History's Greatest

In Gladiator, Commodus is a scheming coward who murders his father, fears the arena, and dies in a cinematic sword fight. Almost none of it is historically accurate. Marcus Aurelius almost certainly died of illness, not murder. Commodus did not fear the arena - he was obsessed with it, fighting there on 735 documented occasions under conditions carefully designed to keep him safe. And his death, when it came, was considerably stranger than anything Hollywood attempted. The real Commodus is not more sympathetic than the film version. He is more bizarre, more interesting, and more revealing about how Rome actually worked. He renamed the city of Rome after himself, declared himself the reincarnation of Hercules, and was ultimately strangled by his own wrestling partner on New Year's Eve - after his mistress's poison failed to finish the job. Here is what actually happened.

In 1642, a teenage Frenchman built one of the world's first mechanical calculators to spare his father the tedium of manual arithmetic. By his mid-twenties, Blaise Pascal had founded probability theory, overturned two thousand years of received physics, and established himself as one of the foremost mathematical minds in Europe. Then, on the night of November 23, 1654, something happened that redirected him entirely. He wrote it down immediately, sewed the document into the lining of his coat, and carried it against his body for the rest of his life. Multiple copies were found sewn into his clothing after his death. He had told almost no one it existed. What followed was not an abandonment of his intellectual standards. It was the same rigorous mind turned toward harder questions — about human nature, self-deception, and how a mortal creature should live with honesty and purpose. Pascal is one of history's most complete minds. This is his full story.