Catastrophe

Aeschylus, having accepted an invitation from Hiero to visit Syracuse, the major Greek city on the eastern side of the island, presents The Women of Aetna in 475 to celebrate the establishment of the new city.

An extremely violent eruption of Mount Etna occurs in this year.

Thasos signals changes in foreign policy alignments all over Greece.

The Thasians had appealed to Sparta for help, asking it to invade Attica, and the Spartans had secretly agreed to do so.

According to Thucydides, they would have done it had they not been detained by a massive revolt of the helots and “perioikoi,” who have taken advantage of a severe earthquake in 464-463, which has killed thousands of civilians, to occupy the strong position of Ithome in Messenia.

The great revolt, known as the Third Messenian War, threatens Spartan supremacy among the Greek states.

Archidamus II, king of Sparta from about 469, organizes the defense of Sparta and suppresses the Laconians, then turns to deal with …

…the Messenians, who have entrenched themselves at Mount Ithome and successfully resist Spartan efforts to dislodge them. (Ithome, together with the Acrocorinth, the citadel of Corinth, was described by a Hellenistic ruler as one of the “horns of the Peloponnesian ox” that a would-be conqueror must seize.)

Possibly, the occupiers of Ithome plan not only an act of secession but, in fact, an attack on the famously unravaged city of Sparta itself.

The earthquake not only shakes Spartan nerve but must also have serious demographic effects (though how long-term these are is disputed).

Rome’s misfortunes of 440 BCE had begun with a famine, which Livy assigns either to the year being unfavorable to the crops, or to the cultivation of the land being abandoned for the attractions of political meetings and city life.

The senate had blamed the idleness of the plebeians, the tribunes had charge the consuls at one time with dishonesty, at another with negligence.

At last they induce the plebs, with the acquiescence of the senate, to appoint as Prefect of the corn-market Lucius Minucius Agurinus of the Minucia gens.

The oldest branch of the family, the Minucii Augurini, were originally patrician, but BCE, Lucius Minucius Augurinus goes over to the plebeians to be elected tribune of the plebs.

In this capacity he is more successful in guarding liberty than in the discharge of his office, though in the end he deservedly wins gratitude and reputation for having relieved the scarcity.

He dispatches numerous agents by sea and land to visit the surrounding nations, but as their mission is fruitless, with the sole exception of Etruria, which furnishes a small supply, he makes no impression on the market.

He then devotes himself to the careful adjustment of the scarcity, and obliges all who possess any corn to declare the amount, and after retaining a month's supply for themselves, sell the rest to the Government.

By cutting the daily rations of the slaves to one half, by holding up the corn-merchants to public execration, by rigorous and inquisitorial methods, he reveals the prevailing distress more than he relieves it.

Many of the plebs, despairing of hope of release from starvation and misery, drown themselves in the Tiber.

Helike, located in Achaea, northern Peloponnesos, two kilometers (twelve stadia) from the Corinthian Gulf and near the city of Boura, like it a member of the Achaean League, had been founded in the Bronze Age, becoming the principal city of Achaea.

The poet Homer states that the city of Eliki participated in the Trojan War with one ship.

Later, following its fall to the Achaeans, Eliki led the Achaean League, an association that joined twelve neighboring cities in an area including today's town of Aigion.

Also known as Dodekapolis (from the Greek words dodeka, meaning twelve, and polis, meaning city), Eliki became a cultural and religious center with its own coinage.

Finds from ancient Eliki are limited to two fifth century copper coins, now housed in the Staatliches Museum, Berlin.

The obverse shows the head of Poseidon, the city's patron, and the reverse his trident.

There was a temple dedicated to the Helikonian Poseidon.

Helike had founded colonies including Priene in Asia Minor and Sybaris in South Italy.

Its panhellenic temple and sanctuary of Helikonian Poseidon are known throughout the Classical world, and second only in religious importance to Delphi.

The city is destroyed in 373 BCE, two years before the Battle of Leuctra, during a winter night.

Several events are construed in retrospect as having warned of the disaster: some "immense columns of flame" appeared, and five days previously, all animals and vermin had fled the city, going toward Keryneia.

The city and a space of twelve stadia below it sink into the earth and are covered over by the sea.

All the inhabitants perish without a trace, except for a few building fragments projecting from the sea.

Ten Spartan ships anchored in the harbor are dragged down with it.

An attempt involving two thousand men to recover bodies is unsuccessful.

Aegium takes possession of its territory.

The city was thought to be legend until 2001, when it was rediscovered in the Helike delta.

Modern research attributes the catastrophe to an earthquake and accompanying tsunami, which destroyed and submerged the city.

The city of Pyrrha on the seismically active island of Lesbos, sited in a small valley off the Gulf of Kallonís, suffers from an earthquake in about 231.

The famous Colossus of Rhodes, erected some six decades earlier, topples in about 226/225 BCE during a severe earthquake that destroys much of the island.

Because of a pronouncement by the Delphic oracle, it will not be re-erected, but it will be later immortalized as one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

North Island’s Lake Taupo lies in a caldera created following a huge volcanic eruption approximately twenty-six thousand five hundred years ago.

According to geological records, the volcano has erupted twenty eight times in the last twenty-seven thousand years.

The largest eruption, known as the Oruanui eruption, which occurred around 26,500 Years Before Present in Late Pleistocene, ejected an estimated eleven hundred and seventy cubic kilometers of material and caused several hundred square kilometers of surrounding land to collapse and form the caldera.

The caldera later filled with water, eventually overflowing to cause a huge outwash flood.

Several later eruptions occurred over the millennia before the major eruption in 180 CE, the most recent.

Known as the Hatepe eruption, it is believed to have ejected one hundred cubic kilometers of material, of which thirty cubic kilometers was ejected in the space of a few minutes.

This is one of the most violent eruptions in the last five thousand years (alongside the Tianchi eruption of Baekdu at around 1000 and the 1815 eruption of Tambora), with a Volcanic Explosivity Index rating of 7.

The eruption column is twice as high as the eruption column from Mount St. Helens in 1980, and the ash turns the sky red over Rome and China.

The Fourth Macedonian War, the final war between Rome and Macedon, comes about as a result of the pretender Andriscus's usurpation of the Macedonian throne, pretending to be the son of Perseus, the last King of Macedon, deposed by the Romans after the Third Macedonian War in 168 BCE.

Andriscus, after some early successes, is eventually defeated by the Roman general Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus at the Battle of Pydna in 148 BCE.

Macedonia becomes a Roman province two years later.

The Third Punic War is the third and last of the Punic Wars fought between the former Phoenician colony of Carthage and the Roman Republic.

The Punic Wars are named because of the Roman name for Carthaginians: Punici, or Poenici.

The war is a much smaller engagement than the two previous Punic Wars and focuses on Tunisia, mainly on the Siege of Carthage, which results in the complete destruction of the city, the annexation of all remaining Carthaginian territory by Rome, and the death or enslavement of the entire Carthaginian population.

The Third Punic War ends Carthage's independent existence.