Erana, a small village of Cilicia on mount Amanus. Cicero, Letters to his Friends, bk. 15, ltr. 4.
Erăsēnus, a river of Peloponnesus, flowing for a little space under the ground, in Argolis. Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk. 15, li. 275.—Pliny, bk. 2, ch. 13.
Erasippus, a son of Hercules and Lysippe.
Erasistrătus, a celebrated physician, grandson to the philosopher Aristotle. He discovered by the motion of the pulse the love which Antiochus had conceived for his mother-in-law Stratonice, and was rewarded with 100 talents for the cure by the father of Antiochus. He was a great enemy to bleeding and violent physic. He died B.C. 257. Valerius Maximus, bk. 5, ch. 7.—Plutarch, Demetrius.
Erăto, one of the muses who presided over lyric, tender, and amorous poetry. She is represented as crowned with roses and myrtle, holding in her right hand a lyre, and a lute in her left, musical instruments of which she is considered by some as the inventress. Love is sometimes placed by her side holding a lighted flambeau, while she herself appears with a thoughtful, but oftener with a gay and animated look. She was invoked by lovers, especially in the month of April, which, among the Romans, was more particularly devoted to love. Apollodorus, bk. 10.—Virgil, Æneid, bk. 7, li. 37.—Ovid, de Ars Amatoria, bk. 2, li. 425.——One of the Nereides. Apollodorus, bk. 1, ch. 2.——One of the Dryades, wife of Arcas king of Arcadia. Pausanias, bk. 8, ch. 4.——One of the Danaides, who married Bromius.——A queen of the Armenians, after the death of Ariobarzanes, &c. Tacitus, Annals, bk. 2, ch. 4.
Eratosthĕnes, son of Aglaus, was a native of Cyrene, and the second entrusted with the care of the Alexandrian library. He dedicated his time to grammatical criticism and philosophy, but more particularly to poetry and mathematics. He has been called a second Plato, the cosmographer and the geometer of the world. He is supposed to be the inventor of the armillary sphere. With the instruments with which the munificence of the Ptolemies supplied the library of Alexandria, he was enabled to measure the obliquity of the ecliptic, which he called 20½ degrees. He also measured a degree of the meridian, and determined the extent and circumference of the earth with great exactness, by means adopted by the moderns. He starved himself after he had lived to his 82nd year, B.C. 194. Some few fragments remain of his compositions. He collected the annals of the Egyptian kings by order of one of the Ptolemies. Cicero, Letters to Atticus, bk. 2, ltr. 6.—Varro, de Re Rustica, bk. 1, ch. 2.
Eratostrătus, an Ephesian who burnt the famous temple of Diana, the same night that Alexander the Great was born. This burning, as some writers have observed, was not prevented or seen by the goddess of the place, who was then present at the labours of Olympias, and the birth of the conqueror of Persia. Eratostratus did this villainy merely to eternize his name by so uncommon an action. Plutarch, Alexander.—Valerius Maximus, bk. 8, ch. 14.
Erātus, a son of Hercules and Dynaste. Apollodorus.——A king of Sicyon, who died B.C. 1671.
Erbessus, a town of Sicily north of Agrigentum, now Monte Bibino. Livy, bk. 24, ch. 30.
Erchia, a small village of Attica, the birthplace of Xenophon. Diogenes Laërtius, bk. 2, ch. 48.