Hannibal Lecter has unpleasant dreams of ancient Sicilians pelting him with clay roof tiles, much like how Mr. L. Prosser (the unlucky bureaucrat tasked with getting Arthur Dent out of the way of the bulldozer at the beginning of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) has intrusive visions of angry 13th-century Mongolian horsemen shouting at him.
Let’s examine the evidence!
From Roof Tiles and Urban Violence in the Ancient World by William D. Barry:
A roof-tile barrage was also tactically significant at Sicilian Selinus in 409 B.C., when the Carthaginian general Hannibal was thwarted in the narrow streets so long as the enemy threw tiles at his army. The tide of battle turned only when the Selinunites had stripped up all of the tiles of the surrounding roofs and thus exhausted their supply of ammunition.
From The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, ch. 1:
More specifically [Mr. L. Prosser] was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn’t know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernible Mongol[ian] characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr. L. Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats. […]
He began to fell little pricks of water behind the eyelids. Bureaucratic cock-ups, angry men lying in the mud, indecipherable strangers handing out inexplicable humiliations and an unidentified army of horsemen laughing at him in his head—what a day.
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