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Updated: June 11, 2025
From the difference in the length of the shadows he deduced that this distance represented one-fiftieth of the circumference of the earth, which would accordingly be about 250,000 stadia, or 25,000 geographical miles. As the actual circumference is 24,899 English miles, this was a very near approximation, considering the rough means Eratosthenes had at his disposal.
Here Milton's Paradise Lost, there "The Age of Reason;" here Methodist Tracts, there "True Principles of Socialism," Treatises on Useful Knowledge by sound learning actuated by pure benevolence, Appeals to Operatives by the shallowest reasoners, instigated by the same ambition that had moved Eratosthenes to the conflagration of a temple; works of fiction admirable as "Robinson Crusoe," or innocent as "The Old English Baron," beside coarse translations of such garbage as had rotted away the youth of France under Louis Quinze.
Archimedes, who died in 212 B.C., is said to have invented the screw, and was skillful in mechanics. Eratosthenes founded descriptive astronomy and scientific chronology. "The Alexandrian age busied itself with literary or scientific research, and with setting in order what the Greek mind had done in its creative time."
It is no discredit to approach astronomy as a geographer and geography as an astronomer if the results are such as these. What Eratosthenes really did was to approach both astronomy and geography from two seemingly divergent points of attack namely, from the stand-point of the geometer and also from that of the poet.
If Eratosthenes had a precursor as an earth-measurer, no hint or rumor has come down to us that would enable us to guess who that precursor may have been. His personality is as deeply enveloped in the mists of the past as are the personalities of the great prehistoric discoverers.
Eratosthenes exhibits a marked departure from circularity, especially on the E., where the wall consists of two well-marked linear sections, with an intermediate portion where the crest for 20 miles or more bends inwards or towards the centre.
Thus Callimachus, the favourite of Ptolemy Philadelphus, and librarian of his Museum, is the most distinguished grammarian, critic, and poet of his day, and has for pupils Eratosthenes, Apollonius Rhodius, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and a goodly list more. He is an encyclopaedia in himself.
This island was not then wholly new to the geographers of Egypt and Europe. It had been heard of by the pilots in the voyage of Alexander the Great; Eratosthenes had given it a place in his map; and it had often been reached from Africa by the sailors of the Red Sea in wickerwork boats made of papyrus; but this was the first time it had been visited by a European.
Eratosthenes had heard that in Syene, in Upper Egypt, deep wells were enlightened to the bottom on the day of the summer solstice, and that vertical objects cast no shadows.
But the stoic answered that there are many cases in which our actions must be guided by what seems probable. None of the works of Sphærus have come down to us. Eratosthenes, of whom we have before spoken, was librarian of the museum during this reign; and Ptolemy, the son of Agesarchus, then wrote his history of Alexandria, a work now lost.
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