Who is the most overrated figure in history?

Reputations built on other people's work, other people's poems and a few well-placed memoirs. Nobody here is a nobody, which is what makes it an argument.

1. 1
   Christopher Columbus

   Credited with a discovery he did not make, in a place he misidentified until he died.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Thomas Edison

   Held over a thousand patents and a reputation for taking credit earned in his own workshops.
   600pts
3. 3
   Ferdinand Magellan

   Credited with the first circumnavigation despite dying less than halfway round.
   551pts
4. 4
   Marie Antoinette

   Remembered for a sentence she never said and a frivolity her letters do not support.
   494pts
5. 5
   Cleopatra

   Famous for a beauty no contemporary described and remembered mostly through Roman propaganda.
   494pts
6. 6
   Alexander the Great

   Inherited the best army in the world from his father and is rarely asked to share the credit.
   350pts
7. 7
   Paul Revere

   One of several riders that night, and the only one Longfellow put in a poem.
   257pts
8. 8
   Richard the Lionheart

   England's warrior-king icon who spent about six months of a ten-year reign in the country.
   257pts
9. 9
   Napoleon Bonaparte

   Brilliant at sixty battles and remembered less for the two that finished him.
   257pts
10. 10
    Nikola Tesla

    A genuinely great engineer turned into an internet saint who supposedly invented everything.
    257pts
11. 11
    Julius Caesar

    Wrote the definitive account of his own campaigns, which is one way to secure a reputation.
    257pts
12. 12
    Henry Ford

    Did not invent the car or the assembly line, but got his name on both.
    257pts
13. 13
    Winston Churchill

    Topped a national poll of greatest Britons, and remains the subject of the fiercest reputational argument of any of them.
    0pts
14. 14
    Amelia Earhart

    A real pioneer whose fame rests more on how she disappeared than on what she flew.
    0pts

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