In the wide mythical tradition of Ancient Greece, the underworld is described as having several bodies of water flowing through its depths. The most well-attested are as follows: the Styx, the Acheron, the Phlegethon, the Cocytus, and the Lethe. These five rivers seem to represent the prevailing anxieties held by the living upon consideration of what accompanies death...

The Myth of Er is the final story recounted in Plato's Republic. It wrestles with the grand ideas of the cosmos and the afterlife, as one might expect from a great thinker like Plato, but it presents a seminal frame of understanding of the universe in the form of the "Spindle of Necessity." The spindle, tended to by Homeric sirens and the three Moirai, the daughters...

From the Spartan scytale transposition cipher to Caesar's shift cipher, the ancient world was rife with codes, encryptions, and secret methods of communication. Often implemented in times of war when the right intelligence in the wrong hands could spell disaster, alternative methods of passing along information have been iterated on countless times. Polybius, a famed histor...