Eratosthenes of Cyrene

Abstract

Eratosthenes was one of the great scholars of Antiquity. Born in Cyrene in c. 285, he studied in Athens before becoming the third librarian at the great research institute founded by King Ptolemy I at Alexandria in Egypt. Rather than specializing in any one field, he produced scholarship in philology, geography, mathematics, philosophy, and chronography, as well as composed poetry. This breadth of learning was (remarkably) the subject of criticism: he was called “Beta” and the “Pentathlete,” which referred to being the second-best in every field. But his versatility did not preclude considerable achievement: most notably, he calculated the circumference of the earth and made other great intellectual advances in geography (where his influence on the later geographer Strabo was considerable) and literary criticism (where, for instance, he refused to believe that the places of Homer’s Odyssey could be mapped onto the actual Mediterranean world), as well as receiving praise for his poetry (from pseudo-Longinus). His works have not survived in full; the process of gathering and assessing his fragments is still ongoing.