Circumference: Chapter 5

by Nicholas Nicastro
This nonfiction book recounts the story of how a 245 BCE sea journey from Athens to Alexandria inspired Eratosthenes of Cyrene to contemplate the stars and measure the distance around the earth.

Here are links to our lists for the book: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5
15 words 11 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. baleful
    threatening or foreshadowing evil or tragic developments
    As the Macedonians gathered to watch, the shadow spread across the moon’s face, stealing its light and changing its color to a baleful red.
  2. propitious
    presenting favorable circumstances
    The timing, on the eve of a battle that would decide the fate of Asia, was also less than propitious — as was the proximity of Saturn (known to the Greeks as Phaenon), a planet with its own malefic associations...
  3. precipitate
    bring about abruptly
    Right on the brink of the decisive battle the men were already in a state of anxiety, and this now struck them with a deep religious awe which precipitated a kind of panic.
  4. mercurial
    liable to sudden unpredictable change
    But what would it have meant to be a follower of Eratosthenes — a mercurial figure who leaped with maddening competence among disparate fields, and whose delights lay in upstaging specialists, astute ridicule, and debunking comfortable myths?
  5. dilettante
    an amateur engaging in an activity without serious intention
    In his own candid appraisal of Eratosthenes, Strabo declares, “Thus he is a mathematician in geography, and in mathematics a geographer; and so lies open to the attacks of both parties.” This has been the specialist’s complaint about gifted dilettantes since scholarship began.
  6. abstruse
    difficult to understand
    Both Ptolemaic astronomy and Chomskyan linguistics were often revised, abstruse, yet sufficiently adaptable that legions of institutionally secure adherents could readily defend them.
  7. hiatus
    an interruption in the intensity or amount of something
    That Ptolemaeus was largely the last word in Western astronomy until Copernicus begs the question of what caused the long hiatus. Why does the history of ancient empirical astronomy seem to end in the fifth century CE?
  8. avocation
    an auxiliary activity
    Certainly, the fact that science was more of an avocation than a profession in antiquity — even at the Museum — contributed to its demise.
  9. edifying
    enlightening or uplifting so as to encourage improvement
    Ancient scientists spent so much energy on libation-pouring automatons and levitating statues, and not on the kind of practical laborsaving devices that define modernity, because (with few exceptions) their discipline was meant to be spiritually edifying, not constructive.
  10. apocryphal
    being of questionable authenticity
    Though it is apocryphal, the biblical-era Book of Esdras clearly states that the earth is no less than six-sevenths dry land...
  11. congenial
    suitable to your needs
    To sell his project to the crowned heads of Europe, Columbus had to out-Ptolemaeus Ptolemaeus in his underestimate of E. To this end, he found the claims of Marinus of Tyre, as summarized in the master’s Geography, to be most congenial.
  12. conflate
    mix together different elements
    Instead, he was able to rationalize it as support for his scheme by conflating the Arabic mile (about 1.19 statute miles) with a unit more familiar to him, the Roman mile (which was about 5 percent smaller than its modern equivalent).
  13. defray
    bear the expenses of
    It is fashionable lately to disparage Columbus for his failures as a colonial administrator, his baleful dabbling in the slave trade, and his fixation on showing a profit — preferably in gold — to defray the expenses of his sponsors.
  14. pernicious
    exceedingly harmful
    It is fashionable today to take the division of scholarship into sciences and humanities as unfortunate, even pernicious.
  15. impetus
    a force that makes something happen
    The implicit notion is that the “two cultures” distinction is self-defeating — that mastering a sonata will somehow give the psychologist some deeper understanding of the creative process, or conversely, that psychology will lend fresh impetus to creative expression.
Created on Thu Feb 10 15:01:22 EST 2022 (updated Wed Jul 02 17:46:32 EDT 2025)

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