises, they found over 320 sets of human remains that had essentially been left to rot. For his epic display of laziness, Marsh was sentenced to 12 years in prison. He’s expected to be released sometime in 2016.

6 Britain’s Laziest Prime Minister

In Britain, class is everything. It’s often said that you can be a talentless no-good, but if you’re born in the aristocracy, you’ll still do well. The case of 19th century prime minister Lord Melbourne proves this. Possibly the laziest man in history, Melbourne became PM by accident and then slept his way through seven years of British history.

In all his long life, Melbourne failed to do pretty much anything. Before becoming prime minister, he’d married the nightmarish Lady Caroline Ponsonby and stayed with her out of sheer lethargy. As he lazed around the house, Lady Caroline went out and had public affairs with men like Lord Byron and then wrote scandalous “tell-all” books about the sex they’d had right under her stupid husband’s nose. It took Lord Melbourne 20 years to get around to divorcing her.

His ascension to the highest office in Britain was no less auspicious. Lord Grey had turned down the post, and Lord Melbourne was the only man the House of Commons’s warring factions could agree on, precisely because he never did anything. In the post, Lord Melbourne spent every single meeting, debate, gathering, and sermon sleeping, usually snoring so loudly that others couldn’t hear themselves speak. Benjamin Disraeli said that he would “lounge away an Empire.” The only reason the lazy PM stayed in office so long was because he had the hots for Queen Victoria, and his post meant that she was obliged to frequently meet him. He was finally replaced in 1841, to the relief of the entire country.

5 The ISIS Jihadi Who Was Too Lazy to Fight

Members of ISIS are many despicable things (callous, cruel, genocidal, anti-Semitic, homophobic), but one thing they’re not is lazy. At least, most of them aren’t. In January 2015, middle-aged Abu Ali crossed from Turkey into Syria to join the death cult. Recruited as a potential jihadist, Ali turned out to be so lazy that he wound up costing the Islamic State money.

There’s a passage in the Quran where Muhammad quite clearly says that if a Muslim doesn’t want to fight, no one can make them. Ali had evidently taken this to heart. When ISIS accepted him into their ranks, Ali demanded a desk job. When they told him to shut up and wage some jihad, he waved the Quran verse at them. Suddenly, ISIS were stuck with a fat, middle-aged idiot whom their own interpretation of Islam forced them to care for.

Over the next few months, Ali chilled out in Syria, watching Rambo on TV and getting fat off the ISIS teat. As carnage unfolded around him, this terminally lazy oddball spent his time downloading music videos and chatting with the jihadists around him. When ISIS finally forced him to go to the front, he invented a medical condition. Eventually, Ali found himself being shunted around from commander to commander, draining resources and driving the terrorists insane with his dedication to living like the Islamic State’s own personal welfare queen.

Finally, those in charge got so fed up with Ali that he began to fear for his safety. He escaped back to Turkey and immediately took up his old life again, having spent four months draining ISIS funds. We can’t tell if he’s genuinely an idiot or a clever undercover plant sent by the CIA to drive some jihadists up the wall.

4 Douglas Adams Procrastinates Right Into Productivity

Douglas Adams is one of the greatest and laziest writers to have ever lived. His Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a seminal book in both sci-fi and British literature. But Adams was famously prone to procrastination. At one point, he gave a Hitchhiker’s book a cliff-hanger ending purely because he couldn’t be bothered to keep typing to the end of the paragraph.

But his greatest act of procrastination undoubtedly came in the mid-1990s. Contracted to do a book called the Starship Titanic, Adams kept putting it off for years on end. Eventually, his procrastination grew so extreme that, according to Terry Jones, he created an entire computer game just to avoid doing work on his novel.

Bear in mind this was the 1990s, when creating a playable computer game in your bedroom was something that maybe only six and a half people could do. Yet Adams still wound up creating a sprawling point-and-click adventure which he triumphantly dumped in front of his publishers as an alternative to writing. His publishers took one look, agreed to release it, and then said that they’d still need the novel. With only five weeks to go, Adams called up Monty Python member Terry Jones and begged him to write it instead. Jones obliged, claiming later that he wrote the whole thing in the nude. (Because why not?)

3 George Akerlof Turns Procrastination Into An Academic Field

Any man can put off doing something for as long as feasibly possible, but it takes a special kind of man to be curious enough about their own laziness to write an academic paper on it. Meet George Akerlof. A respected economist, Akerlof managed to turn his own procrastination into a Nobel Prize–winning career.

The setting is India, and the date is the early 1990s. Akerlof was living on the subcontinent at the time when his friend Joseph Stiglitz came to visit. When his vacation ended, Stiglitz left but forgot to pack some shirts. He asked Akerlof to mail them over to him. Akerlof agreed, only to keep putting it off. He put off mailing the box for eight whole months and finally came to two conclusions: Stiglitz probably no longer wanted to be his friend, and procrastination was something worth rigorous academic study.

The thing was, Akerlof had the best of intentions. He really did mean to send the box, yet he didn’t. His breakthrough was to realize that this strange, irrational action could be applied to behavioral economics. In a 1991 paper called “Procrastination and Obedience,” Akerlof used his own tardiness to make assumptions about how populations might act in certain situations. The academic world went wild.

In the years since, procrastination has become a vast field of study, both within the realm of economics and without. Akerlof went on to win the Nobel Prize in 2001 for his contributions. And Stiglitz, you’ll be happy to know, eventually got his shirts back.

2 Buddha’s Disciple Can’t Be Bothered To Ask Vital Questions

Born before Christ was even a twinkle in Joseph’s eye, Siddhartha Gautama (aka the Buddha) created a global religion, with some 500 million people worldwide adhering to his every utterance. With his words at such a premium, you might expect his disciples to have asked him about everything in minute detail. You’d be wrong. Thanks to the laziness of a guy named Ananda, there are still super-important things that we don’t know about Buddhist vows to this very day.

Toward the end of his life, the Buddha dropped a theological bomb on his disciple Ananda: From then on, the minor vows wouldn’t be needed in ordination, just the major ones. This is kinda like St Peter calling the future pope over and saying, “Know those Hail Marys? I’ve chatted with the big G, and we’ve decided to drop them.” The only problem was, Ananda didn’t know which were the major vows and which were the minor. He deciding that asking could wait for later. He kept on thinking that right until the Buddha died, taking the answer with him.

As a result of this one lazy disciple, no one in the past 2,500 years of Buddhism has had any idea if they’re saying the right vows or not. No one wants to accidentally skip a major one, so they just say the whole lot, painfully aware that a good chunk of it is totally unnecessary.

1 Da Vinci Turns Procrastination into Genius

The Mona Lisa is one of the greatest portraits in history. It’s so iconic that we don’t even have to show you a picture; you can imagine it already. It’s also kind of small: The canvas measures only 76 centimeters (30 in) by 53 centimeters (21 in), about the size of a smallish TV. But given that it’s a masterpiece, you’d probably expect it to have taken a while to paint. How long do you think? Six months? A year?

Try 15 years. For a decade and a half, da Vinci failed to finish his iconic portrait, not because it was so difficult, but because he was so lazy. That’s not us being judgmental. On his deathbed, the great man himself even admitted to his chronic procrastination when he apologized “to God and Man for leaving so much undone.” For comparison, it took Michelangelo a mere four years to paint the entire Sistine Chapel. The area his masterpieces covered? Around 1,100 square meters (12,000 ft²).

But a lazy genius is still a genius, and da Vinci was probably the biggest genius of them all. Although it took him forever to finish artworks (the Virgin of the Rocks took 25 years to finish, from a seven-month commission), he put his procrastination to great use. It was in his downtime that he filled his notebooks with doodles and ideas. Some of those doodles would later turn out to be inventions that could have changed the course of history.

You’ve probably heard that da Vinci invented the helicopter, tank, scuba gear, and parachute. Well, this was when he did it—when he should have been working. Some of the greatest examples of human ingenuity only came about because da Vinci was too lazy to stick with his painting. Remember to tell your boss that next time he catches you binge-watching Game of Thrones when you should be working.

Today, the idea that prophecies can reveal the future is the stuff of tabloids. In the ancient world, though, the prophetic visions and advice of the oracles were thought to be guidance from the gods. While many of the people who sought the advice of ancient priestesses were undoubtedly looking for help with everyday life, there are some prophecies that shaped the entire world.

10 Julian The Apostate And The Rise Of Christianity

Julian the Apostate was a Roman emperor who rose to power in 361. Even though Christianity was gaining considerable momentum, Julian not only renounced the Christian faith but waged a sort of nonviolent war against it.

He wrote volumes on Hellenistic culture and religion, considered himself the head of paganism, performed animal sacrifices, and appointed his officials based on their pagan beliefs. He even funded the rebuilding of Jewish temples in Jerusalem—not because he particularly liked the Jews but because he hated the Christians.

He also tried to usher in a period of rebirth for the Oracle at Delphi, not only declaring them free from taxation but also sending them regular tributes and issuing orders that the ailing area was under his protection. He also sent one of his doctors, a man named Oribasius, to supervise their finances and consult with Delphi’s Pythian priestess.

In spite of all Julian’s efforts, the prophecy would be the last one the oracle ever gave. It foresaw her own downfall and the end of not just the oracle but the influence of the old gods.

A version of the prophecy reads: “Tell the king the fair wrought hall is fallen to the ground. No longer has Phoebus (Apollo) a hut, nor a prophetic laurel, nor a spring that speaks. The water of speech even is quenched.”

Julian died after ruling for only 20 months. He was killed while fleeing a battlefield in what is now the area near Baghdad. No one knows who threw the spear that killed him, and his attempts at reinstating the old gods had no lasting impact.

9 Solon’s Democracy

After the Athenians labored under the laws of Draco—and courted death for any offense imaginable—they turned to Solon for a rewrite of the laws in 594. What he established was the basis for democracy.

Although it is not in the same form that we are more familiar with today, his rules set a precedent. He got rid of the practice of selling citizens into slavery if they defaulted on loans and introduced the ideas of a trial before a jury and a ruling council.

That was a huge change from what the Athenians were accustomed to, and Plutarch writes that the idea for this type of government came from an oracle. When Solon was chosen to try to fix everything that was wrong with Athens, he appealed to the Oracle at Delphi for guidance. The priestess there told him, “Sit in the middle of the ship, guiding straight the helmsman’s task. Many of the Athenians will be your helpers.”

Solon went on to turn a government that had drawn officers from the nobility to one that was designed to protect every person and one with officers selected from among those with material success rather than a pedigree. He also included laws that stated if officers broke the oaths they took, they needed to pay recompense to the oracle. The Pythia herself was given an official post as an interpreter of religious rituals and sacred law, where she continued to help guide the development of democracy from within.

8 Philip Of Macedon’s Silver Spears

Precious metals like gold and silver have been highly valued for a long time, and it was not until the Greeks that precious metals were melted down into easy-to-carry coins that could be handed out as payment. Among the first to use coins was the Greek military, who needed a way to reimburse the massive armies they were calling to arms. These early coins were developed to be used anywhere, and it was Philip II of Macedonia—Alexander the Great’s father—who developed the idea of coins as we know them today.

When Philip rose to power, it was to the top of an ailing country. Macedonia was thought to be a barbaric neighbor to the more cultured Greece, and Philip’s first obstacle was proving that he and his people were worthy of being called Greek. In 359, Philip visited the Oracle at Delphi and was told that “with silver spears you may conquer the world.”

Many of the oracle’s prophecies needed some interpretation, and Philip read the words as not referring to military might but economic power. Turning his eye toward nearby silver mines, he made a push for conquering them and using the newly acquired silver to issue bribes and payments wherever it was necessary.

He then went on to create a series of coins that weren’t just valuable for their precious metal content but for the message they spread. Philip’s coins were struck with designs that were pure propaganda, with images not unlike the ones found on coins today.

One of the finest was a coin that had Zeus’s head on one side (a version of the god that bore a striking similarity to Philip himself) and a horse on the other. It was a clear reminder of Philip’s entrance into the Olympics and his bid to make Macedonia recognized as on par with Greece. The coins were circulated all over the empire and had their descendants in the imagery of modern money.

7 The Tiburtine Sibyl And The Apocalypse

The Prophecy of the Tenth Sibyl is a manuscript that dates back to the 11th century. Nearly as popular as the Bible, it was so popular that dozens of copies still survive in languages including Greek, Latin, Arabic, Slavonic, and Ethiopic. Considered a late ancient apocryphal text originating from the fourth century, the work tells the story of a coming apocalypse and shaped belief in the End Times for medieval Christians.

The original text references the time of a Trojan emperor and tells the story of how the prophetic abilities of the sibyl reached the leaders of Rome. She was summoned to the city, and when she got there, 100 senators had the same dream on the same night.

Each one dreamed of nine different suns with nine different qualities, and when they appealed to the sibyl to find out what the dream meant, the interpretation was a dark one. The sibyl told them that the nine suns—and their different characteristics—represented mankind’s future generations and the changes they would undergo.

The first two generations were peaceful, the third would be a time of turmoil for Rome, the fourth would witness the birth of Christ, and the fifth would spread the gospel. War and upheaval would return for the sixth, seventh, and eighth. In the ninth, there would be a series of four kings. The fifth king would rule for 30 years, build a temple, and see God’s will done.

Then a last emperor, handsome and shining, would rise to rule for another 112 years, converting all the nonbelievers to the will of God. After him would be the Antichrist to challenge him, but he was destined to be defeated by this last emperor as he turns the proverbial keys to the kingdom over to God and Christ.

The prophecy is the first mention of a divine ruler appointed by God who is responsible for subduing the Antichrist. With this original appearance in the fourth century, it marks a shift not only in religious beliefs but in political beliefs as well. Emperors—and later medieval kings—were increasingly viewed as divine creatures who were, first and foremost, concerned with defeating the evils that walked the world and preparing their people for the Second Coming.

6 Tages Founds A Religion

Pre-Roman Etruscan culture relied heavily on the art of divination, and their seers and soothsayers had written entire texts on how to interpret the signs that were sent from the gods. They saw omens in everything from lightning to the organs of sacrificed animals and believed the future was written in the world around them. All they needed to do was know how to read it, and they did. Their divination knowledge was well-known across Italy, and it was a Tuscan family that was even credited as birthing the sage that predicted Caesar’s troubles on the Ides of March.

By the time Christianity came stomping through the old ways, Etruscan diviners became the stuff of the dark side. Even though the old diviners and the new Christians didn’t get along, the practitioners of the old Etruscan religion managed to hold their power for a surprisingly long time—long enough to guide Rome on the path to becoming a major empire.

And it was all based on the prophecies of a man named Tages. The legends say that Tages was child-sized when he was birthed from a furrow being plowed in the fields and that when a crowd gathered to see this miracle, his first words were written down to ultimately become the first sacred book of the Etruscans.

Another part of the story of Tages suggests that he went on to teach haruspication (divination by reading animal entrails) to a group known as the Twelve People of the Etruscans. They were usually interpreted as a group of people from each of the city-states who met regularly to discuss matters of national importance, blending religious beliefs with political rule.

5 Lycurgus And The Establishment Of Sparta

Lycurgus is one of those historical figures who has had the story of his life told so many times that no one is quite sure which parts are true. Historians are not even sure when he actually lived: Aristotle puts his life at around 884 BC, while Xenophon’s records suggest that he lived around 200 years earlier. Details aside, Lycurgus is associated with the development of Spartan culture as we think of it, and he did it with the guidance of the Oracle at Delphi.

According to Plutarch, Lycurgus first gained power as the regent of another. During his first visit to the oracle, she called him “beloved of the gods, and rather god than man” and promised him that he had the ability to establish a set of laws that would lead his people to prosperity.

He pitched his ideas to a small group of supporters first, but that small group quickly grew. During another visit to the oracle, Lycurgus received even more prophetic wisdom in the form of the Rhetra. The Rhetra defined how to divide the people into different groups, how to set up the Senate, and how to distribute power. With Lycurgus and his followers embracing this new method, motions put forward by senators and kings were approved or dismissed by the people.

The Spartan government went through a whole series of changes, not surprisingly, but it was Lycurgus—with guidance from the oracle—who established the heart of Spartan culture.

4 Grinus And The Founding Of Cyrene

Cyrene was one of the most important cities in the Hellenic era and throughout Roman occupation. Established in 631 BC, it was a major hub of commercial trade, religion, and culture for more than 1,000 years. Even today, archaeologists are scrambling to save it.

And it was founded because of the bidding of the Oracle at Delphi.

When Herodotus wrote about the founding of the city, he told the story of Grinus, son of Aesanius and king of Thera. When the king consulted with the oracle, he was told that he needed to found a city in Libya. The king ignored the order, not out of any outright rebellion but simply because no one knew where Libya was.

Over the course of the next seven years, the rain stopped and hardship seized the people. When the king appealed to the oracle again to find out what he could do to save his people, he was reminded of the prophecy. Messengers were sent out to find someone who knew where Libya was, and finally, they found a dye merchant named Corobius.

He had been to Libya—quite by accident—and was able to escort a small party across the sea and to the new land. Leaving him there, the Therans returned to assemble a group of settlers from each of their nation’s districts and head out to found the city that they hoped would save their own.

They ended up settling on an island off the coast, but the bad luck still haunted Thera. The oracle was consulted and replied that they needed to found their city on the continent, not on an island. Moving to the mainland, the native peoples guided them to the final location that would become Cyrene and helped them settle around a spring that would be dedicated to Apollo.

3 The Sibylline Books

The Sibylline Books are a set of mysterious texts written somewhere around the sixth century BC by the ancient priestesses thought to have been blessed with the gift of prophecy. Since the books were kept under close guard by those who possessed them, we really have no clue what the books actually said. We do know that they were partially destroyed in 83 BC and then burned in their entirety around 400 by the order of a Roman general.

The story of how a sibyl burned some of the books rather than compromise on the price is a famous one, and after the sale was finished, the remaining books were kept in a stone chest beneath the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus.

They could only be read by order of the Senate, and it was only during a major crisis or times of great need that the chest was opened and the books were read by those assigned to keep them safe. Sharing any knowledge of what was seen in the books was a crime punishable by death, so we are not even sure if the books contained rules and rituals to appeal to the gods for help in setting things straight or actual predictions.

It’s suggested that many of the temples that dotted the ancient world were built after consultation with the books and that countless cults, rituals, and observations also have their roots in the books. Cicero and Livy both record some of the omens and portents that caused the Roman Senate to order the books unsealed, including astronomical phenomena like the appearance of the Sun at night and more earthly omens like lightning striking a temple or religious statue.

Livy records one specific occurrence where the books were consulted. After two cows climbed some stairs and entered a building, a rain of stones fell in several towns. At the same time, lightning hit a temple to Jupiter in Minturnae and several ships in Vulturnum were also struck and destroyed. After consulting the books, a period of fasting was observed and then repeated every five years.

With the rise of Christianity, consulting the books gradually fell out of fashion. But it is likely that they had already shaped a good portion of early Roman religion, holidays, observances, and rituals.

2 Flavius Josephus Predicts The Rise Of Vespasian

Josephus was a Jewish priest and historian who wrote extensively on early Jewish history, and he is credited with giving us an authoritative, accurate history of his religion during Roman rule. Born in 37, he first traveled to Rome from Jerusalem on a mission to free some of his countrymen from a Roman prison. When he returned to Jerusalem, it was to rebel against Rome, setting him right in the middle of a war that he survived because of a prophecy.

When Rome stormed into Galilee, Josephus and his companions holed up in the fortress of Jotapata. After spending 47 days there, Roman forces broke through and the rebels were driven back to a cave. Rather than surrender, the men decided to commit suicide—a major sin.

Josephus convinced them not to condemn themselves by suicide. Instead, he proposed that each man should kill the man at his side. They drew lots for the one who would survive at the end to surrender, and that was Josephus. Josephus—along with the man he was supposed to kill—surrendered to the Romans, and they were taken to the commander, Vespasian.

Facing crucifixion, Josephus told Vespasian of the prophecy of an oracle—a prophecy that he suggested referred to his captor. The prophecy was that “a star shall come out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel; it shall crush the forehead of Moab and break down all the sons of Sheth.” For the Jews, the prophecy was referring to the Messiah, but Vespasian was intrigued enough by the prospect that it was talking about him that he spared Josephus from death.

After Nero’s suicide in 68, Galba’s hanging in 69, and failed bids for power by two others, Vespasian was made emperor in what seemingly fulfilled the prophecy the Jewish prisoner had told him. Josephus was released, made a Roman citizen, given the name Titus Flavius Josephus, and installed as an adviser.

Even though he absolutely was not trusted by his former Jewish allies, he saw an end to the siege and the destruction of Jerusalem. He went on to write, leaving us with a glimpse into that particular pocket of history.

1 Onomacritus And His Forgeries

The ancient world was shaped by the wars led by men like Alexander the Great and Xerxes, ultimately allowing for everything from cultural exchanges to the development and trade of goods and knowledge. If it weren’t for the rather dubious prophecies assembled—and often written—by Onomacritus, the world might have looked considerably different.

Herodotus says that he was employed mainly in the collection, preservation, and presentation of ancient oracles. He was a scholar, a historian, and an interpreter who was banished from Greece when it was discovered that the information he was presenting from oracles and prophecies wasn’t authentic, per se, as much as they were slightly doctored by him. Once he was banished from Athens, he made his way into Persia where he appealed to Xerxes for employment in his court.

At the time, the counselors of Xerxes were trying their best to get him to renew aggressions against the Greeks, and Onomacritus saw his opportunity. Presenting himself as the keeper and collector of ancient Greek knowledge and prophecy, he gave Xerxes a series of oracles that clearly predicted a win for the Persians. What he conveniently left out were any predictions, prophecies, and texts that said otherwise. Ultimately, Xerxes was persuaded to head out to war.

In addition to starting a war based on selective telling of the truth, Onomacritus has also successfully presented us with a major literary problem even today. Orpheus is one of the great writers of ancient Greek ritual and wisdom, half mythical and mentioned alongside writers like Homer and Hesiod. While we know there are a number of works that are attributed to him, we do not know what he actually wrote. Onomacritus forged an unknown number of Orphic works and changed countless more before cementing those in history and brushing aside the real thing.

We’re always amazed when archaeologists come upon extraordinary and magnificent discoveries. Sometimes, the discoveries are rather small and maybe insignificant (such as a single coin from centuries ago), and sometimes, they’re bigger and incredibly important (such as a forgotten ancient city). While some important discoveries are made as part of well-planned expeditions and aren’t especially surprising, incredible archaeological discoveries are sometimes made by pure chance. Below is a list of 10 important archaeological discoveries that were uncovered completely by accident.

10 19th-Century Brothel

In 1997, the Smithsonian Institution commissioned an archaeological study of the site upon which the National Museum of the American Indian was to be built and found artifacts, buried and untouched for more than a century, that could have only been from a wealthy household. These high-quality, expensive items were an unusual find in an area that was known to previously have been working-class neighborhood, and as a result, old maps and real estate records were consulted. It was then confirmed that the artifacts were what remained of a 19th-century brothel which was run by Mary Ann Hall, a mysterious, successful entrepreneur.

Prior to the dig, archaeologists didn’t know exactly what they were going to find, although they did have their suspicions. Archival research done before the archaeological excavations revealed that the house was occupied by a rather large number of females, a fact which the researchers and archaeologists found rather odd. However, it was the artifacts that pointed to the actual, slightly scandalous nature of the establishment. Hundreds of champagne corks and broken bottles, shards of expensive porcelain, seeds from exotic fruits, and women’s grooming items made it obvious that the house was indeed a brothel. It was no ordinary brothel, however. It stood in close proximity to Capitol Hill and was visited by elite clientele.

Today, many of the artifacts remaining from Mary Ann Hall’s brothel are kept at the Historical Society of Washington, DC, and can be viewed with an appointment.

9 Herculaneum

Most people are familiar with the destruction of Pompeii, which occurred in AD 79. After all, it’s now one of the biggest tourist attractions in Italy and draws thousands of tourists each year. However, a significantly smaller number of people are aware that the day Mount Vesuvius erupted, it also destroyed another Roman city called Herculaneum.

On the day of the eruption, Pompeii was downwind from the volcano and was thus quickly buried under a covering of ash. Herculaneum, on the other hand, was upwind and was destroyed more than 12 hours later when it was hit by a blast of scorching ash, rock, and volcanic gas. The blast was of such high temperature that it instantly carbonized everything in the city, leaving Herculaneum extremely well-preserved (more so than Pompeii, in fact).

While the city of Herculaneum was never quite lost or forgotten, it nevertheless wasn’t until the 18th century that it was “rediscovered”—completely by accident. In 1709, a farmer was digging a well and found some elaborate marble stonework. It was later realized that he had actually discovered the remains of the magnificent Roman theater of Herculaneum, which had been lying undisturbed beneath his fields for over a 1,000 years.

After the initial accidental discovery, a series of “robber” shafts and tunnels were dug to strip the site of any valuable items. Not long after, however, Herculaneum was explored on a more scientific basis for King Charles of Bourbon. In the 20th century, archaeological excavations recommenced on a far more modern and scientific basis, which resulted in the discovery of more interesting Roman artifacts.

8 The Edinburgh Vaults

In 1785, the construction of the Edinburgh Vaults commenced under the South Bridge in Edinburgh, Scotland, and was completed and opened in 1788. The South Bridge’s surface was thus dotted with numerous booming businesses with their workshops located underneath them, while still below this, living quarters existed. The lower you were under the bridge, the lower your social status was.

Life under the bridge was in constant motion and development. Criminals moved illegal materials through the tunnels in a black market, a red-light district with gambling venues cropped up, pubs and brothels were established, and crime and murder prospered. It is even said that at one point, serial killers were able to murder over a dozen victims and store the bodies in the vaults without being detected or stopped.

However, the conditions in the vaults were so bad that even the poorest citizens were leaving their underground slums between 1835 and 1875. The vaults were eventually shut down and forgotten.

In the 1980s, a rugby player and bar owner named Norrie Rowan tried to help his Romanian colleague Cristian Raducanu (who had defected to the UK) escape the Romanian secret police and discovered a tunnel underneath his bar that led to the Edinburgh Vaults. The find led to Raducanu’s successful escape as well as the vaults’ revival. The tunnels and chambers were excavated and restored. When children’s toys, medicine, and other household items were discovered, it was realized that the Edinburgh Vaults were home to many unfortunates. Today, the vaults are a major tourist attraction for those seeking the thrill of ghost tours.

7 The Venus De Milo

The famous sculpture of Venus de Milo was discovered in 1820 by a farmer named Georgios (or Yourgos) Kentrotas on the Aegean Island of Melos (aka Milos or Milo). Kentrotas was in the process of plowing a field when he came upon a cave which contained within it half of a statue of the goddess Aphrodite.

The events that followed are not quite clear, and different sources provide slightly different accounts of what happened next: Some sources claim that Kentrotas hid the statue in a barn, wishing to keep it for himself, but the statue was eventually discovered and confiscated by Turkish authorities. Shortly after, the French ambassador to Turkey bought it and (after some repair work) presented it to King Louis XVIII of France, who placed it in the Louvre, where it remains to this day.

Other sources claim that a French officer named Olivier Voutier was visiting Melos at the time when Kentrotas found the statue and urged him to look for the other half of it. Kentrotas obliged and soon discovered the other half, along with a sixth-century BC statue of young Hermes and Hercules as an old man. Voutier made a sketch of the statue of Aphrodite and sent it to Louis Brest, the French vice-consul for Melos, who in turn sent it to the French consul in Constantinople. The latter decided to obtain the statue of Aphrodite for France and sent an envoy to Melos. In the meantime, however, Kentrotas sold the statue to another man on behalf of the prince of Moldavia. The statue was ready to be placed aboard a ship for Romania when the French ship sailed in. After some bargaining, the envoy and Louis Brest bought the statue as a gift for Louis XVIII. Venus de Milo then appeared in the Louvre on March 1, 1821.

It’s interesting to note that a pedestal, a piece of an upper left arm, and a left hand holding an apple were found along with the statue. However, it’s not clear whether these fragments belonged to the Venus de Milo, and while attempts to create a design to replace the missing arms were made, it was eventually decided to leave the statue in the state it was in when it was accidentally found by the Greek farmer.

6 Chinese Mummy

In 2011 in Taizhou, a city located on the eastern coast of China’s Jiangsu province, road workers were in the process of widening a road, which involved clearing the way by digging several feet into the ground. When the workers were digging about 2 meters (6 ft) below the surface, they struck a large, solid object. Realizing that the object they’d accidentally found might be of significant value, they contacted a team of archaeologists to excavate the area.

The archaeologists then determined that the object was actually a tomb with a three-layered coffin inside it. When the main coffin was opened, layers of silk and linen covered in brown liquid were noticed, but the biggest surprise still awaited: Beneath the linens and silks, they discovered the remains of a female body. The remains were so well-preserved that the eyebrows, hair, and skin of the woman were still intact after more than 600 years.

5 Palatial Roman Villa

When the designer Luke Irwin and his wife decided to convert an old barn on their newly acquired property in England into a room for table tennis, they came upon a most extraordinary find—a palatial Roman villa just 18 meters (60 ft) from their front door.

In an effort to put their table tennis room together, the Irwins hired electricians to lay cables for lights. The spectacular discovery almost wasn’t made at all: The electricians initially suggested stringing up an overhead cable from the Irwins’ house in order to supply the power to the barn, but thankfully, Irwin insisted on an underground cable being laid instead. The electricians gave in, and soon, the drilling process began. Just 46 centimeters (18 in) below the surface, they hit a strange, hard layer. The layer consisted of pieces of mosaics.

Irwin quickly sent a photograph of the mosaic to the council, and shortly after, archaeologists arrived at their house, ready to excavate the site. They found that the mosaic formed part of the floor of an elaborate and extremely well-preserved villa, which dates back from between AD 175 and 220. The dig also unearthed hundreds of oyster shells, high-status pottery, brooches, coins, and the bones of wild animals. Other finds included a Roman well and the stone coffin of a Roman child, which had been previously used as a flower bed. The site hadn’t been touched since the villa collapsed more than 1,400 years ago. As a consequence, it has been unsurprisingly been declared extremely important.

4 The Lyceum

Plato was the founder of the first university in the Western World, called the Academy. Aristotle was a star pupil of the Academy, and in 335 BC, he went on to start his own school, called the Lyceum, in Athens. Over time, however, the Lyceum was lost, and efforts made by archaeologists to find the famous school were fruitless for over more than 100 years.

Nonetheless, in 1997, the Lyceum was accidentally discovered by workers working on a construction site for the projected Museum of Modern Art. Imagine the surprise when excavations carried out by the workers on an unpaved parking lot revealed an ancient complex with a central courtyard and a wrestling area (known as palaestra)! Archaeologists later confirmed that the magnificent discovery was part of the Lyceum. Of course, the spectacular discovery of the ancient school meant that an alternative site would have to be chosen for the art museum, since the remains of the Lyceum have been turned into an outdoor museum.

3 The Banwell Caves

The Banwell Caves consist of the “Stalactite Cave” and the “Bone Cave.” The Stalactite Cave was discovered by chance by local miners in 1757 but was left untouched until 1824, when it reopened with the goal of attracting paying visitors and raising money for a parochial school. However, access to the cave was difficult, and thus, an attempt was made to create a more convenient entrance. The attempt failed, but it led to the accidental discovery of the Bone Cave. The Bone Cave is so named because upon its discovery, it was filled with mud containing bones of animals that were up to 80,000 years old and no longer native to England.

The site where the discovery occurred was owned by the bishop of Bath and Wells, George Henry Law. A cottage was built on the side of the hill and was gradually enlarged. Various ornamental buildings were also built. The best bones from the Bone Cave were displayed in one such building. It’s interesting to note that the bishop firmly believed that the discovery of animal bones was proof of Noah’s flood. The caves continued to operate for some time after the bishop’s death but eventually closed to the public in 1865.

2 The Ruins Of Serdica

In 2012, engineers excavating a new line for the metro in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia came upon the remains of the cosmopolitan city of Serdica, where Constantine the Great, the first Christian Roman emperor, lived for a year while looking for a new capital for his empire. Serdica was a major metropolis and contains physical traces of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine cultures.

The ruins discovered are mostly from the time when Serdica was the capital of the Roman province of Inner Dacia—the time when the city was at its largest and most flourishing. Archaeological excavations of the site unearthed floor mosaics containing symbolic Roman vine leaves, early sewage systems, a wheel of fortune (which was probably used for bringing good fortune to the inhabitants), and private bath houses of ancient Romans who lived there.

Today, the site where the ruins of the ancient city of Serdica were found has been transformed into an open-air museum.

1 The Artwork Of Lascaux Cave

In 1940, a group of teenagers accidentally discovered the ancient artwork in Lascaux Cave near Montignac, France, after following their dog into a cavern. Shortly after, archaeologists were notified of the find and called in to investigate.

The Lascaux Cave is decorated with around 600 painted drawings of animals and symbols as well as almost 1,500 engravings. The drawings are mostly of animals, including horses, rhinos, deer, stags, and mythical creatures. Only one human figure has been drawn inside the cave—a bird-headed man with an erect penis. The paintings found in the cave are considered to be the finest examples of art from the Upper Paleolithic Period. Archaeologists believe that the cave was a center for hunting and religious rites.

The Lascaux Cave was opened to public in 1948 but was closed in 1963 because the artificial lights and carbon dioxide had caused damage to the delicate artwork. A replica of the cave was opened in 1983 and receives thousands of visitors each year.

A student from Ireland in love with books, writing, coffee, and cats.

The Black Death was a pandemic that swept through not just Europe, but also parts of Asia and Africa, leaving an absolutely devastating death toll in its wake. Tens of millions of people died at the very least, and the populations hit were so decimated that they didn’t recover to previous levels for centuries.

During the time period of the Black Death, written records weren’t kept nearly as well as they are now (if they were at all), and the huge and constant loss of life meant that much knowledge of exactly how things happened is lost. This means that many rumors have spread about how it occurred, and many popular accounts are greatly exaggerated. Many of the common claims about the Black Death are either false or not entirely true.

10 The Catholic Church Has Been Blamed For The Black Death

The Catholic Church has been one of the most powerful organizations in the world for quite some time, so it is perhaps not too surprising that there are a lot of conspiracy theories about it, and it has become a popular scapegoat for many situations. In terms of the Black Death, no one is suggesting that the church tried specifically to cause it, but they do suggest that the church’s alleged backward thinking and practices helped it spread more effectively and cause more deaths overall. The claims say that the disease came mostly to humans from fleas and that these fleas came from rats. At this point, the popular theory does seem to unravel a bit, as fleas could travel along with many other animals besides rats.

Regardless, some like to claim that due to Catholic superstitions, cats were originally blamed for the Black Death. This led to a mass culling of cats, which caused the rats to spread and populate far quicker than they normally would have. According to popular mythology, this massive destruction of felines directly helped the Black Death get off the ground as a major pandemic, and it was all the church’s fault.

The problem with this theory—apart from many historians not believing that rats had as big a role as people claim—is that there is really no evidence of this mass cat culling due to Catholic superstition. It’s an oft-repeated story by cat lovers on the Internet to promote the virtues of their beloved choice of pet, but none of it appears to be sourced on anything solid.

9 Terrible Hygiene And Sanitation Practices Were A Huge Factor

Some people don’t like to picture it because it’s not a very romantic part of medieval history, but many researchers believe that one of the biggest reasons the plague spread so easily and with such deadly purpose was not just lack of advanced medical knowledge and preponderance of rats, but the fact that the hygiene habits of the time period were absolutely vile.

Now, we don’t mean that people didn’t bathe or try to stay clean, but rather that the infrastructure was lacking to a point that would be horrifying to most modern people today. Modern sewers and other sanitation didn’t exist, modern trash pickup was not a thing, and refrigeration along with proper knowledge of food safety was also something that people of the time seriously lacked.

Take, for example, the conditions in Bristol, the second-biggest city in Britain when plague hit Europe. It is said that the city was overpopulated and that there were open ditches with people’s waste and other filth running through them, without anything covering them at all. The outhouses were absolutely disgusting, and meat and fish were left out in the open, with flies all over them. And not only was the well water contaminated, but the booze also wasn’t safe to drink much of the time, either. According to historians, these were normal conditions that even the rich had to endure during this time period. With these conditions, it’s not too surprising that an pandemic was able to quickly spread.

8 The Role Of Rats Is Greatly Exaggerated

For many people, the cause of the Black Death is a combination of medieval people being disgusting and way too many rats around. However, researchers who have been studying the evidence for a long time smelled a rat, and after a lot of sniffing around, they came up with a completely different conclusion. Yersinia pestis, the bacterium usually considered responsible for the outbreak of the plague, isn’t usually native to Europe but actually comes from Asia.

After the first outbreak of the plague that killed millions across the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa, the plague was still taking mass victims. It would pop up occasionally across Europe and do damage again before disappearing for a bit. Many people attributed this to rises and falls in the rodent population increasing the incidence of plague.

However, researchers have discovered that the real culprit was likely climate shifts in Asia. As their climate fluctuated throughout the years, it created conditions more likely for carriers, especially fleas, to breed like crazy and to potentially find their way to Europe again. While this doesn’t mean that rats hold no responsibility at all, they are not nearly as dangerous a carrier as the flea itself, which can bother humans directly if its normal sources of sustenance are somehow interrupted, or if there are too many fleas for them to all eat from nearby smaller animals.

7 Some May Have Ended Up With HIV Resistance Genes

The plague swept through Europe and killed millions of people. Afterward, there were multiple repeated outbreaks over the years that continued to occasionally cause devastation until we finally figured out a way to keep the deadly disease under control. During that time, people from some regions of Europe had to either get extremely lucky or hope for an evolutionary genetic mutation to help their progeny survive the constant onslaught of deadly disease. While some people likely did simply get lucky by practicing extremely good hygiene and staying away from sick people, it seems that some people may have evolved in order to fight against it.

Researches have long been trying to find ways to beat HIV, and recently, they found out that some people seem to be entirely or almost completely immune. They have a rare mutation that stops the bad cells from ever entering their white blood cells. Scientists have been unsure how or why they have this mutation, but it certainly does seem to be advantageous in that situation. One researcher studying the issue has looked at the history and believes that the mutation likely came about due to struggles against the plague epidemics in Europe.

While understanding the mechanism behind this rare mutation could certainly help treat or prevent HIV in the future, it is hard to say for certain if there is actually a link to the plague. While there is interesting reason to believe it’s possible, the mutation only seems to occur in some Europeans. Despite Africa and Asia also having been hit incredibly hard by the Black Death, they do not seem to have the mutation in any quantifiable numbers.

6 ‘Ring Around The Rosie’ Has Nothing To Do With The Black Death

Just about everyone has heard the nursery rhyme “Ring Around the Rosie” at least a few times in their life. It’s a nearly ubiquitous little song that has always been a kid favorite. After singing, they get to all fall down and be silly at the end. While it may just be an innocent song to the kids who enjoy it, some adults are convinced that it is much more serious. A great number of people are certain that “Ring Around the Rosie” is actually a song talking about the Black Death in Europe.

The claims usually suggest that the posies are either to honor the dead or to somehow cover up the bad smell. The ashes are a fairly self-explanatory reference to dead people, and “we all fall down” is supposed to be a reference to the fact that such an insane amount of people died. However, there is no evidence at all that the poem had anything to do with the plague.

There are multiple variations of it, the earliest of which showed up in the 1800s. That’s hundreds of years after we pretty much had the plague under control, so it’s quite unlikely that the two ever had anything to do with each other. There is no evidence of what the real meaning for the song was, but we know that it was written much more recently, so it couldn’t be about the plague and was probably just supposed to be fun.

5 It Completely Changed the Economy Of Europe And Hastened The Renaissance

While the Black Death was an incredible tragedy in human history, when millions of people who could have gone on to do great things were lost, no tragedy usually vanishes without some good coming out of it. At the time, as we mentioned earlier, some parts of Europe were extremely overpopulated. This not only made it easier for the plague to proliferate, but it also ensured that labor was not really worth all that much in terms of value, because there were far more laborers than were really needed.

After the plague killed millions, things suddenly changed. With so few workers compared to before, regular farmers and other peasants were now earning much more money. Merchants were also able to make a better living, and any craftsmen of skill became quite important, as there was now a shortage of living skilled and unskilled laborers.

While this can’t be said to be the only factor that led to the Renaissance, it can easily be said that it at least greatly hastened it. With regular citizens having way more economic power and being more on the level of those of noble birth, the old societal system quickly started to give way to something entirely new. While it may have been very bad for Europe and the world in a lot of ways, humanity showed its ability to flourish instead of flounder when hit by a serious crisis.

4 The Plague Still Kills A Handful Of People Every Year

Some people think of the Black Death as something long gone like smallpox, but unfortunately, as many people have learned with the absurd anti-vaxxer, movement, it can be very hard to permanently eliminate a disease, and it may decide to come raging back to cause trouble again when you least expect it. Yersinia pestis was never considered a truly extinct disease, but it still crops up every now and then even in North America, a continent not traditionally known for the plague.

Some trace the existence of Yersinia pestis in North America to the port of San Francisco many years ago. Supposedly, in order to make as much money as possible, the city was allowing people through without properly checking them. This allowed the plague into the city, and since then, it has made its way to the US Southwest, where it has been occasionally causing trouble ever since.

It may still be surprising that some people die of the plague, or even contract it, in this day and age, but it is an extremely deadly disease. It can easily kill in a few days if not properly treated, and because it’s such an old disease that most people are unfamiliar with, they may wait too long to get the medicine and help they need.

The plague may be mostly vanquished, but it still exists, and it still kills every year. If we are not prepared, it could still attempt to strike back and cause yet another massive pandemic of deadly disease.

3 The Miasma Theory And Scientific Ignorance Greatly Helped Its Spread

For those who haven’t heard of it, miasma is an old scientific theory in regards to how people get sick and or ill. As of today, germ theory is pretty well-accepted, and people generally know how to avoid catching something from someone else. However, back in the day, science wasn’t as well-understood, and many experts of the time believed that disease and illness spread through “bad air” that was allowed to accumulate and slowly led to people’s deaths. Considering all of the decomposing filth surrounding them at all time, it’s not too surprising that they considered the foul-smelling air itself to be a vector for disease.

This miasma theory led the people of the time, in desperation, to turn to the best contagion measures they could muster to fight off the disease. They believed that by removing filth from the streets, they could avoid bad air and greatly help to prevent disease. They also emphasized burials far from the city, so that the bodies couldn’t contribute to making the miasma even worse. In a way, these were actually good measures, and it shows that they were starting to understand how to fight off disease, but their knowledge was incomplete, which caused them not to address other, more important issues. Luckily, many humans lived through it with hard-earned knowledge on how to better stave off pandemics.

2 The Origin Of ‘Quarantine’ Is Rooted In The Plague Years

The idea of quarantine didn’t come with the Black Death; the practice of sequestering sick people from healthy people has existed for a long time. Many cultures throughout the world realized long ago that putting healthy people with sick people often led to more sick people. In fact, even the Bible suggests keeping those with leprosy away from healthy people so that they do not get leprosy as well.

However, the actual term “quarantine” is much newer and actually does indirectly have to do with the plague. During the repeated outbreaks of the Black Death throughout Europe, some leaders either sent those who were sick out to live in a field until they were better, sent them to a small area for sick people, or just made them stay at home and stay inside. At first, the period for which people were kept isolated was usually about 30 days. This may seem rather excessive, but with how little they knew about germs at the time, it may have actually been a good idea.

Eventually, for unknown reasons, the amount of time for sequestering a sick person became 40 days, and this is where the name comes from. The original name had actually been trentino, for 30, but became quarantino for 40 once the amount of time changed. Over the years, this evolved into the word “quarantine,” which we now use for any situation where a sick individual is sequestered from healthy people until they are better.

1 Some Researchers Argue That The Culprit Was Not Yersinia Pestis

Most people are certain that the Black Death was caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis, which infects people with the bubonic plague. It is so named because of the awful buboes that grow on you and the swollen lymph nodes that appear before you quickly die and succumb to the deadly disease. However, some researchers have suggested that it may not actually be the culprit behind the major pandemic that swept three continents so many centuries ago.

Plenty of scientists are still convinced that it was Yersinia pestis, but others who have looked closer are not so sure. Some have spent years exhuming those who died of the plague and researching it minutely, and they feel that the plague moved far too fast to fit with the modern strains of the plague that exist today.

Some scientists are convinced that it was an entirely different disease, perhaps even one that we are familiar with today, that actually caused so many people to die so very quickly. They have suggested that it behaved more like a virus and that it was perhaps something more similar to Ebola than the modern version of Yersinia pestis. Scientists have also recently discovered the existence of two unknown strains of Yersinia pestis that had been present in those who had died of the plague. This has led to the compromise theory between the two that perhaps it was Yersinia pestis, but not a strain that we are currently familiar with.

Our ancestors did some strange things out of boredom that we today would have trouble getting our heads around. Once upon a time, people burned cats for fun and thought competitive walking was the height of entertainment. No matter how hard we try, we may never be as crazy as our grandparents.

10Cat Burning

In today’s world, the killing of some animals is met with immediate outrage. In 17th-century France, cat burning was a form of entertainment.

Every year, Parisians gathered during midsummer bonfire in Place de Greve to play, dance, and sing. To make the gathering more interesting, the crowd gathered live cats into sacks, hung them over the fire from a mast, and watched them die slowly. The cats were chosen for their supposed link to the devil and witches. Sometimes, a fox was thrown into the fire. While the poor animals shrieked and cried, the people partied.

French kings and other important dignitaries were also known to take part in this sick fun. Sometimes, they got the honor of lighting the bonfire. Similar midsummer bonfire rituals took place in other parts of France and Europe. After the burning, people took the ashes home because they believed it brought good luck.

9Incubated Babies Fairs

Before the 20th century, premature babies had very little chance of survival. That was set to change when Dr. Martin Corney invented his incubator, but not many people trusted the machine. Hospitals rejected it, and investors were not forthcoming. To prevent the death of his invention and convince skeptics, Couney came up with a very strange and crazy solution. He built an exhibit in which premature babies will be put on display at fairs and parks. The first exhibit, or “child hatchery,” opened in Berlin in 1896. He soon moved to the US, where he opened an exhibit on Coney Island.

Couney’s exhibit looked like a normal hospital. He placed babies in wards and employed doctors and nurses to look after them. The only difference was that one side of the ward was glass, and people watched through it.

The exhibit was very successful. Parents brought their premature babies to Couney and did not have to pay for medical care. The customers were charged up to 25 cents for the show, and the money collected paid for all expenses. Most of the premature children on display survived. By the time incubated babies fairs ended four decades later, Couney had managed to convince everyone that his incubators were safe.

8Blackened Teeth

Today, we brush, floss, and even go the extra mile of whitening our teeth to give us that extra confidence when smiling. Back in 16th- and 17th-century England, however, a fad was born from the lack of dental hygiene.

At that time, sugar was very expensive because it was imported into the country. Therefore, only the upper class Elizabethans could afford it. Excessive use of the commodity rots the teeth. Elizabeth I lost many of her teeth because of her love for sweets, and people could hardly understand her when she spoke. The few remaining teeth in her mouth were black and decayed.

People began seeing black teeth as a status symbol. People whose teeth were not black enough applied cosmetics and used coals to blacken them.

Incidentally, despite the lack of care for dental hygiene, Elizabethans did everything they could to prevent bad breath. This was perhaps because people believed the plague could be contacted from the bad breath of those around them. They used vinegar, anise seeds, and other similar herbs to clear their mouth of bad odor.

7Pedestrianism

In the 19th century, competitive walking was the most popular spectator sport in America. The sport, known as pedestrianism, was born out boredom by the people who migrated to the cities after the Civil War and needed a new form of entertainment. In filled arenas, competitors walked around tracks almost nonstop from Mondays to Saturdays in front of spectators. (Sundays were excluded because public amusement was not allowed on that day.) The competitors walked to see who could cover the most distance during the race’s duration. Some of these competitors would reportedly walk up to 160 kilometers (100 mi) in 24 hours.

The sport was so popular that celebrities were known to visit arenas during the event. Future president Chester Arthur was a regular spectator at the arena. As in modern sports, there were rivalries among the stars, who earned a fortune from the prize money and sponsorship deals. There were scandals over fixing games and over drugs.

Pedestrianism was eventually replaced by competitive cycling after the invention of the safety bicycle by John Starley in 1885.

6The Alexandra Limp

From the moment she got married to the Prince of Wales, Princess Alexandra of Denmark was beloved by the British public. She was the 19th-century version of Princess Diana. Aside from her good looks and lively nature, Alexandra’s love for charity also endeared her to the public.She was so adored that people copied her every move and style.

After the birth of her third child in 1867, Alexandra contacted rheumatic fever, which left her with a limp. This gave birth to the Alexandra Limp, a fad in which women in London and Edinburgh started limping intentionally. To make the limp more realistic, women bought mismatched shoes. Subsequently, shoemakers began making uneven shoes intentionally. The fad got to the point where walking canes became one of the most sought after accessories of able-bodied females.

The Alexandra Limp was criticized by prominent newspapers of the day, many of which saw it as an act of mockery against the princess. Thankfully, it did not take too long before the fad faded.

5Headless Portraits

A lot of bizarre trends emerged after the invention of photography. The most famous of these trends was post-mortem photography, which showed us how death-obsessed the Victorians were due to the high mortality rate back then. However, that wasn’t the only morbid photography trend that was popular at that time. In 1853, a prominent photographer named Oscar Rejlander started an equally disturbing trend known as “Headless Portraits.”

Oscar, sometimes considered the father of art photography, combined negatives and formed pictures of living people beside their own decapitated heads. Soon, there was a huge demand for these photographs, and several photographers adopted the technique.

People took pictures in which their heads were everywhere but on their neck. They held their decapitated heads tucked under their arms, some placed theirs on a platter, while others even dangled it from their own hands with a knife on the other hand. No one was left out of this bizarre fun, as even children were known to take headless portraits.

4Fasting Girls

Anorexia nervosa is an emotional disorder involving the desire to lose weight by refusing to eat. The disorder is prevalent common among teenage girls and young women. Though this was thought to be a recent problem, it has been around for centuries. The most famous cases of anorexia nervosa can be found in the late 19th century, when a group of girls known as “fasting girls,” claimed to be able to survive without eating anything over a long period of time.

These girls were known as having anorexia mirabilis, a miraculous lack of appetite. Their ability to survive without food was seen as a miracle, and they became celebrities. People from different part of the world came to them bearing gifts and offerings to find the favor of God.

3Tear Catching

No one knows how and when tear catching began, but the first documented reference of the practice can be found in the Bible. The practice was also quite popular during the Roman period. Back then, mourners filled small glass bottles with their tears, and these bottles, known as lachrymatory bottles or tear catchers, were left in the burial tomb as a symbol of respect. In some cases, women were paid to cry into the bottles during procession. This was done to get as many full bottles as possible since a person’s value was measured by the tears produced during their funeral.

The practice was revived during the Victorian era. Mourners cried into vials equipped with special stoppers that aided evaporation. Once the tears evaporated, the mourning period was over. On the other side of the world, in Civil War America, Women wept in tear vials and waited till their husbands came back from war to show them how much they have been missed. The more the tears in the vial, the more she had missed her husband.

2Ant Farms

Moving now to the more recent past, the ant farm was a popular toy created by Milton Levine in the 1950s. The idea came from an army of ants he saw at a picnic during a Fourth of July celebration. Milton found ants captivating and thought that if he put them in transparent plastic designed to look like a farm scene, people would enjoy observing them. He named the product “Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm.” After advertising the $1.98 product in newspapers, ant farms became an instant hit, and Milton received thousands of orders from people around the country.

The ants Milton used in his product were gathered by ant rustlers, who were paid a penny for each one. To purchase an ant farm, a customer had to first buy the farm before ordering for his ants, which would be delivered in vials within a day. An instructional manual, special sand, and a liquid dropper were also included in the product.

In 2011, Milton Levine died at the age of 97, having sold more than 20 million ant farms during his lifetime.

1Uranium Sitting

In 1953, a bizarre fad known as uranium sitting was born on a Texas dairy farm. The fad began after the owner, Jesse Reese, claimed his wounded leg healed because he buried it in the soil of his farm, where a group of scientists had recently found traces of uranium. Believing the radioactive soil had healing properties, people with all sorts of ailment ranging from the cold to cancer came to him for help. He soon sold his cows and turned his farm into a “uranium dirt house.” To get better, the customers buried their sick body parts under the soil.

Several uranium dirt houses cropped up in other parts of the state. They charged up to $20 for the service and added trailer camps and landing strips to their place of business to accommodate the increasing crowd. Although they did not know the effect of uranium sitting, medical experts spoke against it and refused to approve the practice.

In 1955, R.E. Hight and his business partner, Walter Miller, opened a uranium dirt house in Corydon, having leased 1.5 tons of radioactive soil from Jesse. Despite the promises of healing, they made customers sign a waiver stating that no miracle was expected from the sitting. Barely months after their business took off, a newspaper published an article stating the sand used in Corydon was not radioactive at all. Hight and Miller hired a geological engineer to examine the soil. The engineer discovered that the soil contained hardly any radioactive particles . Consequently, people began to doubt the healing power of the sand, and the fad died.

Picture this: It is about 700 years before Jesus was born, and you are Numa. No, not the “Numa Numa” song. You are Numa Pompilius, the king of Rome. You live in a time long before being an insane emperor was cool. The priests of your kingdom have informed you that the goddess Vesta will protect your realm from harm.

The catch? You must light a magical fire in her honor and never let it go out. You wonder: How could the kingdom preserve such a fire? After much thought, you decide that such a task could only be taken on by a holy college of virgin women. This sort of thinking is exactly why they elected you king.

These women were known as the vestal virgins, or the vestals for short. For a thousand years, they attempted to keep Vesta’s sacred fire lit. And because of the 10 reasons listed below, they were perhaps one of the most fascinating orders in all of history.

10 They Had To Remain Chaste But Not Forever

When an order of priestesses is called the vestal virgins, you get the feeling that virginity was an important part of the process. These vestals, who were chosen as children, indeed had to abstain from sex for as long as they tended to the sacred fire.

The holy rites of Vesta could only be performed by somebody innocent and pure of heart. If one of the vestals were to break their vows of virginity, it was feared that the fire would go out and Rome would be destroyed. Therefore, ancient Rome had the greatest argument for chastity in the history of abstinence education.

While some might dread the mere mention of abstinence, not to mention a lifetime of it, fear not. Each vestal only served for 30 years. After their service to Rome had been completed, the priestesses would be freed from their vows, just in time to enjoy their midlife crises but with all of the privileges that were associated with the vestals.

9 They Were The Most Powerful Women In Rome

Believe it or not, feminism was not very popular 2,500 years ago. While women in Rome had more rights than women in other ancient cultures, they still could not vote. They were also legally controlled by their fathers and, eventually, their husbands. Because of this, ordinary Roman women rarely owned land or amassed influence.

However, the vestals were no ordinary women. Their rituals were thought to be the one thing stopping Rome from being destroyed or otherwise doomed. Being the most important women in the kingdom/republic/empire, they had privileges that the common women could only dream of.

They were freed from the influence of their fathers and could vote and own property, they were considered trustworthy enough to handle important documents, and they even had front-row seats reserved for them at stadium games. Unfortunately, these privileges have not endured the test of time as modern lady priests are not given complimentary floor tickets to see LeBron play.

8 There Could Only Be Six Of Them (Times Three)

With all the prestige and awe that came with being a virgin, you would think that all the women would have lined up to join the priestesshood. Unfortunately for them, the college of vestals was very exclusive and becoming a virgin was much harder than it would seem. Noble families would offer up their young daughters to the vestal college, although in later years, the college would have to resort to lower-class families as the virginity fad began to die down.

The order would admit six young girls to study the ways of the vestals for 10 years. Afterward, they would perform the rites of Vesta for another 10 years and then train the newest batch of girls for their last 10 years of service. As such, there would never be more than 18 women in the vestals at a time, which made them a rather scarce commodity.

7 Marrying A Former Vestal Was All The Rage

Today, when one thinks of a trophy wife, one thinks about a young woman who has little going for her except for her attractiveness. However, if a man lived in the times of ancient Rome, the greatest wife that he could snag would have been a former vestal. Although they were few in number, retired vestals were well respected, had expanded rights, and received generous pensions, making them potential targets for any masculine gold diggers.

For example, Marcus Licinius Crassus, who is renowned for being one of the wealthiest men in all of human history, is known to have chased the skirt of a vestal named Licinia. He merely wanted to woo her so that he could buy her property cheap.

However, as Licinia was still in the vestal virgins and had not retired yet, a controversy began to brew, and eventually, both Crassus and Licinia were put on trial. Fortunately for the two of them, the judges decided that Crassus was stupidly greedy and didn’t actually mean to deflower the vestal. So Crassus and Licinia were free to go. With this one trial in mind, it would seem that the repercussions for trying to marry a current vestal weren’t too horrible.

6 Marrying A Current Vestal Was A Horrible Mistake

Elagabalus was the 25th emperor of Rome. He was also a teenage boy most famous for fornicating across the capital, marrying five women and two men, and forcing the Senate to watch him dance for his Syrian Sun god—which, in all honesty, is the least that the Senate deserves.

Although Elagabalus preferred the company of his beefy charioteer, he forced Aquilia Severa, a vestal, to marry him. He believed that this would have two benefits: The faiths of Rome and ancient Syria would be joined as one, and he and Aquilia would have “godlike” babies because the vestals were clearly magical.

For the people of Rome, this was unacceptable. The protectors of Vesta’s flames were the vestal virgins, not the vestal babymakers. For the crime of rapturing a vestal away from her duties, among other things, Elagabalus was quickly shown justice. In other terms, he was stabbed and decapitated before being thrown in the Tiber River.

5 Breaking The Rules As A Vestal Was Even Worse

So much emphasis has been placed on the chastity and virtue of the vestals. But even if the Romans thought otherwise, the priestesses were only human. Surely, they erred from their duties on occasion? Everybody needs their fill of Sunday Funday, after all.

Unfortunately, the punishments for errant vestals were ridiculously harsh. If the sacred fire were to go out, then the vestal at fault would be whipped for making the goddess forsake the city. Even worse was the punishment for breaking their vows of celibacy: the considerably bleaker sentence of death.

Of course, attempting to execute a vestal virgin for naughtiness would prove to be difficult as their sacred blood could not be spilled. “Easy solution,” said the other priests. “We’ll just bury them alive!”

This posed another problem, however. Roman law dictated that nobody could be buried within the city. “All right then,” the rival priesthoods collectively murmured. “We’ll build nice rooms underground, put a little bit of food down there, and then seal the room under several feet of dirt. That way, we’re not burying the vestals. We’re just putting them in a chamber where they’ll happen to die after a few days.”

The faithful of Rome then congratulated themselves on the sort of ingenuity that would make any politician swell with pride.

4 They Were Serious About Their Duties

Clearly, being a vestal was not all it was hyped to be, especially if you were constantly under the threat of being whipped, placed in the worst bed-and-breakfast ever, or both. However, to their credit, the vestal virgins were absolutely on top of their game. Vesta’s flame hardly ever went out, although the temple in which it was housed did catch on fire on occasion. That is what you get for trying to keep a magical fire lit for the entirety of Rome’s history.

However, even more incredible is the extent to which the vestals adhered to their vows of chastity. The priestesshood had survived for well over 1,000 years, and yet there are only 10 recorded vestals who were punished for impropriety. That is an average of one virgin breaking the rules every 100 years, a batting average that every religion in the world would be envious of.

3 They Were The Most Sacred And Powerful Of All Roman Clergy

By virtue of protecting the city with Vesta’s flame and having the chastity tenacity of 100 priests, the virgins were naturally the most powerful priestesshood in all of Rome. They even had the political power to pardon pre-dictator Julius Caesar, who had been targeted in one of his rival’s political purges.

Although the priests of other gods had legal protections, the vestals were so revered that merely injuring one was punishable by death—although this presumably did not include dragging one of the errant vestals into an underground chamber.

Furthermore, they were so sacred that they could intervene in criminal affairs at will. If a vestal touched a slave, they were freed on the spot. If a criminal saw a vestal virgin as the criminal was on his way to be executed, he was automatically pardoned. Unfortunately for world history, the demise of Vesta’s college eliminated both the vestals and their slave-freeing powers.

2 Their Fire Was Put Out Forever By The Christians

For eons, the vestal virgins had kept the sacred fire in Rome lit like a magical, protection-granting bonfire that only occasionally burned down the surrounding temples. The Roman pagans argued that the fire, coupled with the Romans’ faith in their pantheon, had granted the city the protection of the goddess. This seemed hard to argue with because of the whole 1,000 years of continued existence thing.

Unfortunately for the pagans and the pyromaniacs of Rome, Christianity happened. In the year 394, emperor Theodosius, boasting the most Christian name an emperor could have, closed the vestal college and put out the magical fire.

According to legend, his niece then came to Vesta’s temple and stole a necklace from a statue of the goddess, thinking that nothing bad could come from this. Sixteen years later, Rome was destroyed by rampaging barbarians—to be precise, the dreadful and Hot Topic–dressing Goths—which led to the most scornful “I told you so” in ancient history.

1 The Closing Of The Vestal College Radically Shaped Christianity

Quickly after the sack of Rome, the citizens of the empire were quick to blame the Christians. If the city prospered for a millennium but was destroyed after these religious upstarts had forsaken the old gods, then surely this was all their fault.

However, instead of this leading to sour feelings and a return to paganism, the notion ended up leading to a theological revolution. Saint Augustine, one of the most famous figures in early Christianity, began to work on a rebuttal.

A few years later, he retorted with his most famous work, The City of God, where he argued that the Christian god had protected Rome in the past when it was virtuous and had abandoned the empire for misbehaving in recent times. Vesta and the other pagan gods had failed to protect Rome from past misfortunes.

They were also, he argued, fake and stupid. Although this did little to assuage any former disgruntled vestals, it reaffirmed the beliefs of contemporary Christians and helped cement Augustine as the most important theologian of his time.

Jeremy is an impoverished college student who enjoys research, gaming, history, and researching gaming history.