Stadion (unit)
The stadion, was an ancient Greek unit of length, consisting of 600 Ancient Greek feet. There are a range of varieties or understandings of what a stadion was and is; these have been calculated by various historians, and those calculations have varied dramatically. Thus, the exact length of one stadion is not known or universally agreed today: historians estimate it at between, with perhaps something of a convergence around the length of an Attic stade.
Calculations
According to Herodotus, one stadium was equal to 600 Greek feet. However, the length of the foot varied in different parts of the Greek world, and the length of the stadion has been the subject of argument and hypothesis for hundreds of years.An empirical determination of the length of the stadion was made by Lev Vasilevich Firsov, who compared 81 possibly inaccurate, non-straight-line distances given by Eratosthenes and Strabo with the straight-line distances measured by modern methods, and averaged the results. He obtained a result of about. Various comparator lengths, translating the length of a stadion into modern units of length, have been proposed, and some have been named. Among them are:
Which measure of the stadion is used can affect the interpretation of ancient texts. For example, the error in the calculation of Earth's circumference by Eratosthenes or Posidonius is dependent on which stadion is chosen to be appropriate.