The world's most underrated historical figure

[stoned]

for real?; i think Poincare and Lorenz are asolutelly unerrated.they came up long before Einstein with principle of relativity,but that is just me.

 

[loseyourname]

for real?; i think Poincare and Lorenz are asolutelly unerrated.they came up long before Einstein with principle of relativity,but that is just me.

I was being sarcastic, my point being that everyone is talking about Einstein all the time. Calling Einstein underrated is like calling Muhammad Ali underrated. When you're considered by many to be the greatest of all time, that isn't underrating.

 

[fourier jr]

Is ralph nader the most ruthless mafia boss of our time?
Or
Was julius caesar obsessed about environmental issues?
Please explain..

maybe robin hood would be a more accurate name for caesar. not that he's my hero (after all he was still a member of the ruling class) but he made a pretty good attempt to redistribute the wealth in rome, gave land away to peasants, etc. the guy who killed him was a ruthless moneylender, who lent at ~45% interest. it's not what I say, it's all in michael parenti's "the assassination of julius caesar: a people's history of ancient rome", nominated for a non-fiction pulitzer in 2003.

here's the description from parenti's site:
Most historians, both ancient and modern, have viewed the Late Republic of Rome through the eyes of its rich nobility. They regard Roman commoners as a parasitic mob, a rabble interested only in bread and circuses. They cast Caesar, who took up the popular cause, as a despot and demagogue, and treat his murder as the outcome of a personal feud or constitutional struggle, devoid of social content. In The Assassination of Julius Caesar, the distinguished author Michael Parenti subjects these assertions of "gentlemen historians" to a bracing critique, and presents us with a compelling story of popular resistance against entrenched power and wealth. Parenti shows that Caesar was only the last in a line of reformers, dating back across the better part of a century, who were murdered by opulent conservatives. Caesar's assassination set in motion a protracted civil war, the demise of a five-hundred-year Republic, and the emergence of an absolutist rule that would prevail over Western Europe for centuries to come.

Parenti reconstructs the social and political context of Caesar's murder, offering fascinating details about Roman society. In these pages we encounter money-driven elections, the struggle for economic democracy, the use of religion as an instrument of social control, the sexual abuse of slaves, and the political use of homophobic attacks. Here is a story of empire and corruption, patriarchs and subordinated women, self-enriching capitalists and plundered provinces, slumlords and urban rioters, death squads and political witchhunts.

The Assassination of Julius Caesar offers a compelling new perspective on an ancient era, one that contains many intriguing parallels to our own times.

http://www.michaelparenti.org/Caesar.html


& from publisher's weekly:
Why did a group of Roman senators gather near Pompey's theater on March 15, 44 B.C., to kill Julius Caesar? Was it their fear of Caesar's tyrannical power? Or were these aristocratic senators worried that Caesar's land reforms and leanings toward democracy would upset their own control over the Roman Republic? Parenti (History as Mystery, etc.) narrates a provocative history of the late republic in Rome (100-33 B.C.) to demonstrate that Caesar's death was the culmination of growing class conflict, economic disparity and political corruption. He reconstructs the history of these crucial years from the perspective of the Roman people, the masses of slaves, plebs and poor farmers who possessed no political power. Roughly 99% of the state's wealth was controlled by 1% of the population, according to Parenti. By the 60s B.C., the poor populace had begun to find spokesmen among such leaders as the tribunes Tiberius Gracchus and his younger brother, Gaius. Although the Gracchi attempted to introduce various reforms, they were eventually murdered, and the reform movements withered. Julius Caesar, says Parenti, took up where they left off, introducing laws to improve the condition of the poor, redistributing land and reducing unemployment. As Parenti points out, such efforts threatened the landed aristocracy's power in the Senate and resulted in Caesar's assassination. Parenti's method of telling history from the "bottom up" will be controversial, but he recreates the struggles of the late republic with such scintillating storytelling and deeply examined historical insight that his book provides an important alternative to the usual views of Caesar and the Roman Empire.

 

[aeroegnr]

Calvin Coolidge

If he had run for president for a second term the 20th century would have been vastly different, in a better way.

 

[arildno]

fourier jr:
Thank you for your reference.
However, parenti's view is not particularly new, nor is it particularly well founded. It is certainly not true that the "populace" in Rome was a "mere rabble", but that was really the 19th century historian's view, not the 20th century view.
So, it seems to me that parenti is attacking a strawman..
If you are interested in Roman history, one of the most influential and respected historians is E. Badian, who has done a great job in elucidating the patron/client-relationships in Roman culture.
The view I expressed in my first post, is the flippant version of Badian's more sober view on julius ceasar.

EDIT: I added an important "not". Sorry..

 

[DaveC426913]

Guttenberg. Not that he is unmentioned; he does get credit, but not nearly enough. I don't know that anyone man has ever affected the course of history quite as much as he.

I second Guttenberg - inventor of the device that helped bring about all of modern civilization.

 

[faust9]

I second Guttenberg - inventor of the device that helped bring about all of modern civilization.

Me too.. Where would we be without Police Academy, Cacoon, or Short Circuit. These flicks alone improved society beyond belief.