ANCIENT PEOPLE YOU SHOULD KNOW II

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Nefertiti

 Nefertiti. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

We know her as the New Kingdom Egyptian queen who wore a tall blue crown, lots of colored jewelry and held up a neck like a swan -- as she appears on a bust in a Berlin museum. She was married to an equally memorable pharaoh, Akhenaten, the heretic king who moved the royal family to Amarna, and was related to the boy king Tutankhamen, known mostly for his sarcophagus. Nefertiti never served as pharaoh, but she assisted her husband in the governing of Egypt and may have been co-regent.

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Nero

Nero - Marble Bust of Nero. Clipart.com

Nero was the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors, the most important family of Rome that produced the first five emperors (Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero). Nero is famed for watching while Rome burned and then using the devastated area for his own luxurious palace and blaming the conflagration on the Christians, whom he then persecuted. More »

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Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso in the Nuremberg Chronicle. Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Ovid (43 B.C. - A.D. 17) was a prolific Roman poet whose writing influenced Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton. As those men knew, to understand the corpus of Greco-Roman mythology requires familiarity with Ovid's Metamorphoses. More »

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Parmenides

Parmenides From The School of Athens by Raphael. Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Parmenides (b 510 B.C.) was a Greek philosophy from Elea in Italy. He argued against the existence of a void, a theory used by later philosophers in the expression "nature abhors a vacuum," which stimulated experiments to disprove it. Parmenides argued that change and motion are only delusions.

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Paul of Tarsus

Saint Paul's Conversion, by Jean Fouquet. Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Paul (or Saul) of Tarsus in Cilicia (d. A.D. 67) set the tone for Christianity, including an emphasis on celibacy and theory of divine grace and salvation, as well as eliminating the circumcision requirement. It was Paul who called the New Testament evangelion, 'the gospel'. More »

54

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Pericles

 Pericles from the Altes Museum in Berlin. A Roman copy of a Grek work sculpted after 429. Photo taken by Gunnar Bach Pedersen. Public Domain; Courtesy of Gunnar Bach Pedersen/Wikipedia.

Pericles (c. 495 - 429 B.C.) brought Athens to its peak, turning the Delian League into the empire of Athens, and so the era in which he lived is named the Age of Pericles. He helped the poor, set up colonies, built the long wallsfrom Athens to the Piraeus, developed the Athenian navy, and built the Parthenon, the Odeon, the Propylaea, and the temple at Eleusis. The name of Pericles is also attached to the Peloponnesian War. During the war, he ordered the people of Attica to leave their fields and come into the city to stay protected by the walls. Unfortunately, Pericles didn't foresee the effect of disease on the crowded conditions and so, along with many others, Pericles died of the plague near the start of the war. More »

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Pindar

Bust of Pindar at the Capitoline Museums. Marie-Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons.

Pindar is considered the Greatest Greek lyric poet. He wrote poetry that provides information on Greek mythology and on Olympic and other Panhellenic Games. Pindar was born c. 522 B.C. at Cynoscephalae, near Thebes.

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Plato

Plato - From Raphael's School of Athens (1509). Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Plato (428/7 - 347 B.C.) was one of the most famous philosophers of all time. A type of love (Platonic) is named for him. We know about the famous philosopher Socrates through Plato's dialogues. Plato is known as the father of idealism in philosophy. His ideas were elitist, with the philosopher king the ideal ruler. Plato is perhaps best known to college students for his parable of a cave, which appears in Plato's Republic. More »

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Plutarch

 Plutarch. Clipart.com

Plutarch (c. A.D. 45-125) is an ancient Greek biographer who used material that is no longer available to us for his biographies. His two main works are called Parallel Lives and Moralia. The Parallel Lives compare a Greek and a Roman with a focus on how the character of the famous person influenced his life. Some of the 19 completely parallel lives are a stretch and many of the characters are ones we would consider mythological. Other parallel lives have lost one of their parallels.

The Romans made many copies of the Lives and Plutarch has been popular since. Shakespeare, for instance, closely used Plutarch in creating his tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra. More »

58

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Ramses

 Pharaoh Ramses II of Egypt. Public Domain Courtesy of Image Library of Christian Theological Seminary

The Egyptian 19th Dynasty New Kingdom pharaoh Ramses II (Usermaatre Setepenre) (lived 1304-1237) is known as Ramses the Great and, in Greek, as Ozymandias. He ruled for about 66 years, according to Manetho. He is known for signing the first known peace treaty, with the Hittites, but he was also a great warrior, especially for fighting in the Battle of Kadesh. Ramses may have had 100 children, with several wives, including Nefertari. Ramses restored the religion of Egypt close to what it was before Akhenaten and the Amarna period. Ramses installed many monuments to his honor, including the complex at Abu Simbel and the Ramesseum, a mortuary temple. Ramses was buried in the Valley of the Kings in tomb KV47. His body is now in Cairo.

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Sappho

 Alcaeus and Sappho, Attic red-figure kalathos, c. 470 B.C., by the Brygos Painter. Public Domain. Courtesy of Bibi Saint-Pol at Wikipedia.

The dates of Sappho of Lesbos are not known. She is thought to have been born around 610 B.C. and to have died in about 570. Playing with the available meters, Sappho wrote moving lyric poetry, odes to the goddesses, especially Aphrodite (the subject of Sappho's complete surviving ode), and love poetry, including the wedding genre of epithalamia, using vernacular and epic vocabulary. There is a poetic meter named for her (Sapphic). More »

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Sargon the Great of Akkad

 Bronze Head of an Akkadian Ruler -- Possibly Sargon of Akkad. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Sargon the Great (aka Sargon of Kish) ruled Sumer from about 2334-2279 B.C. or perhaps a quarter of a century later. Legend sometimes says he ruled the whole world. While the world is a stretch, his dynasty's empire was the whole of Mesopotamia, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Sargon realized it was important to have religious support, so he installed his daughter, Enheduanna, as a priestess of the moon god Nanna. Enheduanna is the world's first known, named . More »

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Scipio Africanus

 Profile of a young Scipio Africanus the Elder from a gold signet ring from Capua (late 3rd or early 2nd century B.C.) signed by Herakliedes. Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Scipio Africanus or Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Major won the Hannibalic War or Second Punic Warfor Rome by defeating Hannibal at Zama in 202 B.C. Scipio, who came from an ancient Roman patrician family, the Cornelii, was the father of Cornelia, the famous mother of the social reforming Gracchi. He came into conflict with Cato the Elder and was accused of corruption. Later, Scipio Africanus became a figure in the fictional "Dream of Scipio". In this surviving section of De re publica, by Cicero, the dead Punic War general tells his adoptive grandson, Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus (185-129 B.C.), about the future of Rome and the constellations. Scipio Africanus' explanation worked its way into medieval cosmology.More »

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Seneca

 Seneca. Clipart.com

Seneca was an important Latin writer for the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and beyond. His themes and philosophy should even appeal to us today. In accordance with the philosophy of the Stoics, Virtue (virtus) and Reason are the basis of a good life, and a good life should be lived simply and in accordance with Nature.

He served as an advisor to Emperor Nero but eventually was oblged to take his own life. More »

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Siddhartha Gautama Buddha

Buddha. Clipart.com

Siddhartha Gautama was a spiritual teacher of enlightenment who acquired hundreds of followers in India and founded Buddhism. His teachings were preserved orally for centuries before they were transcribed on palm-leaf scrolls. Siddhartha may have been born c. 538 B.C. to Queen Maya and King Suddhodana of the Shakya in ancient Nepal. By the third century B.C. Buddhism appears to have spread to China. More »

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Socrates

 Socrates. Alun Salt

Socrates, an Athenian contemporary of Pericles (c. 470 - 399 B.C.), is a central figure in Greek philosophy. Socrates is known for the Socratic method (elenchus), Socratic irony, and the pursuit of knowledge. Socrates is famous for saying that he knows nothing and that the unexamined life is not worth living. He is also well known for stirring up sufficient controversy to be sentenced to a death that he had to carry out by drinking a cup of hemlock. Socrates had important students, including the philosopher Plato. More »

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Solon

 Solon. Clipart.com

First coming to prominence, in about 600 B.C., for his patriotic exhortations when the Athenians were fighting a war with Megara for possession of Salamis, Solon was elected eponymous archon in 594/3 B.C. Solon faced the daunting task of improving the condition of debt-ridden farmers, laborers forced into bondage over debt, and the middle classes who were excluded from government. He had to help the poor while not alienating the increasingly wealthy landowners and aristocracy. Because of his reform compromises and other legislation, posterity refers to him as Solon the lawgiver. More »

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Spartacus

Fall of Spartacus. Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia

Thracian born, Spartacus (c. 109 B.C.-71 B.C.) was trained in a gladiator school and led a slave revolt that was ultimately doomed. Through Spartacus' military ingenuity, his men evaded Roman forces led by Clodius and then Mummius, but Crassus and Pompey got the best of him. Spartacus' army of disaffected gladiators and slaves were defeated. Their bodies were strung up on crosses along the Appian Way. More »

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Sophocles

 Sophoclesat the British Museum. Probably from Asia Minor (Turkey). Bronze, 300-100 B.C. Was previously thought to represent Homer, but now thought to be Sophocles in middle age. CC Flickr User Son of Groucho

Sophocles (c. 496-406 B.C.), the second of the great tragic poets, wrote over 100 tragedies. Of these, there are fragments for more than 80, but only seven complete tragedies:

• Oedipus Tyrannus
• Oedipus at Colonus
• Antigone
• Electra
• Trachiniae
• Ajax
• Philoctetes

Sophocles' contributions to the field of tragedy include introducing a third actor to the drama. He is well-remembered for his tragedies about Oedipus of Freud's complex-fame.More 

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Tacitus

 Tacitus. Clipart.com

Cornelius Tacitus (c. A.D. 56 - c. 120) is considered the greatest of the ancient historians. He writes about maintaining neutrality in his writing. A student of the grammarian Quintilian, Tacitus wrote:

• De vita Iulii Agricolae 'The Life of Julius Agricola
• De origine et situ Germanorum 'The Germania'
• Dialogus de oratoribus 'Dialogue on Oratory' 'Histories'
• Ab excessu divi Augusti 'Annals'More »

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Thales

 Thales of Miletus. Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Thales was a Greek Pre-Socratic philosopher from the Ionian city of Miletus (c. 620 - c. 546 B.C.). He predicted a solar eclipse and was considered one of the 7 ancient Sages. Aristotle considered Thales the founder of natural philosophy. He developed the scientific method, theories to explain why things change, and proposed a basic underlying substance of the world. He started the field of Greek astronomy and may have introduced geometry into Greece fro Egypt. More »

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Themistocles

 Themistocles Ostracon. CC NickStenning @ Flickr

Themistocles (c. 524-459 B.C.) persuaded the Athenians to use the silver from state mines at Laurion, where new veins had been found, to finance a port at Piraeus and a fleet. He also tricked Xerxes into making errors that led to his loss of the Battle of Salamis, the turning point in the Persian Wars. A sure sign that he was a great leader and had therefore provoked envy, Themistocles was ostracized under Athens' democratic system. More»

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Thucydides

 Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia. Thucydides

Thucydides (born c. 460-455 B.C.) wrote a valuable first-hand account of the Peloponnesian War (History of the Peloponnesian Wa) and improved the way in which history was written.

Thucydides wrote his history based on information about the war from his days as an Athenian commander and interviews with people on both sides of the war. Unlike his predecessor, Herodotus, he didn't delve into the background but laid out the facts as he saw them, chronologically. We recognize more of what we consider the historical method in Thucydides than we do in his predecessor, Herodotus.

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Trajan

 Trajan. © Trustees of the British Museum, produced by Natalia Bauer for the Portable Antiquities Scheme.

The second of the five men in the late first to second century A.D. who are now known as the good emperors, Trajan was named optimus 'best' by the Senate. He extended the Roman Empire to its furthest extent. Hadrian of Hadrian's Wall fame succeeded him to the imperial purple. More »

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Vergil (Virgil)

 Vergil. Clipart.com

Publius Vergilius Maro (Oct. 15, 70 - Sept. 21, 19 B.C.), aka Vergil or Virgil, wrote an epic masterpiece, the Aeneid, for the glory of Rome and especially Augustus. He also wrote poems called Bucolics and Eclogues, but he is chiefly known now for his story of the Trojan prince Aeneas' adventures and the founding of Rome, which is patterned on the Odyssey and Iliad.

Not only was Vergil's writing continuously read throughout the Middle Ages, but even today he exerts an influence on poets and the college-bound because Vergil is on the Latin AP exam. More »

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Xerxes the Great

 Xerxes the Great. Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

The Achaemenid Persian King Xerxes (520 - 465 B.C.) was the grandson of Cyrus and the son of Darius. Herodotus states that when a storm damaged the bridge Xerxes had built across the Hellespont, Xerxes got mad, and ordered the water be lashed and otherwise punished. In antiquity, bodies of water were conceived of as gods (see Iliad XXI), so while Xerxes may have been deluded in thinking himself strong enough to scathe the water, it is not as insane as it sounds: The Roman Emperor Caligula who, unlike Xerxes, is generally considered to have been mad, ordered Roman troops to gather seashells as spoils of the sea. Xerxes fought against the Greeks in the Persian Wars, winning a victory at Thermopylae and suffering defeat at Salamis. More »

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Zoroaster

 Section From The School of Athens, by Raphael (1509), showing bearded Zoroaster holding a globe talking with Ptolemy. Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Like Buddha, the traditional date for Zoroaster (Greek: Zarathustra) is the 6th Century B.C., although Iranians date him to the 10th/11th century. Information about the life of Zoroaster comes from the Avesta, which contains Zoroaster's own contribution, the Gathas. Zoroaster saw the world as a struggle between truth and lie, making the religion he founded, Zoroastrianism, a dualistic religion. Ahura Mazda, the uncreated creator God is truth. Zoroaster also taught that there is free will.

The Greeks thought of Zoroaster as a sorcerer and astrologer.