Battle of Zama

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Scipio Africanus drilled his legions to open silent lanes in their formation; Hannibal's war elephants charged straight through and stampeded the Carthaginian flanks. The man who nearly destroyed Rome watched his own beasts end him.

When his teenage lover Antinous drowned in the Nile in 130 AD, Hadrian declared him a god, built a city in his name, and flooded the empire with his portrait. The grief never stopped.

After 13 years orbiting Saturn, the $3.9 billion Cassini was steered into the planet's atmosphere on purpose — a controlled suicide to avoid contaminating moons that might harbor life.

Dug from a Suffolk garden in 1939, the Sutton Hoo helmet's iron face-mask — with its dragon-eyebrow crest — belonged to a king whose name no one can agree on.

Taken from Albania as a child hostage, raised as an Ottoman janissary, Skanderbeg defected at 38 with three hundred men and held off the full Ottoman army 25 times over 25 years.

Harlequins winger Tom Williams bit a fake blood capsule to fake an injury; team physio Steph Brennan then sliced his lip with a scalpel to cover it up. A doctor lost her medical license over a substitution rule.

Prisoners were tied to outdoor stakes, grenades were detonated beside them, and researchers measured gangrene spreading across the wounds — hourly, on a clipboard, in Manchurian winter air.

Vincent 'The Chin' Gigante shuffled through Greenwich Village in a bathrobe and slippers for thirty years, muttering to himself — a performance so convincing it kept him out of federal court until 1997.

NBA referee Tim Donaghy bet on games he personally officiated from 2005 to 2007, adjusting foul calls to swing point spreads. He pled guilty to two federal felony counts and served 15 months.