Most world's Geniuses

5. Politics

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus

Runners-up: Alfred the Great, Suarez (theoretical), Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln.

He is, in this lister’s opinion, one of the very few decent leaders in history. He had his personal vices, among them that he was a womanizer who used his power to seduce any woman who took his fancy. There’s a Clinton joke in there somewhere.

But Augustus can be forgiven that sort of thing given that he was never a tyrant, never let his absolute power corrupt him absolutely, and worked tirelessly for some 42 years to make Rome the finest city in the world.

It may already have been the finest, but Augustus managed to make it even better. Consider that he seized power after Rome had been in continual war with itself for 200 years. The city was ripping itself apart by 27 BC, had just gone through the worst of its civil warring: the First Triumvirate, Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus; then the Second, Octavian (Augustus), Marc Antony, and Lepidus, and no one knew who was in charge. Not even the Senate had control. When Augustus proclaimed himself Emperor, all the bickering stopped. He very quickly made everyone love him.

His rule cemented the Pax Romana, a time from c. 130 BC to c. 180 AD, during which the Roman Republic/Empire was invincible, and no foreign power dared challenge it. Augustus showed up in the middle of it, when, right after that Second Triumvirate and civil war, the entire state was in danger of imminent collapse from within. Augustus pulled it all back up and held it together. He instituted Rome’s first official fire

fighting force of between 500 to 1,000 men in 14 districts throughout the city. He instituted the first official police force, and now, without having to fight the foreigners, he was able to establish a standing army for Rome, c. 170,000 well trained soldiers. He repaired, then greatly advanced the technology of the roads throughout Italy.

He abolished private tax farming, and turned it into a civil service, bringing food to the masses more cheaply, instituted the first official census, the flat-rate tax, with each province’s citizens paying an established annual tax.

None of this mentions all the magnificent buildings he had constructed.

He brought all state finances under control, since the civil wars had caused the values of most things to fluctuate violently. He donated 170 million sesterces (an enormous amount) to establish a trust fund for the active a retired soldiers throughout the empire. This made the soldiers love him more than anyone, and a coup impossible. But then, even the citizens loved him. The senators. Almost everyone loved him. He proved Machiavelli’s maxim that the best ruler is the one who rules by love, and slightly inferior to him is the one who rules by fear. The worst ruler is the one whose people hate him, and there have been plenty of the latter two.

He may have been the greatest benevolent dictator the world has ever seen.

4. Applied Mechanics (Inventing)

Runners-up: Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison.

No introduction is necessary. Suffice to say the man invented the precursor to the robot (and the actual, artificially intelligent robot hasn’t been invented yet). Da Vinci’s idea was for a small cart powered by a very strong spring. The whole thing was made of wood on the outside, with steel framework, and he used several of these, all the same size and shape, to roll around the inside of his house serving drinks and food to guests. The carts turned at the proper doorways by means of various wood disks that da Vinci placed inside. Each disk had different holes that struck the teeth of different cogs and gears on the inside, and thus turned the cart at different times, in different directions. The drinks and food were placed on the flat tops. Replicas have been made based on his extremely detailed drawings and notes, and they really do work.

He invented the first successful parachute, made of a balsa wood frame, and silk fabric, shaped like a hollow pyramid. He never had the nerve to try it out, though. No one did, until 2000, when a skydiver named Adrian Nicholas tested it, and it worked. Nicholas died 5 years later when his modern parachute didn’t open.

Da Vinci invented the sniper scope for rifle arms (muskets in his day), which was simply one of his smaller telescopes bolted onto the top of a musket. He invented pivoting scissors, all earlier designs being single flexing pieces of metal using spring action. The spring design had the drawback of bending out of shape if squeezed too hard, and no longer flexing properly. The pivoting scissors operate as two pieces of metal around a bolt. Da Vinci’s design has changed very little. He invented the first successful hang glider, based on the operations of birds’ wings, for which Bernoulli was not alive to come up with a principle until 200 years later.

He invented the tank, made of thick oak and powered by four to six men turning iron wheels via an iron crank shaft, while four other men inside loaded and fired cannon at the enemy foot soldiers. There is no record of the tank being used in battle, but had it been, it would have been impregnable against the arrows, axes, and swords of the day. It could have been set on fire, but it would have terrified anyone who saw it long before they worked up the nerve to approach it. It was the equivalent of the tripods in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.

He almost invented the helicopter. He just needed a sufficient engine to hold it in the air, and the combustion engine was a long time coming. He invented the steam cannon, which was almost as powerful, and much faster and cheaper to reload, than the gunpowder cannon. He modernized hydraulic pumps, and invented the stabilized artillery projectile. We know it as a rocket, which has stabilizing fins, as opposed to a cannon ball or simple conical shaped projectile. He invented thousands of other things.

3. Sculpting

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

Runners-up: Bernini, Donatello.

Da Vinci was a master of just about everything of the day, including sculpting, but when it came to sculpting, he deferred to the young upstart Michelangelo. The story goes that a 13-foot high block of marble was excised from the Carrara quarry, about 60 miles up into the Appennine Mountains from Florence, and transported there to be carved into some Old Testament figure. Agostino, the student of Donatello, was commissioned for the work, but after roughing out the legs, and knocking a hole between them, he gave up. Donatello died, and the block sat weathering away in the rain, outside a Florence cathedral. The Operai, who were the old men who commissioned artists to sculpt marble blocks into works worth posting around the city, pleaded with da Vinci to do something with the block, before it eroded to dust, since marble was very expensive to cut and move. Da Vinci refused, complaining that the stone was now full of cracks, and much shorter from erosion than when Agostino had intended to make it into a statue. Whatever figure chosen would thus be too short.

He then suggested that they give it to the young Michelangelo, who had shown himself, with his Pieta, to be good at sculpting. He was 26 years old, took the much-needed money, and 4 years later, he had made David.

His other most famous sculpture, the Pieta, is a depiction of the Virgin Mary holding the body of her dead Son, who has just been crucified. He produced many other sculptures, painted occasionally, and also designed the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica.

Further Reading: The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo

2. Rhetoric

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Runners-up: Quintilian, Thucydides, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Sir Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Every high school or college Latin student is familiar with the structure of a Ciceronian sentence. He almost always wrote in what we call a periodic sentence. The main verb is at or very near the end, no matter how long, and Cicero’s sentences are frequently VERY long. The subject is at or very near the beginning. Everything in the middle is a dependent clause modifying the subject or the main verb, or a modifier of a modifier. The sentence can go on ad infinitum. When translating, especially into English, it is often impossible to leave the main verb at the end, because the ear demands it more and more, until the subject is forgotten.

But anyone today who pursues a college degree in rhetoric, no matter his or her language, Cicero’s sentences are sure to be required reading. Political science majors, and especially lawyers, are trained to compose sentences like this. Not trained well enough anymore, granted, since there seems to be a bit of a drop off from Abraham Lincoln’s speeches to George W. Bush’s speeches. If you ever find yourself wishing the speaker sounded more intelligent, you should invoke the name of Cicero above all others.

He mastered the techniques of his day, which were passed down from Ancient Greek, most notably Thucydides’s Funeral Oration of Pericles. It is impossible to know whether Pericles himself actually composed the speech in the form in which Thucydides records it, or Thucydides actually composed some or most of it in his own style. It is very complicated Greek, but very rewarding to the rhetoric student, as Cicero showed amply in his famous Catilinarian Orations, a series of speeches made in the Roman Senate to denounce and vilify Lucius Catilina, a corrupt senator who tried to overthrow the Roman Republic. Cicero actually succeeded in ousting Catilina from power, ultimately resulting in Catilina’s death in a rebellion. Cicero did this solely by means of his prose mastery.

Here is an excerpt, from his First Catlinarian Oration:

“Just how long, O Catiline, do you intend to abuse our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of this unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now? Do not the night guards set on the Palatine Hill — do not the watches posted throughout the city—does not the alarm of the people, and the union of all good men — does not the precaution taken of assembling the senate in this most defensible place — do not the looks and countenances of this venerable body here present, have any effect on you? Do you not feel that your plans are detected? Do you not see that your conspiracy is already stopped and made powerless by the knowledge which every one here possesses of it? What is there that you did last night, what the night before — where is it that you were — who was there that you summoned to meet you — what design was there which was adopted by you, with which you think that any one of us is unacquainted?”

1. Geometry

Archimedes

Runners-up: Euclid, Rene Descartes.

Archimedes is typically in the top four of history’s mathematicians, but it was his practical applications of geometry that will make his name last forever. He invented the Armichedes Screw, which is still an efficient means of carrying water from a low place to a high place quickly. It’s simply an inclined plane inside a tube. One end of the tube is set in the water, and the tube is leaned against something. Turn the tube and the water rises on the inclined plane to the other end and out. He told his employer, the king of Syracuse, “Make me a screw long enough and I’ll empty the ocean.”

The king of Syracuse, which was a walled city on the shore of Sicily, employed him to make the city safe from siege, and he did this by drawing up plans for various machines, notably a huge ballista that could fire 1,000 arrows at once through small slits in the walls. It could devastate an entire regiment approaching the walls. He designed larger and larger catapults to hurl larger and larger stones farther. His most famous inventions, all based on geometry, are his Claw and “Heat Ray.” The claw was a device he envisioned to swing out from the top of a wall, into the side of a wooden ship attacking the harbor. The claw would puncture the ship, then men would hoist it up by means of a huge lever, and overturn the ship, or even upend it, and sink it in a matter of minutes. He told his king, “You give me a lever long enough and I’ll move the earth.”

The Heat Ray was simply a line of soldiers with highly polished shields angled to catch the sunlight and direct it to an enemy ship in the harbor. One shield’s reflection of the sunlight was insufficient to cause wood to burn, but 100 of them magnified the sun’s heat 100 times into a small spot, and did indeed, cause the ships to reach their flashpoints, bursting into flames where they floated.

He mastered the geometric mechanics of the simple machines. He roped up a system of about 50 pulleys of various sizes, some as small as a hand, some as large as an SUV tire, then tied one end of the rope to one of the king’s galleys, a huge ship, and wrapped the other end in his hands, and proceeded to pull the entire ship out of the harbor onto the ground by himself. The pulleys lessened the weight.

He discovered hydraulics when he got into his bath one night and the water overflowed the tub. He saw that the amount of water displaced equaled his weight and ran screaming naked through the streets, “Eureka! Eureka!” which means, “I have found it! I have found it!” This discovery enabled him to measure the volume and density of an irregular object, such as the king’s crown, by submerging it in water, and measuring the amount displaced.

The story of his death goes that he was so engrossed in his geometrical experiments and drawings that while the siege of Syracuse was going on, a Roman soldier shouted to him to freeze in the street. He was carrying an armload of his gadgets and looked like a looter. He ignored the soldier, and the soldier stabbed him to death. His last words are said to have been, “Don’t disturb my diagrams.” He had been drawing them in the dirt. Marcellus, the Roman general, gave strict orders that he was to be spared, because he respected himso much. He lamented during the siege, “I have 10,000 men. They have Archimedes.”