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He refers to this most frequently accepted stade as the “Italian” stade.

Again, this length corresponds to one of Lehmann-Haupt’s six stades. Taking 1/8 of this Roman mile gives the length of 1 stade as approximately 184.8 meters. The exact difference between the Roman foot and the English foot is uncertain, but if 1 Roman foot is taken to be approximately 11.65 English inches, then one Roman mile is approximately equal to 1479 meters. History tells us that the Roman mile is equal to 5000 Roman feet, each of which is just short of the familiar English foot. This is so because a great number of authors from the first century CE onward make reference to the fact that 1 Roman mile is equal to 8 stades. The 185 meter stade, as claimed by Rawlins earlier, is the most commonly accepted value for the length of the stade used by Eratosthenes in his measurements of the Earth. Such correspondence lends credence to the argument that there was more than one stade used in the ancient world, and furthermore, that one of these stades may have been used by Eratosthenes. Each of these variations of the Greek foot, when multiplied by 600, yields a stade length that corresponds closely to one of the six claimed by Lehmann-Haupt. To distinguish between these variations, scholar of Greek architecture Burkhardt Wesenberg refers to them as the “Attic” (from Asia Minor and southern Italy), the “Doric” (from Greece and Sicily), and the “Ionic” (used throughout the Greek civilization). However, all instances of the Greek foot appear to conform roughly to one of three basic lengths. Like the stade, the Greek foot exhibits some regional variation. A common approach to this mystery is to examine the stade’s relationship to other ancient units of length.īook Two in The Histories by the ancient historian Herodotus (480-425 BCE) tells us that 1 stade is equal to 600 Greek feet. While the assertions of these two men represent the opposing extremes in this debate, there is an array of theories which lie somewhere in between. Nonetheless, some scholars are unwilling to believe that Eratosthenes' C E could be so far in error as 17% . That 1 stade = 185 meters ( almost exactly 1/10 nautical mile) is well established. To the contrary, astronomer and historian Dennis Rawlins makes the following claim. Scholar of Greek antiquity Carl Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt claims the existence of at least six different stades. Scholars disagree greatly on the extent to which the stade may have varied in the ancient world. Without an International Bureau of Standards to ensure consistency of weights and measures throughout the ancient world, it is very likely that measures such as the stade varied slightly from region to region. After seeing Eratosthenes’ brilliant argument that the Earth’s circumference is 250,000 stades, one naturally asks, “ What is the length of a stade?” Unfortunately, this question has no simple answer.