Death at Kourion

One of the most devastating earthquakes ever to hit the Mediterranean struck a little after daybreak on July 21, 365 A.D. The fourth-century A.D. Latin historian Ammianus Marcellinus called it “a frightful disaster surpassing anything related either in legend or authentic history.” Ships in Lakonia, in the southern Peloponnesus, were driven several miles inland. (Ammianus claims to have seen this near the town of Motho.) In several places, Ammianus recalled, water receded sharply from the land, luring people out onto what had moments before been the ocean bottom—where they could examine, at their peril, the “many kinds of […]