The Time Julius Caesar Was Captured by Pirates

In 75 BCE a band of Cilician pirates in the Aegean Sea captured a 25-year-old Roman nobleman named Julius Caesar, who had been on his way to study oratory in Rhodes. As the story is related in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, the capture was a minor inconvenience for Caesar but very bad luck for the pirates.

From the start, Caesar simply refused to behave like a captive. When the pirates told him that they had set his ransom at the sum of 20 talents, he laughed at them for not knowing who it was they had captured and suggested that 50 talents would be a more appropriate amount. He then sent his entourage out to gather the money and settled in for a period of captivity. The pirates must have been dumbfounded. It’s not every day that a hostage negotiates his ransom up.

Caesar made himself at home among the pirates, bossing them around and shushing them when he wanted to sleep. He made them listen to the speeches and poems that he was composing in his unanticipated downtime and berated them as illiterates if they weren’t sufficiently impressed. He would participate in the pirates’ games and exercises, but he always addressed them as if he were the commander and they were his subordinates. From time to time he would threaten to have them all crucified. They took it as a joke from their overconfident, slightly nutty captive.

It wasn’t a joke. After 38 days, the ransom was delivered and Caesar went free. Astonishingly, Caesar managed to raise a naval force in Miletus—despite holding no public or military office—and he set out in pursuit of the pirates. He found them still camped at the island where he had been held, and he brought them back as his captives. When the governor of Asia seemed to vacillate about punishing them, Caesar went to the prison where they were being held and had them all crucified

'536' The worst year to be alive

In A.D. 536, Europe had a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad year

It started when a mysterious fog swept over the continent, veiling the sun in a blue haze and casting Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia into darkness 24 hours a day, for 18 months. Falling temperatures ushered in the coldest decade of the past 2,000 years, crops failed from Ireland to China, and famine ran rampant. Those who endured the long, cold night faced even harsher times in the years to come; in A.D. 541, an outbreak of bubonic plague known as Justinian's Plague scythed through the Mediterranean, killing up to 100 million people.

Evidences

The Byzantine historian Procopius recorded of 536, in his report on the wars with the Vandals, "during this year a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness ... and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear".

The Gaelic Irish Annals record the following:

"A failure of bread in the year 536 AD" – the Annals of Ulster
"A failure of bread from the years 536–539 AD" – the Annals of Inisfallen
Further phenomena were reported by a number of independent contemporary sources:

Low temperatures, even snow during the summer (snow reportedly fell in August in China during the Northern and Southern dynasties, which caused the harvest there to be delayed
Crop failures
"A dense, dry fog" in the Middle East, China and Europe

Drought in Peru, which affected the Moche culture

It has been conjectured that the changes were due to ashes or dust thrown into the air after the eruption of a volcano (a phenomenon known as "volcanic winter"). or after the impact of a comet[14] or meteorite.The evidence of sulfate deposits in ice cores strongly supports the volcano hypothesis; the sulfate spike is even more intense than that which accompanied the lesser episode of climatic aberration in 1816, popularly known as the "Year Without a Summer", which has been connected to the explosion of the volcano Mount Tambora in Sumbawa.

Source:weiki