The Greeks attributed to Thales a great many discoveries and achievements. Few, if any, of these can be said to rest on thoroughly reliable testimony, most of them being the ascriptions of commentators and compilers who lived anything from 700 to 1,000 years after his death—a period of time equivalent to that between William the Conqueror and the present day. Inevitably there ilso accumulated round the name of Thales, as round that of Pythagoras , a number of anecdotes of varying (...) degrees of plausibility and of no historical worth whatsoever. These and the achievements credited to Thales have, of course, been painstakingly brought together by Hermann Diels in Der Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Useful and necessary as this work undoubtedly is, it nevertheless has probably contributed as much as any other book to the exaggerated and false Aew of Thales which we meet in so many modern histories of science or philosophy, and which it is the purpose of this article to combat. (shrink)

In a recent paper I discussed the origin of the concept of the climata in Greek geography, and adduced reasons for attributing the formulation and elaboration of the concept to Hipparchus . The above passage in Strabo was naturally mentioned in the course of the argument, and I drew attention in a footnote to the unsatisfactory nature of the account given by him of the climata. I now propose to examine the passage in more detail.

The climata played an important role in Greek geography. As used in the mathematical geography of Hipparchus and Ptolemy the word denotes a narrow belt or strip of land, 400 stades wide, on each side of a parallel of latitude; inhabitants of the same clitma were assumed to be situated in the same geographical latitude, since, for practical purposes, the celestial phenomena, lengths of the longest and shortest days, and general climatic conditions did not change appreciably within this distance. We (...) may compare the modern conception of arbitrary zones each possessing its own standard time; but whereas these are belts of longitude contiguous to each other, the climata were belts of latitude not necessarily contiguous. (shrink)