Agathemerus () was a

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

geographer A geographer is a physical scientist, social scientist or humanist whose area of study is geography, the study of Earth's natural environment and human society, including how society and nature interacts. The Greek prefix "geo" means "earth" a ...

who during the

Roman Greece Greece in the Roman era (, ) describes the Roman conquest of ancient Greece (roughly, the territory of the modern nation-state of Greece) as well as that of the Greek people and the areas they inhabited and ruled historically. It covers the peri ...

period published a small two-part geographical work titled ''A Sketch of Geography in Epitome'' (), addressed to his pupil Philon. The son of Orthon, Agathemerus is speculated to have lived in the 3rd century. Although little is known about Agathemerus historically, he lived after

Ptolemy Claudius Ptolemy (; , ; ; – 160s/170s AD) was a Greco-Roman mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were important to later Byzantine science, Byzant ...

, whom he often quotes, and before the formation of

Constantinople Constantinople (#Names of Constantinople, see other names) was a historical city located on the Bosporus that served as the capital of the Roman Empire, Roman, Byzantine Empire, Byzantine, Latin Empire, Latin, and Ottoman Empire, Ottoman empire ...

on the site of

Byzantium Byzantium () or Byzantion () was an ancient Greek city in classical antiquity that became known as Constantinople in late antiquity and Istanbul today. The Greek name ''Byzantion'' and its Latinization ''Byzantium'' continued to be used as a n ...

Constantine the Great Constantine I (27 February 27222 May 337), also known as Constantine the Great, was a Roman emperor from AD 306 to 337 and the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. He played a Constantine the Great and Christianity, pivotal ro ...

in 328 AD, as he only refers to the city as Byzantium. From his speaking of

Albion Albion is an alternative name for Great Britain. The oldest attestation of the toponym comes from the Greek language. It is sometimes used poetically and generally to refer to the island, but is less common than "Britain" today. The name for Scot ...

, it has been thought that he wrote not very long after the erection of the

Wall of Severus The Wall of Severus is believed to be a defensive fortification built by the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus (reigned AD 193–211) during his military campaigns in northern Britannia in the early 3rd century. Although the structure is mentione ...

. This is probably true, but the language is scarcely definite enough to establish the point. Agathemerus's work consists chiefly of extracts from

, Artemidorus Ephesius and other earlier writers. In his work, he gives a short account of the various forms assigned to the Earth by previous

s. He calculated the distances between land masses and seas, and then laid down important distances on the inhabited part of the Earth using the stadiametric method.

References

* Ancient Greek geographers 3rd-century Greek writers 3rd-century geographers {{geographer-stub