Fun History Fact:
If you just got excited, you’re a nerd.
rUDE i wanted a fun history fact D:
Phalanx warfare often resulted in the two opposing ranks each veering off towards their respective left as each soldier tried to huddle under their neighbour’s shield, with the result that if the officers weren’t careful they could charge and completely miss the enemy because they’d huddled off in different directions.
Among other things, Caesar Augustus’s sumptuary laws outlawed end tables. Apparently having things in easy reach when you were sitting down was too luxurious.
The Catalogue of Ships in Book 2 of the Iliad mentions a delegation from Athens, even though Athens hadn’t been founded at the time the sack of Troy would have taken place. This surely has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Athens was where the Iliad was first written down.
Herodotus is sometimes frighteningly accurate for a man whose approach to documenting history was to ask as many blokes in as many pubs as possible about what had happened and then write down the consensus. Only sometimes, though.
The first part of initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries involved carrying a live piglet down to the sea and bathing with it. Piglet sales spiked in Athens every year because of this, and the city occasionally suffered a piglet shortage.
(It is unknown whether or not participants were allowed to stun their piglets for easier transport.)
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
