Curated playlist
Deified men
- JesusJesus left no writings of his own. Almost everything known about him comes from accounts by others.
- James CookCaptain James Cook tried to kidnap a Hawaiian king to get a stolen boat back.
- AeneasTwice in Homer's Iliad, gods snatch the Trojan Aeneas from death. He was a minor warrior who became Rome's first hero.
- Prince Philip, Duke of EdinburghPrince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, was born on a dining room table. The date was the 10th of June 1921, and the place was Mon Repos, a villa on the Greek island of Corfu. Before he turned two, he was carried out of Greece in a fruit box. He…
- HomerHomer, credited with the Iliad and the Odyssey, may never have lived. No one can say for certain that he existed.
- AliAli stayed in Mecca as a decoy so the prophet Muhammad could escape in 622. He was Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law.
- The BuddhaNo written record of the Buddha survives from his lifetime. Ashoka's edicts name him in the 3rd century BCE.
- Jim JonesJim Jones was an American preacher who founded the Peoples Temple. On the 18th of November 1978, 912 people died at his jungle commune in Jonestown, Guyana. Among them were 304 children. Jones called the event "revolutionary suicide," a…
- Pol PotIn 1977, Pol Pot told Yugoslav television that he had been born into a "poor, peasant family." By then he was running Democratic Kampuchea, the one-party state that the Khmer Rouge had built across Cambodia. Pol Pot was born Saloth Sâr. He…
- Diego MaradonaDiego Maradona punched in one World Cup goal, then dribbled past five English players for another.