Forgotten Footnotes from the Historic World, #1 | by Jeff Miller | Mar, 2025
A sundry listing of curiosities, fascinating details, and miscellany from the Western world earlier than the Christian Period
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Corvus: Within the third century BCE, Rome was locked in a livid competitors with Carthage — positioned in what’s now trendy Tunisia — for management of the western Mediterranean Sea. Carthage was a famous seapower and Rome, with its land-based legions, a lackluster naval rival. That modified when the Romans copied the development of a captured Carthaginian vessel after which improved upon the galley design by including a conveyable gangplank close to the bow. Known as a “crow” or “corvus,” the gangplank, which was topped with an iron weight resembling a crow’s beak, was dropped onto an enemy ship because it was being rammed. With the 2 ships now locked collectively, Roman troopers might cost throughout the gangway, turning a naval engagement — as Serge Lancel writes in Carthage, A Historical past — right into a “hand-to-hand battle” the place the Roman marines had a definite benefit.
Sybarite: The English phrase sybarite, that means an individual dedicated to luxurious and pleasure, derives from the traditional Greek metropolis of Sybaris in what’s now the Calabrian area of southern Italy. Based within the eighth century BCE, Sybaris’ wealth as each a buying and selling port and agricultural heart fueled historic stories of a sensuous and self-indulgent life-style, wealthy with extravagant pleasures of every kind. One such Roman reporter, Diodorus Siculus — writing centuries later — claims that Sybaris grew to 300,000 inhabitants. The extra possible determine is 100,000, a nonetheless spectacular quantity, aided by the Sybarite coverage of granting citizenship to anybody moved there.
Slingers: By the fifth century BCE, slingshots have been removed from what we at the moment contemplate a toddler’s toy. As Victor David Hanson writes in Wars of the Historic Greeks, “With lifelong coaching, seasoned slingers may forged lead bullets over 350 yards, shattering the bones of any uncovered limbs and faces…” The perfect slingers got here from the island of Rhodes, Thessaly on the Greek mainland, and the Balearic Islands off Spain. Certainly, within the second century BCE, through the two-year Roman conquest of Majorca, the most important Balearic island, Balearic slingers arrayed on the shoreline have been in a position to sink the invader’s galleys by focusing on the hulls just under the waterline.
