THAT TIME A ROMAN LEGION GOT REALLY, REALLY LOST
How a bad map, a worse hangover, and a complete misunderstanding of basic astronomy led to the weirdest crossover episode in ancient history.
Sometimes, history is made by brilliant generals and visionary leaders. And sometimes, history is made by a man named Gaius “Two-Goats” Crassus, a Roman Centurion whose sense of direction was so legendarily awful, his own men claimed he could get lost in a broom closet with a map of the broom closet.
Our story begins in 32 BCE, with Marc Antony sweating his toga off in Alexandria, having just been gifted what he *thought* was a super-secret Babylonian star-chart by some smoothie from Cleopatra’s court. It wasn’t. It was, in fact, a crude family-heirloom doodle of the Babylonian god Marduk wrestling a cosmic serpent, which some intern had filed under “celestial navigation” because it had some sparkly bits. Antony, who couldn’t tell a star from a swan-shaped cloud on a good day, handed this masterpiece of terrible art to Two-Goats Crassus, commander of the Legio IX “Hispania,” and slurred something about “guarding the eastern flank from…shiny things.”
Crassus, a man whose liver had its own postal code, took this order with the solemnity only a truly dedicated drunk can muster. He marched his 4,800 legionaries straight out of Alexandria and, using the Marduk-doodle as his guide, proceeded to get so comprehensively lost that it beggared belief. They missed Syria entirely. They overshot Mesopotamia by a margin that would make a cartographer weep. For three years, they wandered, a mobile disaster powered by stubbornness and cheap wine, occasionally trading polished helmets for sheep and directions from baffled nomads who’d never seen so many angry men in red skirts.
Somehow—and historians, by which I mean ME after three jars of wine, are still fuzzy on the specifics—they ended up building a fleet of shitty, barely-seaworthy boats and sailing from… somewhere… east. They were aiming for India. They missed. By about 8,000 miles. When they finally spotted land, it wasn’t some bustling port full of spices and silk. It was the Yucatán Peninsula. They’d found the Mayans. Or, rather, the Mayans, specifically the bewildered citizens of Tikal, found *them*: a bunch of pale, scurvy-ridden, sunburnt Romans stumbling out of the surf, demanding to know where the goddamn highway to Antioch was.
The Mayans, for their part, were masters of astronomy and mathematics who had calendars that made the Roman Julian system look like a child’s crayon scribble on a napkin. When Crassus, holding up his Babylonian wrestling-match-cum-star-map, tried to explain where he was from, the local priests just nodded politely, took one look at his "chart," and immediately concluded these newcomers were divinely-sent idiots of a caliber previously unknown to mortal man. They presented the Romans with their own, vastly more complex calendar, perhaps hoping it would help them get un-lost. Crassus, believing it was a gift of surrender, had it lugged back to his camp, where his men immediately started using its intricate circular design as a truly phenomenal drinking game board.
