The real burning question is: is it worth to die a terrible death in order to
become famous? ... "
Herostratus
Liliputins. What, the heck, is this?
http://stihi.ru/2021/11/24/7101
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The burning question is an urgent or crucial issue under heated discussion. It is a question whose answer is of great interest to everyone. The term has equivalents in French (question bruelante) and German (brennende Frage). It can also refer to an important, and perhaps scandalous, question that requires an answer. The burning question is something we all want to know about.
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Herostratus (Ancient Greek) was a 4th-century BC Greek, accused of seeking notoriety as an arsonist by destroying the second Temple of Artemis in Ephesus (on the outskirts of present-day Seljuk), one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The act prompted his execution and the creation of a damnatio memoriae law forbidding anyone to mention his name, orally or in writing. The law was ultimately ineffective, as evidenced by surviving accounts of his crime. Thus, Herostratus has become an eponym for someone who commits a criminal act in order to become famous. Little is known about the life of Herostratus, though it is thought he may have been someone of low social standing, a non-Ephesian or a slave. According to tradition, the fire that destroyed the second temple was set on the day Alexander the Great was born, 21 July 356 BC. Herostratus was then captured and tortured on the rack, where he confessed to having committed the arson in an attempt to immortalize his name. To dissuade those of similar intentions, the Ephesian authorities not only executed Herostratus, but attempted to condemn him to a legacy of obscurity by forbidding mention of his name under penalty of death. However, the ancient historian Theopompus, who was not Ephesian but rather Chian, mentions the name of Herostratus in his Philippica, and it appears again later in the works of Strabo. It is said that in fact his name has outlived the names of his judges, and in his 1658 work Hydriotaphia Sir Thomas Browne states:
But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. [...] Herostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it [...] Who knows whether the best of men be known? or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembred in the known account of time?