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Guess what mango was that?
Well?
All right, So I was reading up on ancient Greek theater this week, which you know I like to do every October very personal reasons. I don't want to get into it, and I came across this story about an Athenian actor name he Geligos, and he once mispronounced a word so badly that it tanked his entire career. That sounds so harsh, like just one word tanked his career? What was the word? Well, so here's the story. This happened back in the spring of four hundred and eight BC,
and it was during the premiere performance of Orestes. This was this tragedy written by Euripides. He was playing the lead role, and in a scene where his character recovers from a bout of madness, he's supposed to say, quote, after the storm, I see once more a calm, But because he was rushing to get the line out, there's this word in it, galen, and he says it with the wrong inflection, which changed the meaning from calm to weasel, Like that's a different word. Those are yeah, I always
think that's an improvement. Well, it was actually worse than it sounds, because in ancient Greece, seeing a weasel was considered a really bad omen So the mispronunciation not only made the line sound sillier, it also conveyed the exact opposite mood. Instead of being this optimistic line about feeling better, it became this ominous line about him having bad luck.
And it was actually that big of a mistake just mispronouncing this one word.
I'm telling you it ruined his whole career. So comic playwrights of the era teased him mercilessly and even referenced him by name in their own play. This killed his reputation as an actor, to the point that he never acted again after that one flub. It also gave him a different level of fame than his contemporaries. Like basically, even though ancient Greek tragedies are the bedrock of Western theater, we usually don't have record of the actors who appeared
in the original performances. You don't hear the names of any of them except for Geligos, who we still know for this mistake, and this was definitely not the legacy he would have hoped for, but it is still his legacy. No such thing as bad publicity. No, that's exactly right. So we're often hearing about the seven wonders of the ancient world, so today I thought it might be fun to explore the seven biggest blunders of the ancient world instead.
This slip of the tongue is just the first on the list, but that still leaves six more gafts to go, so let's dive in. Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genie. I'm Will Pearson, and as always I'm joined by my good friend mangsh Hot ticketter and on the other side of that soundproof glass wearing a It took me a minute to read this, but it says po body's nerfic T shirt. He's so clear, so clever,
clever a picture of a great sphinx on it. That's our friend and producer Dylan fag and he's just always one upping the last thing he's done.
So I am actually glad that Dylan referenced the sphinx because I considered adding the sphinx to our list, specifically because of that broken nose it has, but once I started looking into it, I realized the nose wasn't broken off by mistake.
This is one of those stories that I feel like I've heard a few times that I never can like, wasn't it cut off on purpose? Or shot off by French troops or something like that. No one actually knows who did it for sure.
There have been all these rumors over the years that it was Napoleon soldiers they had blasted the nose off with the cannonball in the seventeen nineties. That was the rumor, But most historians actually think that the schnaws was chiseled off in the late fourteenth century and chiseled off like
it's a mass of nos that's huge. The most likely culprit was this man named Mohammad Sayim al Dhar and apparently the Egyptian peasants of the era had started making offerings to the sphinx in the idea that it would improve their harvests or whatever. But when Aldaar found out, he was so outraged by this idolatry that he destroyed the sphinx.
Nose just despite them. Wow, So did the villagers kind of snap out of it after that or what? No, they executed him for vandalism. Oh god. Okay, yeah, so far we've talked about some people that they're just lives, have gone poorly after things. But all right, so now that we've got that nose story out of the way, what's your first fact? Mango?
Okay, So I actually kind of want to stick with Egypt for a minute, because not only is it home to the only ancient wonder that still exists, the Great Pyramid of Giza, but it's also home to a true anciente blunder called the Bent Pyramid. Have you ever seen this?
Actually have not.
I'm actually going to put a photo here, but the three hundred and thirty foot tall Bent Pyramid of Dashu Where was built for pharaoh Sneffru in about twenty six hundred BCE, and its name stems from an engineering issue that required the builders to abruptly change the angle of the pyramid slope about halfway through the construction.
Yeah. I'm just looking at this picture, and the slope really does change drastically right there in the middle of the pyramid, Like the lower portion looks so much deeper than the top. Yeah.
So the whole thing was originally designed to be built at a fifty four degree angle, which would have given it smooth, straight angles that you see on traditional pyramids. But as the builders added more and more layers of blocks, these cracks started appearing in the structure, and they realized it would probably collapse if they kept going, and so after a bit of number crunching, they decided to reduce the angle for the upper portion to a much more stable forty three degrees.
I guess it worked. It's still standing today, and you could argue that the slightly curved appearance is part of the landmark's charm. I guess. But I'm curious why the Egyptians made such a mistake in the first place. I mean, building pyramids feels like kind of their thing, you know.
Yeah, yeah, Egyptians are well known for building pyramids. I think we're going to break that fact, right, Yeah, okay, But Snepfer's bent pyramid was.
Kind of in early work.
It was just the second pyramid burial structure that the Egyptians had ever constructed. The first one had been built about two hundred years earlier, southwest of Cairo. And the interesting thing about that one is it was actually a stone step pyramid, So the kinds you see in like Central America, rather than a smooth faced one like the kind that they would later become famous for.
Yeah, so I guess this bent pyramid was in this transitional phase where they were still trying to figure out what it really meant or what it needed to build a pyramid.
Yeah, they were still fine tuning the process, and obviously there was a fair amount of trial and error along the way. The Egyptians learned from this mistake, and once the Bent Pyramid was finished, they built a second, more successful one for the same pharaoh, This three hundred and forty foot tall, smooth side red pyramid, and it's just to the north and the future pyramids built in the area. It was built at that same forty three degree angle
that saved the Bent pyramid. I don't know what it is about forty three degrees, but it just works.
Yeah, and definitely does. That's every when we want to build a pyramid. All right, Well, I've got an architectural mishap to add to our list as well, except mine is more of an ecological oversight than some sort of design flaw. All so, I'm gonna give you a little bit of background here. This was in the Great Maya city called to Call and that formed around six hundred BCE.
Now to Call started as this tiny village in what's now Guatemala, but over the course of about one thousand years it developed into this full blown jungle metropolis so to call hit its stride between three hundred and nine hundred CE, and at the peak of its power in the mid eighth century, it boasted upwards of sixty thousand inhabitants, so there was a lot of people living in one place, making it one of the largest and most powerful city states in all of the Americas.
And I'm guessing the architecture there was pretty impressive as well.
Yeah, the architecture is actually pretty stunning. So they're these one hundred foot tall temples more than two dozen pyramids. But maybe most impressively, it also had this highly advanced water management system that was there to help residents survive the region's dry season. So this included a series of dams reservoirs that collected and stored as much rain water as possible, as well as these paved sloping plazas to
help direct the water where it needed to go. So the city even had this sand filtration system to keep the water clean, so really advanced systems.
That sounds gorgeous actually, and I'm guessing all that water work was necessary because of where the city was located.
That's exactly right, Like the city was built in the middle of this dense rainforest and people didn't have easy access to lakes or rivers, so that's how the city compensated for this. But what's ironic is that the very system that helped to Call survive droughts and dry spells
also led to its downfall. And much of the Maya Kingdom collapsed at the turn of the ninth century, and in fact, to Call seems to have been outright abandoned, like with all of its structures left completely intact, as if everyone just picked up and left at some point. So for the longest time, there's been this mystery about
what caused the city's demise. It obviously wasn't a violent struggle, as there were no signs of damage to the city, so that led historians to conclude that the city's collapse was probably related to droughts and overpopulation.
And we're saying the fancy water system that the city has, that's the reason that they left.
Yeah, So there was this very recent study. It was back in twenty twenty that was published in Scientific Reports Journal, and it was this investigation of to Call's reservoirs, and they revealed that they were dangerously polluted with high levels of mercury. And not only that, scientists also found traces of very toxic algae blooms. Now, the presence of mercury is most likely attributed to a red mineral called cinebar or mercuric sulfide, which the ancient mile widely used as
a pigment or a die for various things. So, for example, the city's temples and the main palace were said to be caked in cinnabar, which means that during the rainy season, all that mercury rich powder, it just washed right off the buildings. Yeah, so you know, it's not good news. And so thanks to those sloping plazas, this just flowed straight down into the city's reservoirs and obtained the water supply of course. Yeah.
And so obviously with people drinking and cooking with all this poisoned water, they.
Must have started getting sick, right, very sick. Once the blue green algae began to bloom in those phosphate filled reservoirs. The locals could probably tell from the site and smell alone that the water was no longer safe to drink.
And I guess what's weird about this is that the entire population just gets up and leaves, right. I mean, this civilization has lasted what like a thousand years, and it feels like they'd almost wanted to fight to save their city a little bit more.
Well, you've got to keep in mind that Takol was already struggling due to intensifying droughts. So even if they're was a way to fix the pollution, the residents really didn't have the time to implement it. Like, they obviously needed to deal with this immediately, and so they had to find a new water supply. And there's also the
religious component to consider. So water was sacred to the Maya because it was key to their whole existence, So when their supply suddenly went bad in the middle of a terrible drought, they likely took it as a sign that the gods were displeased with them. So from a practical standpoint and a symbolic one, abandoning their once great city probably felt like the most sensible option.
Yeah, I guess it's a luxury to be able to learn from your mistakes. Like when you think about the Egyptians working on that bent pyramid, they make this awkward pyramid, and then they have time to reflect and figure out like how to make the next one perfect. Right, But for the Maya, they don't really have a chance to be scientific.
In order to survive. They just have to scramble. Yeah. Yeah, Actually it's funny that you put it that way, because the next blunder on my list is from someone who also had to walk away in order to survive a mistake, but in his case there was a literal dead elephant blocking the exit. How about that for a tease? Mango.
Yeah, I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'm very curious. So let's take a quick commercial break and then you can tell me all about it. You're listening to Part Time Genius and we're talking about the seven blunders of the Ancient World.
So will where are you taking us next? All right? So for this one, we're headed back to ancient Greece to about the third century BCE, which was a tumultuous time in the Mediterranean. The recent death of Alexander the Great had created this serious power vacuum, and all of his former generals and allies were competing to fill it.
And one of the would be successors King Pirus was this ruler from northern Greece, and he managed to extend his domain by winning their victories against the armies of Macedonia. Now this was in the year two eighty, and that's when he set his sights on conquering Rome. So Piras sailed to Italy with about thirty thousand soldiers and twenty war elephants, marking the first time that elephants had ever been seen on the peninsula.
So this must predate Hannibal and the Alps, then, I guess.
By about sixty years, so not not a ton of time. But as you might imagine, the Romans on the battlefield were pretty freaked out by the site of these enormous armored ann I can't even imagine if I had never seen an elephant. But even with the advantage of intimidation, Peiris only barely pulled out a win. In fact, the number of casualties he sustained was so high that the Greek historian Plutarch quoted him as having said, quote, if we are victorious. In one more battle with the Romans,
we shall be utterly ruined. So you can imagine that these were hard won battles. So King Pierris became well known for his narrow winds, and people started using the expression pyic victory, which of course means a victory that comes at such great costs that it's almost like a defeat. It's funny.
I remember taking a class on the moguls in college, and elephants are obviously so massive and so intimidating, but they also scare incredibly quickly, and so they're not great war animals.
I can imagine that, especially if you let a bunch of mice loose. I mean, that's what I hear. Have no idea whether that's true, it's not true. So I haven't even gotten to his real mistake. If you remember that amazing tease before the commercial breath, the dead elephant blocking the doorway. Do you remember this? Okay, So, after a series of skin of his teeth victories in Italy,
Pearis actually started losing battles. So in two seventy five he retreats back to Greece and begins making a play for the throne of mast on first, he targeted Sparta, but when the city state proves resistant to his attacks, he turns his focus north to Argos. I've always thought this was interesting in military history, where they're like, I'm gonna go beat these people and then I can't, like, oh no, no, I'll go over here. But it's interesting
to think about it. But now Pierce had no trouble breaking through the city's defenses, thanks once again to his pack of giant elephants. But once he's inside, he finds it really difficult to maneuver through the narrow streets, and
his forces are quickly overwhelmed. And to make matters worse, Peers's forces keep pouring into the city even after he had ordered a retreat, and in the scuffle that followed, one of the elephants, the largest one, falls down right in front of the main gate, which sends the other elephants into a panic, and they start rampaging through the city, basically crushing everything.
I mean, can you imagine, like there's no reverse on an elephant, Like you're in these narrow streets and like the turning radius isn't that great?
Not good? Not good? So does piiskeatry not exactly, but his death was the direct result of not being able to get around the fallen elephant. So in the battle, Puris takes one look at the chaos unfolding and decides to take his chances back in the city. Now, as the story goes, he's fighting his way through the streets and he gets stabbed through the breastplate by this enemy spear. Pieris turned to face his attacker and landed a killing blow.
But what he didn't realize was that the soldier's mother had been watching the whole scene from a nearby rooftop. So, according to Plutarch, when the old woman saw that her son was in danger, she lifted up a rooftile with both hands and hurled it at Peuris's head, and the resulting blow didn't kill Pearis, but it left him dazed enough that other soldiers were able to swoop in and finish him off.
It feels like bringing elephants to battle wasn't a great idea, but the king's real mistake was killing someone right in front of their mind.
You don't do that.
Yeah, it's not the kind of thing you walk away from it. But let's leave the battlefield behind for now. Because it's time to pay a visit to the ancient city of Bethlehem. And that's where Saint Jerome, one of the early scholars of the Catholic Church, accidentally sparked one of the weirdest trends in medieval and Renaissance are the horns on Moses.
You know, I've actually always wondered about this, because there's that famous statue of Moses by Michelangelo, and for no apparent reason, he's got these weird little baby goat horns sprouting from his forehead.
Yeah, it's super weird, especially considering Moses's this prophet and horns are obviously associated with the devil. But Michelangelo was actually far from the only person to make this connection. This image of a horn Moses turns up in all sorts of Western medieval iconography, and weirdly, it can all be traced back to this single mistranslation by Saint Jerome. So it all goes back to the late fourth century.
See when Saint Jerome began working on the first Latin translation of the Christian Bible, and for whatever reason, he decides to ignore the existing Greek translation of the Old New Testaments and instead he translates his own version directly from Hebrew into Latin, and unfortunately that led him into trouble due to several ambiguities in the ancient Hebrew language.
One example of this is the Hebrew word for a ray of light is almost exactly the same as the word for horn, and because the Hebrew language doesn't apparently write out its vowels, I guess Jerome wasn't able to pick up on the context clues. And so in the Book of Exodus, when Moses returns from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, his face is lit up by this divine light, but in Saint Jerome's translation, he gets horns instead.
Wow, all right, So Moses spends six weeks on a mountaintop communing with God and comes back down he's suddenly grown a pair of horns, and nobody manages to comment on this again. Is that what we're talking about here? Yeah, it's super weird.
And the really well part is that the people who translated the Old Testament into ancient Greek ray solved for this welcome back to part time genius meaning of the Hebrew text and described Moses's face as glorified. But because Jeromed ignored that Greek translation Moses winds up supporting horns in art for the next millennium, even after the error is widely acknowledged.
Huh. I Like the art world was like, no, We're just we're sticking with the horns, you know. All right, So if my math is right, that brings us up to five ancient blunders with two left to go. But before we get to those, let's take one more quick break, all right, Mango surp my final entry on our ancient blunders list. I want to take us back to the
reign of Shen Sherwang, the first emperor of China. So we're talking about the third century BCE, and Sheen puts an end to a long period of provincial inflict in China by unifying the country's various provinces under one central government. He was also responsible for several major advances in Chinese culture, including the introduction of standardized weights and measures, the creation of uniform system of writing, the construction of the earliest
form of the Great Wall. So a lot of accomplishments here. Yeah, it seems so pretty productive, pretty productive. Yeah, But as he grew older and more powerful, the emperor also became obsessed with death and began searching for a way to achieve immortality. It feels like a lot of these leaders
fall into this trap. And we know this because about twenty years ago, archaeologists discovered this cache of ancient writings at the bottom of an abandoned well in the Hunan Province, and one of them contains this executive order issued by the emperor. The decree ordered a nationwide search for immortality potions or elixirs of life, and required every village and region to submit a report of their findings. That's kind of amazing.
I mean, like, China is such a vast territory and it's not like you can just send out junk mail or notification. The fact that like he forced this decree on everyone is incredible. It's a testament to Chen's efficacy as a leader. But it also just shows how seriously he took this quest for his immortality. So did the villages end up getting back to him.
I imagine they all did, but only a handful of responses were found in that well, and most of the replies were awkward notes from regional governments saying they hadn't found the elixir of lives, but like, we're going to keep looking for it because they am sure. They didn't want to get in trouble. But the only semi hopeful response came from officials and Langya when they suggested this herb from a local mountain might have these life extending properties.
That sounds promising, did it, apparently not considering Emperor Chen died at the age of forty nine. But that actually brings us around to his big mistake, because it seems that in his desperate search for immortality, the emperor may have actually shortened his own life. Historians believe that his early death was brought on by mercury poisoning, this extremely toxic side effect of many of the lixers that he
drank in pursuit of his eternal life. Now that said, don't feel too badly for the emperor, because he did have a backup plan. So before his early ish death, he ordered the construction of this enormous burial chamber, which he famously stocked with a life size army of thousands of terra Cotta warriors. To see where we're going here, Yeah, Jen believed in the afterlife and hope that the clay soldiers would protect him in the world that was to come. I like that.
You basically thought he would live forever regardless, but he still tried to find a magic pushit, yes, make sure I was to.
Live on earth. Well.
Oddly enough, my last mistake also has to do with one man's quest for immortality. And maybe it's because I'm actually working on a new show on how to Live Forever, because I am obsessed with other people's obsession with the topic. But so this fact, we need to head over to the city of Ephesus, which used to be a part of ancient Greece but is now in modern day Turkey, and the city is largely remembered as a birthplace of the philosopher Heraclitis, but it was also home to many
lesser known female artists. I didn't realize this until we did this episode, but Ephesus was filled with sculptors and painters and teachers, including the artist Timer Reid, who painted a famous portrait of Artemis in the fifth century BCE. Now Artemis for anyone who's familiar with Greek myths or Percy Jackson was one of the most revered goddesses in the ancient Greek pantheon, but the Ephesians laid a special claim to her because they actually believed she had been
born near the city. And while most cities praised Artemis as the goddess of hunting and wild animals, the people here actually worshiped her as this goddess of fertility and the protector of women and young girls, and in fact, Ephesian women would often call on Artemis for help during childbirth. So Artemis was, I don't know, kind of like the city mascot patron deity might be a better way to describe it.
But I want to go with mass.
But that's why the city has had a temple dedicated to her since as far back as the Bronze Age, and the original structure was wiped out by a flood in the seventh century, But about two hundred years later, the Lydian king Croesus paid to rebuild the temple of Artemis, and he made it bigger and sturdier than ever, And so this new and improved temple was one of the largest ever built in ancient Greece. It stood roughly sixty
feet tall. Inside there was this treasure tove of relief carvings, sculptures, paintings, including this massive statue of Artemis herself. But for nearly one hundred years after its completion, the Temple of Artemis served as a house of worship, and it was also this tourist destination, this art gallery, all in one. And then this guy named Haristratus comes along, right and late one evening in three hundred and fifty six PCE, he makes his way up to the temple and so fire
to the wooden roof. The flame spread so quickly throughout this wooden interior. By morning the temple is totally in ruins. There's nothing left but a few blackened marble columns.
So not an Artemis fan, I'm guessing that's the things we really don't know much about the arsonist.
He's believed to have been lower class and possibly enslaved, and many historians suspect that he wasn't Ephesian by birth, And obviously with that kind of background, you can imagine all sorts of potential motives. It might have been politically motivated. It might have been protesting this injustice of his low station. Or he also might have been a misogynist lashing out it this women's protector.
Or maybe and I'm not trying to be funny here. Maybe he was just unwell and not thinking clearly. Yeah.
Yeah, there are all sorts of plausible options, except that none of them are the explanation that he offered, because after being arrested, he admitted that he had torched the temple just to make a name for himself. He wanted to leave his mark on history, and he decided the best way to do it was to destroy the symbol of the city, which had been, you know, a wonder of the ancient world that could have lasted for a very, very long time had it not been for him.
It's weird because it makes you wonder why the Ephesians would play into his hand by recording his confession. Why not just say the fire was an accident and sweep it under the rug.
Apparently they tried so. Not only did Efesian authorities sentence Haristratus to death for the arson, they also institute this special kind of punishment known as damnatio memory or condemnation of memory, and under this order, the public was forbidden to speak or write the culprit's name. This was obviously done to discourage others from committing similar copycat crimes, but
also to ensure that he didn't get his wish. You know that people would forget the name Herostratus, so instead of being remembered, he would be condemned to obscurity.
It's like the people that streak across like at the super Bowl and stuff like that on the field. No, it don't show them. We do not want them to be known. But that's clearly not what happened, since we're talking about him right now.
Yeah, I completely Apparently some historians refused to go along with this punishment, so they write down his story, his name before it could be forgotten by history, and as a result, Arsenist's name was not only remembered, it became the basis for a new expression, which is herostratic fame. It basically means fame at any cost. All right, So what are we calling the mistake in this one? Because it seemed like the Arsenists got exactly what.
He wanted in this case.
I think it's the Ephesian authorities who made the mistake because they tried to suppress the truth about this fire, and they went about it in the worst possible way, right They told everyone not to talk about it, which just makes everyone want to talk about it.
Yeah, yeah, all right. Well, I'm glad we put this list together. It's nice to know that the people of the past were just as accident prone as the rest of us, and as susceptible to mercury poison. It is true.
It seems to close out the show. Why don't we try to keep the fact off mercury poisoning free?
I'll try, no promises. Well, let's see what happens. Okay.
So here is a messy medieval blunder from the city for Germany. This is back in eleven eighty four. Dozens of noblemen gathered at Saint Peter's Church at the request of the King Henrik the sixth, and he had called a meeting to settle a land dispute between two prominent citizens.
But unfortunately they actually never got a chance to discuss it because shortly after the meeting started, the floor of the church collapses, right, and apparently the upper room where the group met wasn't intended to hold such a large gathering. Everyone's in chainmail and all this heavy armor, and the floor just wasn't strong enough. So the weight of the falling people and the debris was so heavy that they broke through the ground floor too, and wound up plunging right.
Into the church's.
Communal sessca post. I know, it's like the money pit or something. It's believed that almost everyone for the meeting fell into the latrine pits. Supposedly, the king and the archbishop avoided this embarrassment by clinging on to some iron rails on the church's windows. I don't know if that's just sort of like polishing the story, but the majority weren't so lucky, and altogether more than sixty people fell into this latrine and never made it out.
Goh, that might be the saddest story about people falling into a giant toilet that I've ever heard, So can't use that in our future list of sad stories of people falling into giant toilets. But yeah, that's really sad.
All right.
I've got a tragic, low brow blunder of my own for you, Mango, and it's about the first known mooning on record, and it took place in Jerusalem. This was back in the first century CE, and according to a contemporary historian of the era, Flavius Josephus, the first mooning took place just outside of the city when a Roman soldier exposed his backside to a group of Jewish pilgrims
on their way to celebrate Passover. As Josephus puts it, quote, the soldier pulled back his garment and, cowering down after an indecent manner, turned his breach to the Jews and spake such words as you might expect upon such a posture. To put it another way, he farted than for that.
Okay, so I'm going to skip to another one. I know we've talked about the Wicked Bible before aka the Sinner's Bible, and it's just a normal English printing of the Christian Bible. This is from sixteen thirty one, except, of course, it leaves out the word not from the seventh Commandment, so instead of saying thou shalt not commit adultery, it orders the readers to go out and have an affair.
Was this a typo situation or did the printers leave out the non on purpose, like as a prank or what was the origin of this? So there's this long.
Running rumor that the misprint was actually an act of sabotage by a rival publisher, but today most experts think it was just an honest mistake, not that it made much difference to the two printers responsible for this. Once King Charles found out about the wicked Bible, he ordered the printers to stand trial for sloppiness, and ultimately he
stripped them of their printing license. Now, one thousand copies of the Bible were printed before the error was discovered, but ns most of them were destroyed by all these scandalized readers, priests, or whatever who wanted to get rid of them. Only about twenty copies are known.
To exist today. Okay, all right, well here's a quick one I found. So back in thirteen twenty five, a strange, short lived conflict broke out between the Italian city states of Bologna and Modena, and it was called the War of the Bucket. Now, trouble had been brewing between the two cities for centuries, but the thing that supposedly tipped them over into this all out war was the theft of an old wooden bucket. I mean, buckets are very handy,
so you could see the other night frustrate someone. But apparently a group of Modanese soldiers sneaked into Bologna one night they noticed this random bucket at a public well, and they decided to take it with them, so you know, the spoils of victory, I guess. And of course someone noticed the missing bucket the next morning and was able
to quickly suss out who had stolen it. So Bolanese officials demanded this bucket be returned, and even when the Modenese were fused to oblige, Bologna declared war on its longtime rival.
I feel like that has got to be some bucket rightly special.
I definitely hope so, because although the war only lasted a few months, it's estimated that roughly two thousand people died between the two sides.
Oh my god, a few months. So how did Bologna get this bucket back?
They did not. They wound up surrendering, and just to add insult to injury, the Modinese were said to have stolen a second bucket on their way back home.
So we've talked about some pretty silly fluffs today, but I think this fact might be the most embarrassing yet. According to a biography of Greek philosophers, there was a Stoic philosopher named Crispus, and this is in the second century BCE. He apparently laughed himself to death while watching a donkey eat figs. Okay, so apparently this happened during
the one hundred and forty third Olympia. Chrysippus was just hanging out watching the games when he noticed that his donkey had started helping himself to some figs, and he thinks it's the funniest thing he's ever seen, so he cries out, now, give the ass some pure wine to wash down his figs. And then, according to Diogenes, he laughed so violently that he died.
Wait, so this guy got presumably very drunk at the Olympics and then die laughing at his own dad joke. It sounds like, are we sure this guy was a stoic? Because that does not sound very stoic to me.
I think his real mistake was not giving a close enough watch on his fig supply, because the easiest way to prevent death by laughing at watching a fig eating donkey is to never give your donkey figs in the first place.
A truer words were never said, Mango, I think you deserve the trophy this week for imparting that bit of wisdom. You built it up like it was going to be a great fact and it delivered. So congratulations you win the trophy this week.
Well that's going to do it for a part Time Genius from myself, Will, Mary, Gabe, and Dylan.
Thank you so much for listening.
We'll be back next week with and other brand new episodes, so please tune back in. Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongashtikler and research by our good pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support.
From Tyler Klang.
The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norbel and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay, trustee Dara Potts and Viney Shorey. For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or.
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