Power

Augustus's genius was making autocracy look like a restored Republic, and almost every source describing how he did it was written by him or long after him.

The two earliest accounts of the vision that supposedly turned Constantine to Christianity do not even agree on whether he was asleep or awake when he saw it.

A king beaten into obedience by his father grew into a philosopher-warrior whose wars built Prussia and whose afterlife was claimed by people he never met.

The famous poem bearing his name has almost nothing to do with him; it borrowed his identity for an unrelated Ojibwe legend, burying the real political story underneath it.

The Meditations show Marcus Aurelius arguing with himself about duty in the middle of a war he never asked for, but the notebook carries almost no dates and cannot serve as its own history.

The man who built a continent-wide system for suppressing revolution was toppled by one in a single day in 1848, which either proves the system was fragile all along or that thirty years is a long run for any settlement.

Every detailed account of Nero was written decades after his death by a senatorial class his reign had offended, and the three main sources cannot even agree with each other on what happened.

The chancellor built the first modern welfare state specifically to stop workers from turning socialist, which makes the safety net's origin story considerably less generous than the thing it produced.

The funeral oration that shaped centuries of democratic thought may not be his own words at all; even Thucydides admitted reconstructing it from memory.

Even the meaning of his own name is disputed, and scholars still cannot agree whether the Socrates in his dialogues speaks with his teacher's voice or Plato's own.

2004

1815

1688

Every developed country that signed the Kyoto Protocol met its targets, and global emissions rose by a third anyway.

1919

1922

Myanmar's military government let an American aircraft carrier group sit offshore for weeks with aid it refused to accept, while the storm it was refusing help for had already killed as many people as some entire wars.

The Roman Curia has been rewritten by nearly every kind of pope going, and the latest version, in force since 2022, quietly let a nun run one of its departments for the first time.

1976

A president kept 3,432 hours of his own conversations on tape, and it was that recording system, not the burglars, that eventually brought him down.

William rewarded some of the men responsible for lynching a Dutch statesman with money and high office, a detail his own defenders have never quite managed to explain away.