What connects a Roman general who fought Attila the Hun, an 11th-century bishop of Barcelona, a sixth-century medical writer, and a genus of spiders? Just one word: Aetius. This episode turns an unlikely source, a humble Wikipedia disambiguation page, into a sweeping x-ray of human civilization.

We trace the name Aetius across more than a thousand years, watching the very definition of greatness shift from philosophers and theologians to military commanders, then to Byzantine martyrs, and finally to modern scientists naming bugs. Along the way we confront survivorship bias, the fragility of historical records, and how language itself evolves and survives. It is a master class in historiography hidden inside a bulleted list.

• How a first or second century doxographer acted as a 'human hard drive,' preserving philosophy before the p ...