[Anotheroneagain]

What books did Caesar read? In reality, books are not that useful. History doesn't show too much accumulation of knowledge over time - there is virtually no continuity between the bronze age and classical antiquity. Almost everything was lost, and built anew. Then it was all lost in another dark age. A few scraps remained.

In fact, civilisation rises and falls as brainpower rises and falls. There only was a long period of rise recently, but, it's been long over, and we now live off the scraps of what it produced.

[ninalanyon]

Caesar almost certainly read classics of Greek philosophy and Roman literature.

But what does your comment have to do with books? There were none in the Bronze Age, nor for many centuries after it.

[Anotheroneagain]

I was commenting on the absurdity of the story. It just doesn't seem to be how knowledge works. Nothing was discovered by such slow, long term accumulation of knowledge. Instead, knowledge seems to be discovered very quickly when the potential is there, and it decays and gets forgotten if the potential is lost.

For example, it was perfectly possible to be born when there was no powered flight at all, and live to see the moon landing. And, while there are all the plans, and everything there was to write down about Saturn V, we can't do it again, as the human potential isn't there anymore. In fact, we can't even fly supersonic anymore.