Greek Geographic Philosophy and Eratosthenes

Greek geographic thought developed from the mythic, Homeric image of a disk-shaped earth encircled by the river Okeanos toward an increasingly mathematical and empirical discipline over some four centuries. Anaximander of Miletus (c. 610–546 BCE) is credited by later tradition, including Agathemerus (a Byzantine-era geographer summarizing earlier sources), with drawing the first Greek map of the known world (oikoumene) and with proposing that the earth was a cylindrical body floating unsupported in space, held in place by its equidistance from all things rather than resting on water or another element — a genuinely novel argument from symmetry rather than myth. Hecataeus of Miletus (c. 550–476 BCE) followed with his Periodos Ges ("Journey Round the Earth" or "Description of the Earth"), a prose geography accompanying an improved map that divided the world into Europe and Asia (with Libya, or Africa, sometimes appended to Asia), and Herodotus, in the 5th century BCE, both drew on and criticized such earlier maps in the geographic and ethnographic excurses that fill much of his Histories, mocking mapmakers who drew the inhabited world as a perfect circle "as if drawn with a compass" (Histories 4.36).