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Updated: June 11, 2025
How you men do prate sometimes of matters concerning which you are as ignorant as the yearling calves and gabbling geese that I suppose your learned astronomers see driven every day to pasture on that range of mountains in the moon Eratosthenes that modern science pretends to have discovered, and about which you read so marvellous a paper last week."
One other great merit of Eratosthenes is, that he first raised Geography to the rank of a science. His Geographica were an organic collection, the first the world had ever seen, of all the travels and books of earth-description heaped together in the Great Library, of which he was for many years the keeper.
Strabo in a famous passage records an exceptional hedonism in Greek thought and goes on to expound the conventional belief. Eratosthenes says that the poet directs his whole attention to the amusement of the mind, and not at all to its instruction.
It is believed that Eratosthenes invented an important modification of the gnomon which was elaborated afterwards by Hipparchus and called an armillary sphere. This consists essentially of a small gnomon, or perpendicular post, attached to a plane representing the earth's equator and a hemisphere in imitation of the earth's surface.
By comparing those parts of Diodorus Siculus and Strabo, which they avowedly copy from him, with the track of Agatharcides: in the Red Sea, we are enabled to discover only a few additions of importance to the geographical knowledge supplied by the former: Agatharcides, it will be remembered, brings his account of the African side of the Red Sea no lower down than Ptolemais: he does not even mention the expedition of Ptolemy Euergetes to Aduli; nor the passage of the straits, though Eratosthenes, as cited by Strabo, proves that it was open in his time.
Although these critics generally, with the exceptions of Aristotle and Eratosthenes, believed the greatest value of poetry to be in the teaching of morality, no one of them endeavored to define poetry, as they did rhetoric, by its purpose. To Aristotle, and centuries later to Plutarch, the distinguishing mark of poetry was imitation.
That he should have accomplished this through observation of nothing more than a tiny bit of Egyptian territory and a glimpse of the sun's shadow makes it seem but the more wonderful. Yet the method of Eratosthenes, like many another enigma, seems simple enough once it is explained.
On the island of Elephantine, opposite Aswan, an interesting discovery has lately been made by Mr. Howard Carter. This is a remarkable well, which was supposed by the ancients to lie immediately on the tropic. It formed the basis of Eratosthenes' calculations of the measurement of the earth.
The next two hundred years after Eratosthenes' death was filled up by the spread of the Roman Empire, by the taking over by the Romans of the vast possessions previously held by Alexander and his successors and by the Carthaginians, and by their spread into Gaul, Britain, and Germany.
He maintained that the earth is spherical, and established the terms longitude and latitude, which Eratosthenes had introduced, and computed the earth to be one hundred and eighty thousand stadia in circumference, and a degree to be five hundred stadia in length, or sixty-two and a-half Roman miles.
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