Really Awful People

Every culture has its monsters. Some of these creatures have become household symbols for all that is dreadful. Others, just as evil, are hardly known at all. Exploring the mythology which surrounds some of these Really Awful People can reveal much about motivation, circumstance, and their true natures. For grabbing wealth and land, it is hard to top Attila the Hun, Vlad Tepes and Francisco Pizarro. For shear megalomania and murder, Nero, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong are in a class by themselves. History has its large scale sexual predators in Poland's Elizabeth Bathory and France's Gilles de Rais (Retz). The act of killing twenty thousand Roman troops by Arminius is viewed as an attrocity or a victorious battle, depending if you were a Roman or German.