Moments of vengeance and can be found throughout the entirety of history. As Paul Gaugin once said, “life being what it is, one dreams of revenge“. Over the millennia, plenty of folk not only dreamt of revenge, but when to exact it and stick it to those who had upset them. Take the time a young Julius Caesar was captured by pirates and held hostage. As they waited for a ransom payment, Caesar often told his captors that once he was free, he would come back and crucify them. They thought he was kidding, but he was not. Below are thirty things about that and other satisfying you moments from history where people got their just desserts.
30. These Ancient Mediterranean Pirates Became a Bit too Cocky
Caribbean pirates might have been scary in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the so-called Golden Age of Piracy. However, they never came as close to being as bad as ancient Mediterranean pirates, neither in frightfulness, nor in the scale of their depredations. For the most part, the Mediterranean Sea’s barren and rocky coastline was not great for agriculture, and thus couldn’t support a large population. Many coastal inhabitants lived in small villages and turned to the sea to create a living, mostly by fishing. When the fishing was not good, many turned to robbery. Since they already had seafaring skills, they often robbed ships. Back then, ships usually hugged the coastline, and thus by necessity, passed by numerous villages and shores infested with full time or part time pirates.
Piracy got so bad that in the twelfth century BC, that marauders known as the “Sea People” ganged up on the era’s civilizations and wrecked them all, with the exception of Egypt. The result was what came to be known as the Bronze Age Collapse, and a dark age that lasted for half a millennium before the Mediterranean’s trade and economy began to recover. When it did, pirates once again popped up to prey upon not just on ships, but upon coastal communities as well. They terrorized, often held for ransom, and devastated these communities when they failed to cough up. In the middle of that anarchy, one unlucky band of first century BC pirates happened to capture a ship that carried a young Roman aristocrat named Julius Caesar. Little did they know how just how bad their captive was going to stick it to them.