LITMIR.BIZ

       Map 5. Hecataeus is credited with improving upon the work of Anaximander. He created a more detailed interpretation of the world, approximately 80 years after Anaximander.

      A fellow citizen, Anaximander (610–546 BCE), is assumed to have been a pupil of Thales, who was 14 years his senior. Thales – in whose mind observations of earlier societies and Greek philosophy had coalesced – certainly influenced Anaximander. In the theories attributed to him, the diversion from traditional myths and rational thought became obvious – he believed the world floated in the ‘infinite’ but was a cylinder in shape. Its inhabitable surface, on top of the cylinder, was surrounded by a circular ocean, reminiscent of the Babylonian concept. According to the geographer Eratosthenes, Anaximander was the first to publish a map of the known world, centred on, or at least near, his home city of Miletus. Hecataeus (550–476 BCE), also of Miletus, was inspired by Anaximander’s map to create his own version with added detail and produced a prose world history that separated out tradition and myth, relying on factual evidence wherever possible.

      ERATOSTHENES AND THE WELL AT SYENE

      Alexandria, founded on the northern coast of the Nile delta by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, prospered after its foundation, far outliving the empire of Alexander, which fell apart after his death. Alexandria came under the rule of the Ptolemies, perhaps the most successful inheritors of his domains. They ruled with a relatively heavy hand, exacting high taxes to pay for a powerful army and navy, but they realised that knowledge was power and they had cultural ambitions. The manifestation of that power was the Great Library at Alexandria. The Ptolemies invested heavily in this fine institution; they even developed a policy that any ship arriving in Alexandria’s thriving port, guided into safe anchorage by the great ‘Pharos’ lighthouse, could be searched for scrolls and learned documents, which would be confiscated from their owners. These would then be carefully copied and the copies would be handed back to their owners, while the originals were placed in the library. Under the patronage of the Ptolemies, Alexandria attracted mathematicians, philosophers and scientists of all kinds. The lights of the Pharos guided valuable trade into Alexandria, but the reach of Alexandria’s influence ran well beyond the shores of the Mediterranean Sea – perhaps what modern politicians and diplomats now describe as ‘soft power’.

      Eratosthenes (275–194 BCE), born in Cyrene and educated in other places including Athens, was a polymath and intellectual philosopher, geographer and mathematician who is reputed to have written a history of comedy, a chronology of major events in the Hellenistic world and also poetry. It was this gifted thinker that Ptolemy III, Euergetes, appointed head of Alexandria’s famous library in around 245 BCE. Eratosthenes, at the age of 31, now found himself the librarian in charge of the greatest concentration of knowledge in the known world and was able to sift through new scrolls and reports arriving in the Great Library. This position made Eratosthenes among the most respected scholars in the Greek world.