Of Clouds & Shadows

Heiner Thiessen on Eratosthenes, Ancient Greek scientist.

- Heiner Thiessen

Thinking for oneself and avoiding any form of hero-worship seems sound advice, and most of my life I have followed it with genuine conviction. But in my quieter years, and closer to the big cliff, where I have found the space and time to live on a sloping ledge, well beyond the realm of grinding necessity, I have discovered a fellow human being with whom I feel great kinship and even a sense of quiet admiration, having none of his outstanding qualities myself.

I am talking about a Greek polymath who had a finger in almost every scientific pie of his day. They called him the pentathlete, due to his mental prowess in so many disciplines. He was a poet, a mathematician, a geographer, a historian, an astronomer, and finally, the director of the most important library of the ancient world, situated in Alexandria on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea in Egypt, west of the Nile Delta. I am talking about Eratosthenes, who was born in North Africa in about 276 BC and who spent most of his adult life in the Greek colony of Alexandria, newly established by the ambitious Macedonian warlord Alexander the Great.