Stupid Deaths: Aeschylus

Fresh from a reminder that the inventor of Greek drama met an end that was part tragedy and part comedy, Aeschylus steps up to Death's check-in desk at the front of a queue of the newly departed. Death runs through the usual questions about his name, date and job, then asks how he died. Aeschylus describes strolling along when an eagle overhead, carrying a tortoise it wanted to smash open, spotted his gleaming bald scalp and took it for a convenient rock. Death dissolves into helpless laughter, keeps firing off death and tortoise puns while Aeschylus insists the shelled creature walked away unharmed, and finally waves the playwright through to the afterlife before calling the next soul forward.

Death logs Aeschylus's death as 458 BC, the year the playwright returned to Sicily for the last time; he actually died at Gela in 456 or 455 BC. The story of the eagle mistaking his bald head for a rock and dropping a tortoise on it comes from the Roman writer Valerius Maximus.