Most Bizarre Deaths from Classical History

Classical history is kind of notorious for its menagerie of stories about bizarre and humiliating deaths. Today we will hear stories about a philosopher who covered himself in cow manure and was devoured by wild dogs, a military leader who committed suicide by drinking bull’s blood, a playwright who was killed by a falling tortoiseshell, a poet who jumped into a volcano to make people think he was a god, a tragedian who was killed like a character in one of his tragedies, a tyrant who was assassinated with a poisoned toothpick, a Stoic philosopher who literally laughed himself to death, and even a Christian religious leader who pooped out his own internal organs. All of these stories are almost certainly apocryphal, but they are still interesting to retell!

Herakleitos of Ephesos

Herakleitos of Ephesos (lived c. 535 – c. 475 BC), also known as “Herakleitos the Obscure” and “the Weeping Philosopher,” was a Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from the city of Ephesos in Asia Minor. Many fragments of Herakleitos’s writings have survived. He is perhaps best-known for his oracular sayings, such as πάντα ῥεῖ (“All things flow”), ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω (“The way up is also the way down”), and δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης (“You can never step in the same river twice”).

No one knows how Herakleitos really died, because almost everything we know about him comes from his own writings and, obviously, he was not there to record his own death. Later, however, a bizarre story arose to explain how he died. According to an account given by the third-century AD Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtios in Book IX of his book The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, taken from the earlier writer Neanthes of Kyzikos, Herakleitos suffered from dropsy and, in an effort to cure himself of it, he covered himself in cow manure.

Supposedly Herakleitos had been instructed to do this by a physician, who told him that the warmth of the manure would draw out the noxious humors that were causing his affliction. According to the story, Herakleitos found relief, but not of the variety he was expecting; he was supposedly torn to pieces by wild dogs, who mistook him for a wild animal.

ABOVE: Heraclitus, painted in around 1630 by the Dutch Baroque painter Johannes Moreelse, showing the author’s imagining of what Herakleitos might have looked like, based on traditional iconography

Themistokles of Athens

The Athenian general Themistokles (lived c. 524 – c. 459 BC) was probably the most singularly important Greek leader during the Second Persian Invasion of Greece in 480 BC. He was the one who set the trap for the Persians at Salamis, allowing the Athenian navy to utterly crush the Persians and turn the tide of the war. Themistokles, however, received little thanks for his contributions. In 473 or 472 BC, the Athenians ostracized him (i.e. banished him from the city for ten years), believing he had begun to acquire too much power.

Themistokles, ironically, ended up being forced to flee to Asia Minor to seek refuge with the Persians. (Oh yes, you heard that correctly; the man who almost single-handed engineered the Persians’ ultimate defeat in the Greco-Persian Wars was forced to go to the Persians for refuge because his own native Greeks would not have him.)

Themistokles convinced the Persian Shah-in-Shah (“King of Kings”) Artaxerxes I (ruled 465–424 BC) to appoint him as satrap of the Persian satrapy of Magnesia, telling him that he had really been on the Persians’ side all along and had really been sincere with his letter prior to the Battle of Salamis telling the Persians that the Greeks were in disarray.

In reality, Themistokles died of natural causes sometime around 459 BC or thereabouts as the governor of Magnesia, but the later Greeks told a very bizarre story about how they thought this old turncoat had died. The story goes that, supposedly, alone, exiled, and depressed, Themistokles had chosen to commit suicide by drinking bull’s blood. The weird thing is, though, that bull’s blood is not actually poisonous and you can actually drink it without it killing you; it just is not very appetizing. Obviously, then Themistokles could not have really died this way.

Yet, somehow, the story is retold throughout a number of classical Greek sources, including Thoukydides’s Histories of the Peloponnesian War, Diodoros Sikeliotes’s Universal History, and Ploutarchos of Chaironeia’s Life of Themistokles. In his comedy The Knights, which was first performed in around 324 BC, the Athenian comedic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BC) uses Themistokles’s example of committing suicide by drinking bull’s blood as the most masculine and heroic way a man could possibly die.

The British classicist Percy Gardner (lived 1846 – 1937) argued in a paper published in 1898 titled “A Themistoclean Myth” that the story of Themistokles’s bizarre suicide may have originated from an ignorant attempt to interpret a statue in Athens which portrayed him standing in a heroic pose, holding a cup up as an offering to the gods. Gardner argued that people may have mistaken the statue for a portrayal of Themistokles’s suicide and that this may have been the source for the legend that he had killed himself by drinking bull’s blood.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble copy of a Greek portrait bust of Themistokles originally carved around 470 BC. The bust is believed to be a realistic portrait, which makes it highly unusual for busts of this period.

Aischylos of Athens

The Athenian tragic playwright Aischylos (lived c. 525 – c. 455 BC) is one of only three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any works have survived complete under his own name. Aischylos probably originally wrote somewhere between seventy and ninety plays, but only six plays that were definitely written by him have survived to the present day complete: The Persians, The Seven against Thebes, The Suppliants, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides. (A seventh complete surviving play, Prometheus Bound, is traditionally attributed to Aischylos, but is of disputed authorship.)

The story of how Aischylos supposedly died is first told by the early first-century AD Roman writer Valerius Maximus in his Memorable Deeds and Sayings book 9, chapter 12. According to Valerius Maximus, Aischylos was killed while he was in Sicily. He had gone outside the city where he was staying and was sitting in an open, sunny area in the middle of a field.

Then, an eagle flying overhead carrying a tortoise shell spotted him and mistook his bald head for a rock. The eagle dropped the tortoise shell on Aischylos’s head, hoping to crack the shell open so it could eat the tortoise inside. Instead, the shell smashed Aischylos’s head open and killed him.

The later Roman writer Pliny the Elder (lived c. 23 – 79 AD) refines this story when he retells it in his Natural History 10.7. Pliny adds that Aischylos had been in the field because he had been warned by an oracle that he would be killed by a falling object and so he was deliberately trying to stay in open spaces where he presumed nothing would be able to fall on him.

According to the classical scholar J. C. McKeown, the story of Aischylos’s bizarre death may have been inspired by a surviving passage from his lost tragedy The Necromancers, in which the seer Teiresias predicts the death of Odysseus, declaring:

“A heron flying overhead will strike you with dung emptied from its belly. Your aged scalp from which the hair has fallen out will be made to fester by a spine from its food gathered in the sea.”

It’s not hard to see how a story from one of Aischylos’s tragedies about Odysseus getting killed by a poisonous spine in a piece of dung dropped on his head by heron could transform into a story about Aischylos himself getting killed by a tortoise shell dropped on his head by an eagle.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust of Aischylos dating to around 30 BC, a copy of an earlier Greek bronze original dating to between 340 and 320 BC

Empedokles of Akragas

Empedokles of Akragas (lived c. 494 – c. 434 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek Pluralist philosopher and poet from the city of Akragas in Sicily. He was a very mystical thinker and was heavily influenced by the philosophy of the Pythagoreans (whom I talk about in this previous post from March 2018).

Empedokles is perhaps most famous for having developed the idea that all things are composed of four basic elements: fire, water, earth, and air. Today, these are known as the “four classical elements” and, although we now know that Empedokles’s idea is not literally true, it has had far-reaching influence on our culture. More of Empedokles’s writings have survived than those of any other pre-Socratic Greek philosopher.

No one knows how Empedokles really died, for the same reason no one knows how Herakleitos really died. Quite simply, almost everything we know about him comes from his own writings, but, obviously, he was not around to write about his own death. In later times, however, a fabulous legend grew from a passage in one of his surviving poems, in which Empedokles declares, “I am a divine god to you, no longer mortal.”

What Empedokles actually meant by this statement is debatable. It is entirely arguable, based on the wording and context of the statement, that he was merely mocking the doting manner in which people revered him by satirically commenting that they thought him to be a god. Nonetheless, later writers interpreted this passage to mean that Empedokles had really publicly declared himself an immortal god.

A legend first alluded to by the Roman poet Horace (lived 65 – 8 BC) in his poem Ars Poetica, written in around 19 BC, and retold in full by Diogenes Laërtios in Book VIII of his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers holds that, when Empedokles was starting to grow old, he began to fear the prospect that he would die a normal death just like any other human being and that, then, people would realize he was not an immortal god.

Empedokles therefore supposedly came up with an absolutely brilliant, totally failproof plan: he decided he would leap into Mount Etna, an active volcano. Then no one would ever be able to find his body and they would all think that he had been taken up into heaven to be with the other gods! So, one night, he followed through with it and leapt into Mount Etna.

Empedokles, however, was in the peculiar habit of wearing bronze-soled sandals. Supposedly, shortly after the people discovered that he had gone missing, they searched for him and discovered one of his signature bronze-soled sandals on the side of Mount Etna. From the sandal, they were able to figure out what Empedokles had really done. They therefore proved to the whole world that he was indeed mortal, thus making his whole suicide entirely pointless.

ABOVE: The Death of Empedocles, painted between 1665 and 1670 by the Italian Baroque painter Salvator Rosa, showing Empedokles jumping into Mount Etna

Euripides of Athens

Aischylos was not the only great tragedian who was said to have suffered a terrible death. The later tragedian Euripides (lived c. 480 – c. 406 BC), who is best known today for his plays Medeia, Alkestis, Hippolytos, The Trojan Women, and The Bacchae, was also said to have died horribly.

Euripides is said to have left Athens near the end of his life and retired to the court of King Philippos II of Makedonia in the Makedonian royal capital of Pella. According to the Roman author Aulus Gellius (lived c. 125 – c. 180 AD) in Book 15, chapter 20 of his Attic Nights, Euripides was walking home late at night after having had dinner with King Philippos II, when he was attacked and torn to pieces by a pack of hunting dogs set upon him by a jealous rival.

Aulus Gellius doesn’t give any details of what supposedly happened, but the Souda, a Byzantine encyclopedia compiled in the tenth century AD, elaborates on the story considerably. According to the Souda, the rivals who arranged for the dogs to be released were Arrhibaios of Macedonia and Krateuas of Thessalia, and the one who actually released the dogs was a slave of King Philippos II named Lysimachos who had been bribed with ten minae.

The story of Euripides’s tragic death seems to have been inspired by his own tragedies. The character Pentheus in Euripides’s surviving play The Bacchae is famously torn apart by Mainads near the end of the play. The mythological figure of Orpheus (who was also said to have been torn apart by Mainads) and Aktaion (who was said to have been torn apart by the hounds of Artemis) are also known to have made prominent appearances in Euripides’s works.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust of Euripides, based on a Greek bronze original dating to around 330 BC or thereabouts

Agathokles of Syracuse

Agathokles of Syracuse (lived 361 – 289 BC) was your archetypal tyrant. Many words could be used to describe him: cunning, deceitful, conniving, brutal, merciless, and even downright bloodthirsty. This was a man who could get away with anything and who would stop at no lengths to attain greater power. He was so archetypal that none other than Niccolò Machiavelli himself cited him in his political treatise The Prince as the model of the criminal tyrant, calling him “treacherous, pitiless, irreligious.”

This is perhaps why it is so strange that it allegedly took so little to bring Agathokles and his reign as tyrant crumbling down. Agathokles, you see, is recorded to have been killed by a poisoned toothpick at the instigation of his own grandson Archagathos. Imagine that: a brutal tyrant brought down by something as small as a wooden toothpick.

Unfortunately, we do not know if this story is accurate and there are other reports that Agathokles simply died of natural causes.

ABOVE: Portrait of Agathokles of Syracuse from the obverse of one of his own coins

Chrysippos of Soloi

Chrysippos of Soloi (lived c. 279 – c. 206 BC) was a major philosopher who belonged to the Hellenistic Greek philosophical school of Stoicism, which I discuss in depth in this article from January 2020. Members of this school believed that emotions cloud our judgment and lead us to make rash or impulsive decisions that we later regret. The Stoics therefore taught that people should seek to make all decisions from within a state of apatheia (ἀπάθεια; apátheia; literally “without passion”), or objective, emotionless rationality. This is why our word stoic in English is used to refer to someone who does not show emotion.

As far as we can tell, the historical Chrysippos seems to have lived his life well according to Stoic teachings, but a story told centuries after his death about how he died portrays his death in a both bizarre and humiliating light. According to Diogenes Laërtios in Book VII of his book The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, when Chrysippos was an old man, he saw a donkey eating figs and thought it was so hilarious that he just could not stop laughing.

Supposedly, for further amusement, Chrysippos ordered one of his slaves to give the donkey some fine wine to wash the figs down with. Chrysippos watched as the donkey tried to drink the wine that had been brought for it and he just kept laughing and laughing uncontrollably. Finally, he laughed so much that he literally died of laughter.

Interestingly, this story, which is almost certainly apocryphal, was not originally told about Chrysippos at all, but rather—in its earliest attested form—about the Athenian comic playwright Philemon (lived c. 362 – c. 262 BC). It certainly makes far more sense for a comic playwright to have died laughing than a Stoic philosopher, so we must wonder how the story came to be told about Chrysippos.

The most likely explanation is that the legendary death by laughter was probably first attributed to Chrysippos by someone hostile to Stoic philosophy. By attributing a death so humiliating and so utterly contrary to the doctrines of Stoicism to one of the school’s greatest thinkers, whoever did this probably meant to show that Stoics were hypocrites and that their philosophy of emotionless rationality could not be realistically followed.

Chrysippos is far from the only ancient historical figure whose reputation has been sullied by a recycled canard; as I discuss in this article from August 2020, the accusation of drinking expensive pearls dissolved in vinegar is first attested in Horace’s Satires 2.3.239–42, in which the person who dissolves and drinks the expensive pearls is the unnamed son of the famous orator Aesopus. The accusation was later, however, applied to both Queen Cleopatra VII Philopator of Egypt and the Roman emperor Caligula.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust of Chrysippos, based on a Greek original dating to the late third or early second century BC

Areios of Baukalis

The most ignominious death I can possibly think of that a famous or notorious person is said to have suffered is the legendary death supposedly suffered by the early Christian bishop Areios of Baukalis (lived c. 250 or c. 256–336 AD). Areios was the foremost proponent of the so-called “Arian heresy,” which held that Jesus was not of one substance with God the Father, but rather the first creation of the Father and therefore a lesser, created being. Areios was a massively controversial figure back in the day and his theological opponents hated him with intense passion.

No one knows how Areios really died, but Areios’s opponents invented an elaborate story about his allegedly humiliating death to suit their intense hatred of him. According to the Greek historian Sokrates Scholastikos (lived c. 380–after c. 439 AD), a devout Trinitarian Christian writer who is perhaps best known today for his famous account of the death of Hypatia of Alexandria, one day, as Areios was passing a statue of the Roman emperor Constantine I in the forum of Constantinople, he was suddenly stricken by a terrible and urgent need to defecate.

Areios desperately made his way to the public toilets at the side of the forum. He was in immense and terrible pain. When he arrived and he finally sat down, he was on the verge of fainting. He supposedly pooped so hard his whole rectum fell out, bringing on a massive outpouring of blood. Then his small intestine, spleen, and liver all came gushing out and he died a horrible, painful death sitting on the toilet.

Sokrates Scholastikos describes this event as miraculous and states that, even in his own time, over a hundred years after Areios’s death, people still pointed out the very toilet where Areios had allegedly died. Sokrates Scholastikos probably did not make this story up himself, but rather heard it from other Trinitarian Christians in Constantinople. It has all the flavor of a local legend that was probably originally transmitted orally.

ABOVE: Fictional engraving from 1493 depicting Areios as the artist imagined him. (No one knows what the historical Areios really looked like.)