Curated playlist
Characters in the Divine Comedy
- Julius CaesarRoman general and dictator (100–44 BC)
- Thomas AquinasItalian Dominican theologian and philosopher (1225–1274)
- Alexander the GreatMilitary commander, King of Macedon from 336 to 323 BC
- PlatoPlato wrote that the safest general characterization of European philosophy is that it consists of a series of footnotes to him. That line came from Alfred North Whitehead, not from Plato himself, and it captures something strange about a…
- AristotleAncient Greek scholars gave Aristotle a name reserved for one man: among medieval Muslim scholars he was "The First Teacher", and to Christians like Thomas Aquinas he was simply "The Philosopher". He lived from 384 to 322 BC, and according…
- AbrahamAbraham began his story under a different name: Abram. In the Book of Genesis, God tells him to leave the house of his father Terah and travel to a land God will show him, and from that single command grows a figure revered across three…
- NoahNoah is a figure whose name appears in the Hebrew Bible, the Quran, and the writings of the Bahai Faith, making him one of the few characters shared across every major Abrahamic tradition. He is described in Genesis as the tenth and final…
- Adam and EveAdam and Eve are the first man and first woman in the creation myth of the Abrahamic religions. From them flows a startling claim. All of humanity is in essence a single family, with everyone descended from one original pair. Their story…
- Dante AlighieriDante Alighieri began his most famous poem with a line of plain confusion: "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita," or "Midway upon the journey of our life." He was writing about a man lost in a dark wood, around 35 years old, imagining a…
- HoraceQuintus Horatius Flaccus, the poet the English-speaking world calls Horace, once described himself as a man who fled the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC without his shield. He was no born aristocrat. He was the free-born son of a former slave,…
- AvicennaBy the age of ten, Avicenna had memorized the entire Quran. He was born around 980 in the village of Afshana in Transoxiana, into a Persian family, and his curiosity would carry him through the libraries of Balkh, Khwarazm, Gorgan, Rey,…
- VirgilVirgil stood on a pillar of bright tin-plated iron. That is how Geoffrey Chaucer placed him in The House of Fame, written between 1374 and 1385, granting the Roman poet a uniquely prominent position in history. Dante went further. In the…
- Saint PeterSaint Peter began life as Shimon bar Yonah, a fisherman from Bethsaida. He died, according to tradition, crucified upside down on Vatican Hill under the Emperor Nero. Between those two points lies one of the most consequential lives in the…
- SatanSatan goes by many names. In Hebrew he is ha-satan, "the accuser". In Arabic, Iblis or Shaitan. In Latin, Diabolus, the slanderer. In Christian art since the ninth century, he carries a pitchfork and walks on cloven hooves. In medieval…
- AugustusOn the 8th of May 44 BC, a teenager named Gaius Octavius accepted a dead man's will and, with it, the most dangerous inheritance in the Roman world. Julius Caesar, his great-uncle and Rome's dictator in perpetuity, had been stabbed to…
- AeneasAeneas was twice pulled back from death by gods who would not let him die. In Homer's Iliad, Aphrodite and Apollo snatch him from a duel with Diomedes of Argos, who nearly kills him, and carry him to Pergamos for healing. Later Poseidon, a…
- Judas IscariotJudas Iscariot was one of Jesus Christ's original Twelve Apostles, and his name has become, in many languages, a synonym for betrayer. Thirty pieces of silver. A kiss on the cheek. A single word, "master," spoken in a garden at night.…
- HectorHector, prince of Troy, stands at the center of one of the oldest stories in Western literature. In Homer's Iliad, he leads the Trojan army against the besieging Greeks for ten years, kills more warriors than any man on his side, and dies…
- Frederick II, Holy Roman EmperorFrederick II was born in Jesi, near Ancona, on the 26th of December 1194, and the circumstances surrounding that birth were so extraordinary that rumors would follow him for the rest of his life. His mother, Queen Constance of Sicily, was…
- Marcus Junius BrutusMarcus Junius Brutus died on the 23rd of October 42 BC, on a hillside near Philippi, by falling on his own sword. He had just lost two battles in quick succession to the armies of Octavian and Mark Antony. Four legions remained with him.…
- Seneca the YoungerSeneca the Younger spent his final hours in a warm bath, dictating last words to a scribe while friends gathered around him in his home. He had already tried to bleed to death by severing veins, and taken poison that failed to kill him. In…
- Paris (mythology)Paris of Troy was condemned before he was born. His mother Hecuba dreamed she gave birth to a flaming torch. The seer Aesacus read this as a verdict, not a vision: the child would destroy Troy. Priam ordered his chief herdsman, Agelaus, to…
- HippocratesHippocrates of Kos has been called the Father of Medicine for more than two thousand years, yet almost nothing concrete is known about what he actually thought, wrote, or did. He was born around 460 BC on the Greek island of Kos. The man…
- HomerHomer is credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, yet no one can say for certain that he ever lived. He was possibly born around the 8th century BC. His life and his authorship remain obscure. Ancient Greek society revered him…
- Justinian IJustinian I was born in 482 in Tauresium, in Dardania, near the city of Naissus, into a peasant family of either Thraco-Roman or Illyro-Roman origin. He may have been the last Roman emperor to speak Latin as his native tongue. From those…
- StatiusPublius Papinius Statius grew up in the Bay of Naples during the early years of the first century. His father, a native of Velia, moved to Rome and taught with marked success before returning to Naples. The elder Statius competed in poetic…
- AliAli ibn Abi Talib was born around 600 CE, by tradition possibly inside the Ka'ba in Mecca, the holiest site of Islam. He was the cousin and son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad, raised in Muhammad's household from about the age of five. He…
- MuhammadMuhammad was born in Mecca around the year 570, into the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh tribe. His father died before he was born. His mother died when he was six, and his grandfather died two years after that. By the age of eight he had…
- SocratesSocrates wrote nothing down. Not a single text, not a stray fragment, survives in his own hand. Everything known about the ancient Greek philosopher from Classical Athens comes secondhand, through the accounts of people who knew him or…
- Gaius Cassius LonginusGaius Cassius Longinus spent his life fighting against what he saw as tyranny, only to be remembered for the act that made him infamous: driving a blade into Julius Caesar's chest on the 15th of March, 44 BC. He was not the most famous…
- CerberusCerberus, the hound of Hades, sits at one of the most consequential thresholds in all of Greek mythology: the gate between the living world and the realm of the dead. His job was not to keep the living out, but to keep the dead in. No soul…
- TrajanTrajan was born Marcus Ulpius Traianus on the 18th of September in AD 53, in a modest Roman colony called Italica, in what is now the Andalusian province of Seville in southern Spain. At the time of his birth, Italica was a small town…
- AverroesAverroes was born in Córdoba on the 14th of April 1126, into a family whose name was synonymous with legal authority. His grandfather had been the city's chief judge and imam of the Great Mosque. His father held the same office. And yet,…
- Cato the YoungerCato the Younger stabbed himself in the abdomen in April 46 BC rather than accept a pardon from Julius Caesar. The details of that final night in the city of Utica are vivid and brutal: after his family removed his sword, he tore his own…
- AttilaAttila ruled the Huns from 434 until his death in early 453, and in those two decades he forced two Roman empires to their knees. His name, which most scholars trace to the Gothic word atta meaning "father" combined with a diminutive…
- SinonA young Greek warrior named Sinon stood before the stone walls of Troy, his hands bound and his eyes fixed on the massive wooden horse looming behind him. He was the son of Aesimus, who traced his lineage back to Autolycus, a figure known…
- Pope Boniface VIIIPope Boniface VIII was born Benedetto Caetani in Anagni, a hilltop town southeast of Rome, and he died there too, in the most humiliating circumstances any medieval pope had ever endured. On the 7th of September 1303, soldiers in the pay…
- Simonides of CeosSimonides of Ceos lived from around 556 to 468 BC, and the Greeks credited him with something no poet before him had managed: convincing the world that an ordinary human being deserved the kind of praise once reserved only for gods and…