Europe in the classical world (800 BC – AD 500). Greece, Rome, Persia, the Qin and Han, the Maya: the age of the great classical states and the written histories that describe them. These articles cover their rise, their wars and the everyday lives their ruins preserve.
In 494 BC Rome's plebeian soldiers left the city for the Sacred Mount. Livy says they came back after winning officials of their own, the tribunes.
· 494 BCAthens filled most offices, from the Council of 500 to its juries, by lottery with a stone machine, the kleroterion, to keep the rich from taking power.
· 487 BCAthens could vote once a year to exile one man for ten years, his name scratched on a pottery shard (ostracon), as a check on power, not a punishment.
· 487 BCIn 458 BC Rome made Cincinnatus dictator for six months to save a blockaded army. He resigned on the sixteenth day and, Dionysius says, refused the spoils.
· 458 BCAlexander succeeded Philip II in 336 BC, crossed to Asia in 334, beat Darius III at Issus and Gaugamela and reached the Punjab before his army turned back.
· 336 BCArrian gives Alexander 47,000 men against a Persian army 'said to contain' a million, and has Darius flee first; a Babylonian diary says he was deserted.
· 331 BCAlexander died at Babylon on June 11, 323 BC; by 280 BC his generals ruled three kingdoms, yet Greek stayed the language of eastern towns and of Bactria.
· 323 BCA lump raised from a wreck off Antikythera showed a gear wheel in 1902. X-ray studies from 2005 to 2021 read its 30 gears as an eclipse and planet machine.
· 100 BCVesuvius carbonized a Roman villa's library in AD 79. Scans and machine learning now read the scrolls unopened: a first word in 2023, a whole roll by 2026.
· AD 79Vesuvius buried Pompeii under about 4 m of ash in AD 79. Pliny dates it to August 24; Pompeii's park says the October date has no documentary basis.
· AD 79Claudia Severa's birthday invitation, tablet 291, is one of the Roman ink letters on thin wood found at the fort of Vindolanda since March 23, 1973.
· AD 100Priscus's fragment 8, in J. B. Bury's translation, follows the East Roman embassy of 449 to Attila, a Greek merchant turned Hun and a banquet in wood.
· AD 449
