# A three-book Geography under Eratosthenes’s name is later quoted by Strabo as a completed treatise

Date: 230

## The fact

Strabo’s Geography, as Perseus and LacusCurtius print it, quotes and criticises a three-book geographical treatise under [Eratosthenes](/people/eratosthenes)’s name, including a division of the inhabited world. Eratosthenes did not typeset Jones. Strabo is the principal surviving public file, not a recovered papyrus autograph.

It is one event.

## Context

Map-drawing is stored separately. Colonial reuse of later Ptolemaic maps is not this book.

Eratosthenes’s documented role is bounded by other offices and collaborators named in the sources below. Sharing a field with them is not a reason to drop a documented act, and it is not a reason to assign later consequences done in the name after death.

Conventional years are c.276–c.194 BCE. Almost no autograph survives. Cleomedes, Strabo, Nicomachus, and later encyclopedias are the public file. Classroom globe reconstructions are not his acts. Contribution is complex.

Named person as heading of the dated public instrument. Later editors, museums, printers, or offices share publication. Complex where later carriers are the surviving public file.

## Evidence and sources

Perseus’s Strabo and Britannica independently describe Eratosthenes’s Geography as a lost work known through later quotation.

Official or archival record: Perseus — Strabo, Geography (Jones) (https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0198; Perseus Digital Library / Tufts).

## Significance

A named geographical treatise is a knowledge-access path even when the autograph is gone. Quotation is not a licence to invent chapters.

## What is established and what is not

Established: later geography names a three-book Eratosthenic Geography. Not established: a complete table of contents in his hand, or that Strabo’s criticisms are Eratosthenes’s own words.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.

Established here: a sourced, dated public instrument with a named contribution by Eratosthenes.

They are not a public rating.

Eratosthenes did not file a later UNESCO form, a later Loeb colophon, or a later museum label as a personal act. A portrait or conventional bust is not this mechanism. Allegation, reconstruction, and established occurrence stay distinct. Keep Strabo’s imperial date as the carrier. Do not back-date [Jones](/people/van-jones) 1917 as 230 BCE. Keep the carrier date of later English distinct from the received historical year stored in the date field. Do not read a later English edition as a recovered autograph of Eratosthenes.

## People

- Eratosthenes: https://factrail.ai/people/eratosthenes

## Drivers

- Digital Learning Access: https://factrail.ai/drivers/edu-digital-learning-access

## Sources

- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eratosthenes
- https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0198

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/era-geography-three-books