Eratosthĕnes
（
Ἐρατοσθένης). A distinguished contemporary of
Archimedes, born at Cyrené, B.C. 276. He possessed a variety of talents seldom
united in the same individual. His mathematical, astronomical, and geographical labours are
those which have rescued his name from oblivion, though he was, besides, famous for his
athletic prowess. The Alexandrian school of sciences, which flourished under the first
Ptolemies, had already produced Timochares and Aristyllus; and Eratosthenes had not only the
advantages arising from the instruments and observations of his predecessors, but the great
Alexandrian library, which probably contained all the Phœnician, Chaldaic, Egyptian,
and Greek learning of the time, was intrusted to his superintendence by the third Ptolemy
(Euergetes), who had invited him to Alexandria.
The only work attributed to Eratosthenes which has come down to us entire is entitled
Καταστερισμοί, and is merely a catalogue of the names of
forty-four constellations, and the situations in each constellation of the principal
stars, of which he enumerates nearly five hundred, but without one reference to astronomical
measurement. We find Hipparchus quoted in it, and mention made of the motion of the pole, that
of the polar star having been recognized by Pytheas. These circumstances, taken in conjunction
with the vagueness of the descriptions, render its genuineness extremely doubtful.
If Eratosthenes be really the author of the
Καταστερισμοί,
it must have been composed merely as a
vade mecum, for we find him
engaged in astronomical researches far more exact and more worthy of his genius. By his
observations he determined that the distance between the tropics, that is, twice the obliquity
of the ecliptic, was 11/83 of an entire circumference, or 47¡ 42' 39", which makes
the obliquity to be 23¡ 51' 19.5", nearly the same as that supposed by Hipparchus
and Ptolemy. As the means of observation were at that time very imperfect, the instruments
divided only to intervals of 10', and as corrections for the greater refraction at the winter
solstice, for the diameter of the solar disc, etc., were then unknown, we must regard this
conclusion as highly creditable to Eratosthenes. His next achievement was to measure the
circumference of the earth. He knew that at Syené the sun was vertical at noon in
the summer solstice; while at Alexandria, at the same moment, it was below the zenith by the
fiftieth part of a circumference: the two places are nearly on the same meridian (error
2¡). Neglecting the solar parallax, he concluded that the distance from Alexandria
to Syené is the fiftieth part of the circumference of the earth; this distance he
estimated at five thousand stadia, which gives two hundred and fifty thousand stadia for the
circumference. Thus Eratosthenes has the merit of pointing out a method for finding the
circumference of the earth. But his data were not sufficiently exact, nor had he the means of
measuring the distance from Alexandria to Syené with sufficient precision.
Eratosthenes has been called a poet, and Scaliger, in his commentary on Manilius, gives some
fragments of a poem attributed to him, entitled
Ἑρμῆς, one
of which is a description of the terrestrial zones. It is not improbable that these are
authentic.
That Eratosthenes was an excellent geometrician we can not doubt, from his still extant
solution of the problem of two mean proportionals, preserved by Theon , and a lost treatise
quoted by Pappus,
De Locis ad Medietates.
Eratosthenes appears to have been one of the first who attempted to form a system of
geography. His work on this subject, entitled
Γεωγραφικά
(
Geographica), was divided into three books. The first contained a history of
geography, a critical notice of the authorities used by him, and the elements of physical
geography. The second book treated of mathematical geography. The third contained the
political or historical geography of the then known world. The whole work was accompanied with
a map.
Eratosthenes also busied himself with chronology, and suggested the Julian calendar, in
which every fourth year has 366 days. Some remarks on his Greek chronology will be found in
Clinton's
Fasti Hellenici (vol. i. pp. 3, 408); and on his list of Theban
kings, in Rask's work on the ancient Egyptian chronology
(Altona, 1830).
The properties of numbers attracted the attention of philosophers from the earliest period,
and Eratosthenes also distinguished himself in this branch. He wrote a work on the duplication
of the cube—
Κύβου Διπλασιασμός—which
we only know by a sketch that Eudoxus has given of it, in his treatise on the Sphere and
Cylinder of Archimedes. Eratosthenes composed, also, another work in this department, entitled
Κόσκινον, or “the Sieve,” the object of
which was to separate prime from composite numbers. Eratosthenes arrived at the age of eighty
years, and then, becoming weary of life, died by voluntary starvation (B.C. 196). The best
editions of the
Καταστερισμοί are that of Schaubach, with
notes by Heyne
(Göttingen, 1795), and that of Matthiae, in his Aratus
(Frankfurt, 1817). The fragments of Eratosthenes have been collected by
Bernhardy in his work
Eratosthenica (Berlin, 1822), and the
poetical remains separately by Hiller
(Leipzig, 1872). See, also, Berger,
Die geographischen Fragmente des Eratosthenes (Leipzig, 1880).
