{"id":4827,"date":"2014-11-07T02:33:52","date_gmt":"2014-11-07T01:33:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiquitatem.com\/en\/eratoathenes-alpha-beta\/"},"modified":"2014-11-07T02:33:52","modified_gmt":"2014-11-07T01:33:52","slug":"eratoathenes-alpha-beta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiquitatem.com\/en\/eratoathenes-alpha-beta\/","title":{"rendered":"Eratosthenes did not become"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><b>Alpha (\u0391 \u03b1) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. Beta (\u0392, \u03b2) was the second. To  be an \u00abalpha\u00bb  means to be the first of the group; to be a \u00abbeta\u00bb means to be the second.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>\n\tIn the animal world and zoo world, that&nbsp; is the same but&nbsp; in <em>Greek <\/em>cultism, being an &quot;<em>alpha<\/em>&quot; male means being the roughest and strongest of the group, accumulate a greater quantity of testosterone and have the fastest and most aggressive sperm and consequently have the&nbsp; exclusivity of&nbsp; junction&nbsp; with the females.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tIn the &quot;<em>homo<\/em>&quot; gender it is not irrelevant and value to be an &quot;<em>alpha male<\/em>&quot; in the zoo sense, but the <em>sapiens <\/em>has many and varied areas of interest in addition to the primary desire of junction.<\/p>\n<p>\n\t<em>Erat&oacute;stener <\/em>was&nbsp; a curious and wise character in <em>Greek Antiquity.<\/em> He was born in Cyrene circa&nbsp; 276 B.C. and he died in Alexandria in 194 B.C. He lived in Alexandria, where he was director of the famous <em>Library, <\/em>about which I have dealt extensively in this blog.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tHe&nbsp; was a wise mathematician, geographer, astronomer, philosopher, historian, poet, musician, etc. According to <em>Suetonius<\/em>, he was the first who called himself as &ldquo;<em>filologus<\/em>&quot;, a philologist&quot;.&nbsp; Among its achievements, which have been left&nbsp; to posterity, it is the famous &quot;<em>Sieve of Eratosthenes<\/em>&quot; or&nbsp; mode and stencil to find prime number and especially t<em>he measuring of the circumference of the Earth<\/em> with minimal error.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tIt is allocated to him the famous work <em>Catasterisms<\/em>, which explains 44 constellations of the&nbsp; visible from Greece sky. The work, as it has been transmitted quite schematic, it is not yours, but he must well have been the author of a larger work&nbsp; which is today&nbsp; a mere relic summary for students.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tHe wrote three books on <em>Geography<\/em>, in which he exposed his measurement of the circumference of the earth, explained below. He is also author of a <em>Chronography <\/em>from the Trojan War to Alexander the Great, on&nbsp; reference to the celebration of the Olympic Games in honor of Zeus. He wrote the &quot;<em>Platonic<\/em>&quot; dialogue relating the music to mathematics; also he wrote an essay on <em>the cub duplication; <\/em>an epic poem called Hermes, the<em> elegiac poem <\/em>Erigone; an extensive work on <em>Old Comedy <\/em>and the famous&nbsp; mentioned above treatise&nbsp; &ldquo;<em>Catasterisms<\/em>&rdquo;.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tWell, <em>Eratosthenes <\/em>was not for his contemporaries an &quot;<em>alpha<\/em>&quot; but a &quot;<em>beta<\/em>&quot; and with these&nbsp; nickname he was called and this not because he was a scholar and second category scientist, but because it was &quot;<em>the second<\/em>&quot; in all categories and topics of in question.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tBy this reason he is also called &quot;<em>pentatlos<\/em>&quot;, <em>pentathlete<\/em>, the best in the whole five sports. (compound Greek word from <em>penta <\/em>= five and <em>ahtlos <\/em>= competition). Others called him &quot;<em>the second Plato<\/em>.&quot; All this is told in the <em>Suda <\/em>(Greek encyclopedia of X century), in&nbsp; <em>\u1f18&rho;&alpha;&tau;&omicron;&sigma;&theta;\u03ad&nu;&eta;&sigmaf;, &epsilon; 2898 according to the numbering of Adler<\/em><\/p>\n<p>\n\tAnyway, just&nbsp; the gentle reader may compile clearly a long list of men &quot;<em>beta<\/em>&quot;, of second men, whom&nbsp; mankind is indebted for their&nbsp; many positive contributions. They had the wisdom and intelligence to leave the first place, the &quot;alpha&quot; place ,for absolutely expendable people.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tAs I stated,&nbsp; in the <em>Suda <\/em>(tenth century Greek encyclopedia) in entry <em>\u1f18&rho;&alpha;&tau;&omicron;&sigma;&theta;\u03ad&nu;&eta;&sigmaf;, &epsilon; 2898 <\/em>according to the numbering of Adler, we are informed of it:<\/p>\n<p>\n\t<em><strong>Son of Aglaus (others say Ambrosius); of Cyrene. A pupil of the philosopher Ariston of Chios, the grammarian Lysanias of Cyrene, and Callimachus the poet. Ptolemy III summoned him from Athens, and he lived until Ptolemy V. Because he came second in every branch of learning to those who had reached the highest level, he was nicknamed &#39;platforms&#39;, &beta;\u1f75&mu;&alpha;&tau;&alpha; [1] Others called him a second or new Plato, or the &#39;pentathlete&#39;. He was born in the 126th Olympiad,[276-273 B.C] and died aged 80, giving up food because of his declining eye-sight. He left a distinguished pupil, Aristophanes of Byzantium, whose pupil Aristarchus was in turn.His pupils were Mnaseas, Menander and Aristis. He wrote philosophical works, poems and histories; Astronomy, or Catasterisms; On the Philosophical Sects; On Freedom from Pain; many dialogues; and numerous grammatical works.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p>\n\t<em>[1] &beta;\u1f75&mu;&alpha;&tau;&alpha; , a mistake for &beta;\u1fc6&tau;&alpha; (the second letter&nbsp; in the alphabet).<\/em><\/p>\n<p>\n\tHis <em>measurement of length of the diameter of the Earth<\/em> with minimal error, without&nbsp; satellites, radar, telescopes and other modern props, is the result of an intelligence which continues to fascinate us. Definitely it deserves a little explanation.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tIt is told that reviewing one day a papyrus of <em>Library<\/em>, he found that it said that on June 21, in the spring solstice, in <em>Siena<\/em>, near the first cataract of the Nile Egyptian city, at noon you could see the water in fund of the wells and vertical poles did not shaded because the sun was at its zenith. Eratosthenes recalled that this day in <em>Alexandria <\/em>obelisks shaded shadow forming an angle of 1\/50 of a circle, ie, 7.2 &deg; (degrees). As the sun was far from the earth, the sun&#39;s rays impinged parallel sites.&nbsp; Knowing the distance between Alexandria and Syene was 5,000 stadia, about 800 kms, it was concluded that the share of 7.2 &deg; (degrees) away; inasmuch as the earth&#39;s circumference is 360 degrees, he concluded that the length was 252,000 stadia, equivalent to about 41 142 kms. He was wrong on a percentage laughable. The length in ecuador with today&#39;s precision is 40,076 kms.<br \/>\n\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\n\t<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" height=\"317\" src=\"https:\/\/www.antiquitatem.com\/imgs\/arts\/distancia_tierra._recoradajpg.jpg\" width=\"354\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\n\tIf two parallel straight lines are transected by a third line, the alternate interior angles are equal. Angle B equals angle A; so the length from Alexandria to Syene was 7,2&ordm;, about 800 kms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alpha (\u0391 \u03b1) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. Beta (\u0392, \u03b2) was the second. To  be an \u00abalpha\u00bb  means to be the first of the group; to be a \u00abbeta\u00bb means to be the second.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,13,14,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-history","category-language-literature","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiquitatem.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiquitatem.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiquitatem.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiquitatem.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiquitatem.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiquitatem.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4827\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiquitatem.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiquitatem.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiquitatem.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}