Scientist and clergyman Temple Chevallier believed that the fast pace
of recent discoveries in astronomy risked substituting a new superstition for an old one.
Forty thousand men, women and children, the last survivors of Japans’s
persecuted Christian population, took refuge without earthly hope in a seaside castle.
Augustus, the Roman Emperor, invited himself to dine at the luxury
Naples villa of Publius Vedius Pollio, but a broken goblet thoroughly spoilt the evening.