Tradition holds that the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus burned on the very day Alexander the Great was born.

356 BC

Plutarch quipped that the goddess failed to save it because she was busy delivering Alexander.

◍ Show on the globe

The event

• Herostratus burns the Temple of Artemis356 BC · Ephesus. Herostratus of Ephesus set fire to the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders, and confessed under torture that he wanted eternal fame. The city banned his name on pain of death, but historians recorded it anyway, and 'Herostratic fame' became a byword.

4th century BC

More amazing facts

• 356 BC · 221 BC In 356 BC Alexander the Great was born, and the state of Qin began Shang Yang's reforms.
• 351 BC The word 'mausoleum' is a man's name.
• 350 BC · 1963 A schoolboy in Tanganyika noticed what Aristotle had written about: hot water sometimes freezes faster than cold.
• 340 BC Diogenes did not live in a barrel but in a pithos, a huge clay storage jar, in Athens.
• 338 BC One of history's shortest replies came from Sparta.
• 326 BC Alexander’s men marvelled at an Indian reed that “yields honey without bees”. That was how his admiral Nearchus described sugarcane in 326 BC, a plant Europe barely knew.

All amazing facts (1058) →