Historical Eras

~470 – 320 BCE

Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and their circles — plus the Syracuse cluster connected through Platonic visits.

Aesop · Aristotle · Archimedes · Plato · Socrates

~100 BCE – 14 CE

Caesar, Cleopatra, Cicero, Pompey, and the generation that destroyed the Republic and built the Empire.

Augustus · Julius Caesar · Cleopatra VII Philopator

~618 – 756 CE

Wu Zetian, Li Bai, Du Fu, and the golden court that collapsed under An Lushan's rebellion.

Wu Zetian · Li Bai

~1079 – 1204

Eleanor of Aquitaine, Héloïse, Abelard — the 12th-century world of courtly love and scholastic daring.

Eleanor of Aquitaine

~1154 – 1250

Frederick II's cosmopolitan court — popes, astrologers, Arab philosophers, and a Holy Roman Emperor who defied them all.

~1452 – 1527

Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and their patrons, pupils, and lovers in Florence, Milan, and Rome.

Michelangelo Buonarroti · Leonardo da Vinci

~1564 – 1616

Shakespeare and the orbit of patrons, muses, and companions who shaped the Elizabethan stage.

William Shakespeare

~1762 – 1821

Napoleon, Joséphine, Talleyrand — the world remade and unmade by one man's ambition.

Napoleon Bonaparte

~1750 – 1827

Mozart, Beethoven, and the patrons, wives, and rivals who shaped the golden age of European music.

Ludwig van Beethoven · Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

~1724 – 1803

Kant, Hamann, and Herder — the Königsberg circle that argued over reason, faith, and the nature of language.

~1672 – 1730

Peter the Great's forced modernization of Russia, and the family it destroyed in the process.

Peter the Great

~1805 – 1870

Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole, and the reformers who reshaped what medicine and public service could mean.

Florence Nightingale

~1859 – 1958

The Curies and their circle — radioactivity, two Nobel Prizes, and the scandals that ran alongside the science.

Marie Curie

~1722 – 1825

Hamilton, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Monroe — and the women, soldiers, and enslaved people who made the republic possible.

Thomas Jefferson · George Washington · Alexander Hamilton

~1777 – 1863

Jackson, Clay, Van Buren, Houston — the generation that inherited the founders' republic and nearly broke it.

~1856 – 1968

Booker T. Washington through MLK and Malcolm X — a century of Black American intellectual and political struggle.

Malcolm X · Martin Luther King Jr.