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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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I think not, so how many grunts would an ancient von Neumann have been worth to Caesar's army?

With any luck, he'd have been worth a few generals, irrespective of his ability to improve on contemporary siege weaponry, and perhaps he'd have replaced Caesar himself in textbooks – which is, in fact, my point; Ceasar was a genius himself, from what we can tell.

I am afraid you way overestimate how much of ancient history survived.

We know little else than names of many scientists and thinkers considered greatest geniuses in their time.

What would history said about ancient Von Neumann? Something like this:

...

NEUMANUS of Puteoli (fl. first half of 1st BCE), ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician.

N's works are completely lost, but he was mentioned by several second century sources as mathematician and geometer. One third century source claims N. was also writing about ethics and political philosophy.

About N. life is known nothing except he was of eastern Greek origin and moved to Italy later in his life.

There are no contemporary mentions of N. and his works and only few later notices.

1/Second century collection of anecdotes from lives of famous philosophers, contains two tidbits from N's life.

One extremely implausibly describes his mathematical prowess, while another is obviously meant as over-the-top parody of warmongering demagogue (it would be clear to all contemporaries that no Greek could be ever allowed to step in Roman Senate, least of all to implore the Senate to declare war against Parthian Empire in cartoonishly bloodthirsty speech).

2/Fourth century military writer in chapter about siege warfare includes apocryphal story how N. was one of Caesar's influential advisors and attributes to him invention of several war machines (current scholarly consensus is the story is later interpolation).

3/Fourth or fifth century pagan anti-Christian polemic quoted by fifth century Christian writer lists N. among famous learned and wise men who were pious worshippers of pagan gods (reading of name is disputed).

4/Seventh century Jewish chronicle lists N. among Jewish apostates and renegades who betrayed their faith (reading of name is disputed).

edit: typos, my fingers keep forgetting this site needs higher quality input than Reddit ;-)