A neat thing about learning some history

After some recent events, I've begun to put some of my time towards learning more about history, and especially the relative positioning of events and developments on the timeline. This has led to some interesting revelations of which things that I vaguely knew about in an isolated manner actually happened at the same time, or in close succession.

Alexander the Great and young Rome

The campaigns of Alexander extended almost exclusively towards the east of Greece, with a southern detour for Egypt. All the while, Italy and the fledgling Roman Republic were spared his attention. One has to wonder how different history would have gone if Rome had been pulled into Alexanders Empire and its Greek cultural influences.

Side-note: Some decades after Alexanders death and the splintering of his Empire into the Hellenistic Successor Kingdoms, one of them did come into conflict with Rome when king Pyrrhos invaded Italy with his army. He faced Roman armies over and over again, and even though he won each individual battle, his losses kept mounting, such that eventually he had to retreat. This is where we got the phrase "Pyrrhic Victory" from, a nominal victory that comes with too high a cost, such that it results in your eventual doom or failure.
This war was also interesting for the fact that Carthage and Rome were on the same side. The first war between them would happen one or two decades later.

Archimedes & The Second Punic War

You probably know the name Archimedes. A Greek philosopher and mathematician who aided the defense of the city of Syracuse against the Romans by providing war machinery such as mirrors concentrating sunlight to burn the boats of the Romans.
What I didn't know was that this siege and death happened during the second Punic war, the same one in which the Carthaginian general Hannibal invaded the Roman heartland by crossing the Alps with elephants.
When including the tails, these events took place over the two decades leading up to 200BC, about 150 years before the time of Caesar.

Virgil, Cicero and Caesar

Virgil lived in the same time period as Caesar, maybe a few decades forward shifted. Before, I mostly knew of Virgil as "that highly respected old poet who was adopted into Dantes Inferno/The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri". I'm still not particularly familiar with him, but can now place him and Cicero in this specific period.