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Rome's seven kings supposedly ruled for 244 years — an average reign of 35 years each — and every single one died violently or vanished. Romulus, the first, was torn apart by senators during a thunderstorm.

Born to a mule-driver's family, Vespasian taxed public urinal collections and, when his son Titus complained, held a coin to his nose and asked if it smelled. On his deathbed he quipped, 'I think I'm becoming a god.'

SOE agents slipped into Spanish-controlled Fernando Poo, chloroformed harbour watchmen, threw grappling irons onto three Axis ships, and towed them into international waters — a neutral nation's port robbed without a shot fired.

Kendrick Lamar accused Drake of grooming minors, named him a predator over a beat, then watched it hit number one — a Billboard chart-topper built on a criminal allegation.

Horst Mahler co-founded the Red Army Faction as a leftist anti-fascist lawyer, then transformed into a Holocaust-denying neo-Nazi who greeted his 2009 prison sentence with a raised-arm Hitler salute in the courtroom.

id Software built Doom in a rented suite above a pizza shop in Mesquite, Texas, in 1993 — John Carmack's renderer was so fast it broke every benchmark tool the team tried to measure it with.

Tino De Angelis filled vast New Jersey tanks mostly with seawater, floated a thin film of soybean oil on top for inspectors, and borrowed $175 million against it. The 1963 collapse took down two Wall Street firms in a single afternoon.

Foucault's 'History of Sexuality' — three volumes published before AIDS killed him — argued the Victorian era didn't repress sex; it invented an entirely new way to talk, confess, and be made by it.

Alfred Nobel read his own obituary—'merchant of death'—while still alive, then spent his fortune engineering the Peace Prize to rewrite his legacy. The man who perfected mass killing also endowed its antidote.