Free Republic

This quote is taken from an exhortation by the Roman general Belisarius in AD 533 to his troops as they set out on the great campaign to wrest north Africa from the Vandals. The setting is the beach at Abydos, a city set on a promontory projecting into the Hellespont between the Aegean Sea and the Sea of Marmara. Having left Constantinople by ship shortly before, Belisarius and his army had landed at Abydos to collect an additional load of cavalry mounts. Before they could set sail again, however, the wind died and left the fleet becalmed. Several days of...

Click above for a video excerpt from The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius describing a personal encounter with the dreaded Plague of Justinian. The thought of pandemic troubles many souls these days. It is well to keep in mind that as bad as things may seem with regard to the deaths caused by the COVID-19 virus, we are not even within shouting distance of the type of utter and absolute societal devastation caused by the typical catastrophic historical plague. One of these epic pestilential events was the so-called Plague of Justinian of the mid-to-late 6th century AD. Erupting in AD 542,...

Olympia, the Sanctuary of Zeus and venue of the Olympic Games in Ancient Greece, was probably destroyed by tsunamis that reached far inland, and not as previously believed, by earthquakes and river flooding... Paläotsunamis that have taken place over the last 11,000 years along the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean. The Olympic-tsunami hypothesis has been put forward due to sediments found in the vicinity of Olympia, which were buried under an 8 metres thick layer of sand and other debris, and only rediscovered around 250 years ago. "The composition and thickness of the sediments we have found, do not fit...