, a Greek of Cyrene, librarian of Alexandria under king Euergetes,
, a Greek of Cyrene, librarian of
Alexandria under king Euergetes, the son of Ptolemy
Philadelphia, was born in the year 275 B. C. He cultivated at once poetry, grammar, philosophy, mathematics,
and excelled in the first and the last. He was styled the
Cosmographer, the measurer of the universe, the second
Plato, and was the first who discovered a method of measuring the bulk and circumference of the earth. He constructed the first observatory, and observed the obliquity
of the ecliptic, and found out also a method of knowing
the primitive numbers, that is, the numbers that have no
common measure but unity, which was named the sieve of
Eratosthenes. This philosopher likewise composed a treatise for completing the analysis, and he solved the problem
of the duplication of the cube, by means of an instrument
composed of several sliders. Having attained the age of
eighty, and being oppressed with infirmities, he voluntarily died of hunger, in the year 195 B. C. He described in
Greek, the reigns of thirty-eight Theban kings, which had
been omitted by Manetho, out of the sacred records of the
Egyptians, at Thebes, and this at the command of king
Euergetes. Apollodorus transcribed this catalogue out of
Eratosthenes, and Sycellus out of Apollodorus. This
catalogue or Laterculus of Eratosthenes is generally owned
to be the most authentic Egyptian account of all others
now extant, and reaches from the beginning of that kingdom after the deluge, till the days of the judges, if not also
till the days of Solomon: and by Diccearchus’s connection
of one of its kings with an antediluvian king of Egypt on
one side, and with the first olympiad of Jphitus on the
other, we gain another long and authentic series of heathen
chronology during all that time. The little that remains
to us of the works of Eratosthenes was printed at Oxford
in 1672, 8vo- There are two other editions one in the
“Uranologia
” of father Petau, Catasterismi cutninterpretatione Latina et commentariis,
” including a dissertation by
the learned Heyne, printed at Gottingen, 1795, 8vo.