![]() It is Antonius Diogenes’ The Incredible Things Beyond Thule, a complex faux-memoir by an unnamed narrator. The earliest surviving Greco-Roman text about travel to the moon was written in the second century BC. It is perhaps for this reason-its plausible placeness-that the moon has been the subject of stories about space travel for much longer. Asaph Hall’s observation of the Martian moons and Giovanni Schiaparelli’s observations of Mars’ canals sparked a great interest in Mars not just as an object, but as a place. ![]() Such observations became possible in the late nineteenth century. Why did Mars become the most interesting planet to travel to? One possible reason is that with a good telescope, Mars can be seen quite clearly. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) has ensured that Mars has remained the primary focus of pop-cultural imagination about space travel. Although these works involve all the planets, by the late nineteenth century, Mars and Martians had begun to occupy a disproportionately prominent place in fiction the huge popularity of H.G. Two of the best-known early works which involve space travel are Athanasius Kircher’s Itinerarium Exstaticum (1656) and Emmanuel Swedenborg’s The Earths in Our Solar System (1758). It is not intuitive, in a world before space travel, that we would think of space, or even of the planets, as places in their own right. Two themes emerge clearly from interviews with Shatner about the experience: first, that travel away from the earth provides a new perspective on it second, more subtly, that space is no longer a rarely-crossed frontier for scientific investigation, but a place, to which leisure travel is not only possible but becoming commercially realistic (if only for the super-rich). By controlling Alexander’s body, Ptolemy aimed to be viewed as the successor to his empire.William Shatner has recently attracted widespread criticism for undertaking a 10-minute space flight with Jeff Bezos’ space travel company, Blue Origin. A year or two after Alexander’s demise, his body was sent back to Macedonia only to be intercepted and sent to Egypt by Ptolemy I, one of his former generals. Wallis Budge speculated that Alexander’s remains were immersed in honey to stave off decay. Plutarch reports that Alexander’s body was initially treated in Babylon by Egyptian embalmers, but leading Victorian Egyptologist A. Alexander’s body was preserved in a vat of honey. In modern times, medical experts have speculated that malaria, lung infection, liver failure or typhoid fever may have done Alexander in. Some ancient biographers even speculated that Aristotle, who had connections with Antipater’s family, may have been involved. Given that Alexander’s father had been murdered by his own bodyguard, suspicion fell on those surrounding Alexander, most notably his general Antipater and Antipater’s son Cassander (who would eventually order the murders of Alexander’s widow and son). ![]() Two weeks later, the 32-year-old ruler was dead. Alexander the Great fell ill after downing a bowl of wine at a party. A few months after Alexander’s death, Roxanne gave birth to the couple’s only son, Alexander IV. Soon after, in a traditional wedding ceremony, the king sliced a loaf of bread in two with his sword and shared it with his new bride. ![]() of Sogdian Rock, a seemingly impregnable mountain fortress, the 28-year-old Alexander was surveying his captives when Roxanne, the teenage daughter of a Bactrian nobleman, caught his eye. When Alexander met his future wife, Roxanne, it was love at first sight.Īfter his spectacular capture in 327 B.C. Near the site of the battle of the river Hydaspes-the costliest victory of his Indian campaign-Alexander founded the city of Bucephala, named for his favorite horse, which was mortally wounded in the battle. Other Alexandrias trace the path of his armies’ advances through present-day Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan. The most famous of these, founded at the mouth of the Nile in 331 B.C., is today Egypt’s second-largest city. Alexander commemorated his conquests by founding dozens of cities (usually built up around previous military forts), which he invariably named Alexandria.
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