I have been reading The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist by Reviel Netz and William Noel. This is a fascinating book. The authors make is quite clear that most science as we know it today is a footnote to Arhimedes. Archimedes was the first person to sit down with an idea, convert it to his mathematics, geometry, and see how the physical universe must behave. He formed the foundation of calculus and the concept of multiple infinities.
I completed Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer--and the Century-Long Search to Discover Its Secrets by Jo Marchant. It is a very complete and up to date story of the Antikythera Mechanism. Like Watson's, "The Double Helix", it demonstrates that catty, small, and deceit doesn't just show up in publish or perish science but in history and museum management too.
Some time ago, I read The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn by Lucio Russo and Silvio (translator) Levy. This book starts with the invention of science in the 3rd century BC and demonstrates how close we are to a dark age that was the breeding ground for ills of this world.
I came away with the knowledge that these books have defined the civilization that we have today. If the industrial revolution had its roots in Galileo and Newton, then Galileo and Newton were firmly rooted in Archimedes. Even though "If only" is for losers, I'll say (with A.C. Clark) that, 'if only' the Greek City States had sided with Rome instead of Carthage we may be looking back at the earth from colonies throughout our solar system and probing the planets in orbit around the nearest stars. We would have avoided the dark age preventing the individual from melting back into tribalism and maintaining pressure on authority through questioning its motives and methods.