John the Baptist (late 1st century BC – c. AD 30) was an itinerant preacher and a major religious figure in Christianity, Islam (known as Yahya ibn Zakariyya), the Bahá'í Faith, and Mandaeism. John is described as having the unique pract...

Heron of Alexandria was an ancient Greek mathematician who was a resident of a Roman province (Ptolemaic Egypt); he was also an engineer who was active in his hometown of Alexandria. He is considered the greatest experimenter of antiquity a...

Plutarch is the most famous biographer of the ancient world and the author of a famous collection now known as Plutarch's Lives. Plutarch's original title was Parallel Lives of Famous Greeks and Romans, and that describes his unique approac...

Claudius Ptolemy was a Greco-Egyptian writer of Alexandria, known as a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer, and poet of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology. He lived in the city of Alexandria in the Roman province of Egypt...

Pausanias was a Greek traveler and geographer of the 2nd century AD, who lived in the times of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. He is famous for his Description of Greece, a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from firsth...

According to the Christian father Origen, Celsus was a 2nd-century Greek philosopher and opponent of Early Christianity. He is known for his literary work, The True Word, which survives exclusively in Origen's quotations from it in Contra C...

Diogenes Laërtius was a biographer of the Greek philosophers. Nothing is definitively known about his life, but his surviving Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers is a principal source for the history of ancient Greek philosophy....

Plotinus was a major philosopher in the ancient world and is widely considered the father of Neoplatonism. Much of our biographical information about him comes from Porphyry's preface to his edition of Plotinus' Enneads. His metaphysical wr...

Irene of Athens, Byzantine empress (797-802). She served (780-90) as regent for her son, Constantine VI, and later was made (792) joint ruler. Devoted to the Orthodox Church, she bent most of her efforts to suppressing iconoclasm. In 797 Ir...

Anna Komnene, Latinized as Comnena, was a Greek princess, scholar, physician, hospital administrator, and the daughter of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos of Byzantium and Irene Doukaina. She wrote the Alexiad, an account of her father’s reign, w...

Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam was a prominent member of the Knights Hospitaller at Rhodes and later Malta. Having risen to the position of Prior of the Langue of Auvergne, he was elected Grand Master of the Order in 1521. He commanded th...

Hayreddin Barbarossa was an Ottoman admiral of the fleet who was born in the Ottoman island of Midilli (Lesbos) and died in Constantinople (Istanbul), the Ottoman capital. Barbarossa's naval victories secured Ottoman dominance over the Medi...

Jean Parisot de Valette was born into a noble family in Quercy. He was a Knight of St. John, joining the order in the Langue de Provence, and fought with distinction against the Turks at Rhodes. As Grand Master, Valette became the Order's...

El Greco was a painter, sculptor, and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. "El Greco" (The Greek) was a nickname, a reference to his Greek origin. El Greco was born in Crete, which was at that time part of the Republic of Venice, and the c...

Francesco Morosini was the Doge of Venice from 1688 to 1694, at the height of the Great Turkish War. He was a member of famous noble Venetian family (the Morosini family) which produced several Doges and generals. Morosini first rose to pro...