Imagine walking into completely silent abandoned building. Dust covers the floor, old furniture sits exactly where it was left, and in the corner stands a beautiful stone angel with its hands covering its face. You don't know what it is so you stare at it, curious. You look away for just a second, and then you look back. It's closer, frightening you. That is the nightmare at the heart of the Weeping Angels, one of the most terrifying creatures ever created for Doctor Who. Strangely enough, these weeping angel story didn't begin with an alien planet or some complicated science-fiction idea. It began with a statue in a graveyard. The Weeping Angels first appeared in the 2007 Doctor Who episode "Blink," written by Steven Moffat. The basic rule was simple but very horrifying: They can move when you're not looking at them. The moment you look at one, it becomes completely still - like an ordinary stone statue. You turn your head? It moves close. You so ...
Alexander the Great.
Alexander the Great had conquered everything from Greece to the edge of India before he turned 30.
He'd never lost a single battle. He personally led cavalry charges, absorbed arrows, sword cuts, and blows to the skull across years of near constant warfare, and came back fighting each time.
His soldiers believed he was divine. He may have believed it, too. Then, he developed a fever in Babylon in late May of 323 BC after a prolonged night of banqueting and heavy drinking.
Alexander fell violently ill.
What followed was 11 days of steadily worsening fever. He lost his ability to speak. He lost his ability to move. His generals, desperate and anxious about succession, filed the entire army past his bed so each soldier could say goodbye.
Alexander could no longer form words, but reportedly managed to raise a hand to acknowledge each man as he passed.
On June 10th, 323 BC, Alexander the Great died. He was 32 years old. The cause of death has been debated for over 2,000 years.
Typhoid fever, poisoning, the compounded damage of a decade of wounds, acute alcohol damage. Historians still argue.
What isn't disputed is this: The man who conquered the known world died of a fever in a foreign city before he turned 33. The empire he'd spent his life building fractured into civil war within months. He conquered everything except time.
Hannibal Barca.
Hannibal Barca crossed the Alps with war elephants and nearly destroyed Rome. His encirclement of a Roman army at Cannae in 216 BC, where 80,000 men were annihilated in a single afternoon, remains one of the most studied tactical masterpieces in military history.
Rome feared him for decades. even after Carthage fell and Hannibal was driven into exile, they kept hunting him across the eastern Mediterranean. They could never leave him alone.
By 183 BC, Hannibal was an aging man living under the protection of King Prusias the First of Bithynia. Roman envoys arrived and demanded his extradition. The king agreed without hesitation. Roman soldiers surrounded Hannibal's house from every exit.
Hannibal had anticipated this possibility for years. He kept poison sewn inside a ring just in case the day came. He took it. His reported last words were characteristically sharp, "Let us relieve the Romans of their long anxiety, since they find it tedious to wait for an old man's death." He was approximately 64 years old.
The greatest general Rome ever faced chose his own ending rather than let Rome choose it for him. Even in death, he outmaneuvered them.
Spartacus.
Spartacus led the largest slave revolt in Roman history, the Third Servile War, commanding an army built from nothing that defeated Roman legions repeatedly across nearly 3 years.
He was a gladiator who became a general, a slave who came within reach of breaking Rome open entirely. He was killed in battle in 71 BC. And here is what makes it haunting, and nobody knows exactly how.
When Marcus Crassus' legions finally crushed the slave army, Spartacus reportedly fought his way towards Crassus himself, cutting down two Roman centurions in the process, before being surrounded and overwhelmed.
His body was never formally identified on the battlefield. The Romans, who loved putting enemy heads on spikes as warnings, never produced his. He simply vanished into the carnage of the final battle, anonymous at the end, buried somewhere among the thousands of dead, his remains indistinguishable from the men he had led.
6,000 of his surviving followers were crucified along the Appian Way, one cross every 100 ft for 350 miles.
Spartacus himself got no cross. Just silence.
Rome won the war. It never got the satisfaction of the man.
Julius Caesar.
Julius Caesar had survived civil war, military conquests, and multiple political crises to become dictator of Rome in perpetuity. He was warned repeatedly.
A soothsayer told him to beware the ides of March. His wife Calpurnia had nightmares about his murder and begged him not to go. A written note identifying the conspirators was pressed into his hand as he walked to the Senate.
He went anyway. He never read the note.
On March 15th, 44 BC, more than 60 senators, calling themselves the liberators, surrounded him in the Curia of Pompey on the pretense of presenting a petition. Then the knives came out.
The first blow grazed his neck. Caesar grabbed the blade with his bare hand and tried to fight back. He was immediately overwhelmed. He was stabbed 23 times.
A Roman physician later concluded only one wound was actually lethal. 22 of the blows he could have survived. His assassins were so panicked and frantic in the moment that several accidentally stabbed each other in the chaos.
Caesar fell at the foot of a statue of Pompey, his old rival. Some accounts say he pulled his toga over his face as he went down, choosing to die with whatever dignity the moment still allowed.
He was 55 years old, killed by his own senators in his own city in broad daylight.
Attila the Hun.
Attila the Hun had devastated everything from the Rhine to the Black Sea. He'd extracted enormous tribute from Rome and the Eastern Empire, earned the title Scourge of God, and terrified a continent for two decades.
No army stopped Attila on the battlefield, but what stopped him was a nosebleed on his wedding night.
In late 453 AD, Attila took a new wife, a young woman named Ildico. The wedding feast was enormous, as everything Attila did was enormous. Staggering amounts of food, wine, and celebration. He retired to bed with his new bride in the early hours of the next morning.
He was found dead the next day, blood everywhere. He had suffered a severe nasal hemorrhage while deeply unconscious from drink and drowned in his own blood.
Some historians suspect poison. The timing was suspiciously convenient for Rome, which had spent years buying Attila off. No one was ever proven responsible.
His body was placed in three nested coffins, gold, then silver, then iron. The soldiers who buried him were executed afterwards, so the tomb's location would die with them. No one has found it. He vanished from the earth the same way he'd lived, leaving nothing behind he hadn't chosen to leave.
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