It’s hard to believe that someone with such a radiant CV would be known as Βητα by his friends on account of being second best at everything, but that is what they say about Eratosthenes – the man who invented longitude and latitude, first calculated the circumference of the world, and may even have accurately calculated the distance to the sun.

The mathematician, poet, athlete, geographer, and astronomer Eratosthenes was born in 276 BCE in Cyrene, a part of the Greek world that now belongs to modern Libya. The third century BCE was a very mobile age and like so many others from all across the Greek world Eratosthenes went to Alexandria, the scientific centre of the ancient Mediterranean. He studied there and like many other students in Alexandria he also went to Athens as a sort of ancient exchange student. Once back in Alexandria Eratosthenes was offered the illustrious position of librarian at the Library of Alexandria, which made him the President of the foremost university in the world as he knew it.

It wasn’t a title that came cheap, of course. We already know that Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the world with a less than 1% error margin (and using no more than a stick and a sunny day at that!) and that he invented longitude and latitude. He also invented the amillary sphere and an algorithm for finding prime numbers, and created maps of the known world.

But, most of all I would like for us to remember Eratosthenes today for arguing that there is no nation inherently superior to all others, but rather that there is good and bad in all nations. In that, you see, he disagreed with another one of our Great Greeks.

That’s it for ε. Until it’s time for ζ, feel free to nominate ancient great Greeks of any letter of the alphabet following ε in the comments section.

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About the author: E P Wohlfart is a twenty-something freelance writer with a Classical Archaeology degree, a laptop and a maxed-out library card. Aside from administrating PastPresenters.com, which she started in 2008, she works with several historical publications and is a regular contributor at Suite101.