Me ̄nophilos (120 BCE – 25 CE)
C 6.7.2C describes his ear medicine: pepper, myrrh, saffron, poppy “tears,” pome-
granate peel, almonds, etc., in honey and very sour vinegar. The name is unattested before
300 BCE (LGPN), and the use of pepper suggests the terminus post, when Indian trade made it
more available.
Fabricius (1726) 336.
PTK
M ⇒ V
M ⇒ P
Metagene ̄s of Kno ̄ssos (550 – 500 BCE)
With his father K, began the great Temple of Artemis at Ephesos, and
wrote about it in one of the earliest known architectural treatises (V 7.pr.12, 16).
Metagene ̄s also invented a rolling framework for moving large rectangular epistyle blocks of
the temple, an extension of his father’s invention for the column drums (Vitr. 10.2.12, 13).
Svenson-Ebers (1996) 67–99; KLA 2.78–79, A. Bammer.
Margaret M. Miles
Meto ̄n of Athens (440 – 410 BCE)
Astronomer who, with E, observed the summer solstice on the morning of 13
Skirophorion ( probably 27 June 432 BCE) on the Pnyx using a he ̄liotropaion (an instrument
of disputed nature) and devised a 19-year calendar, whose first period presumably would
have begun on the next new moon. The period was 235 months, which required 12 years
with 12 months and 7 years with 13 months. This part of the system was certainly based
on the Babylonian 19-year system and probably distributed months in the same way. More-
over, the period was 6,940 days, implying a year of 365 5/19 days and an average synodic
month of 29 25/47 days. The distribution of hollow (29 days) and full months (30 days)
might have used a scheme like that reported by G, Elem. Astron. 8. To yield 235
months in 6,940 days, the system treats all months as having 30 days (making 7,050 days),
but then drops a day every 64th day (i.e. after the 63rd day), with the month being hollow,
to bring the total back down to 6,940 days. The period was called “Meto ̄n’s cycle”
(D S 12.36.2–3). Whatever Meto ̄n’s purpose was in devising the
calendar, it was used as the basis of astronomical observation, especially in its revised
form by K. Meto ̄n may have begun the practice of erecting public parape ̄g-
mata, traces of which survive in Geminus and P (also, Schol. A 752).
Meto ̄n and Eukte ̄mo ̄n parceled out the seasons (P. P G 1): summer (90
days), fall (90 days), winter (92 days), and spring (by inference, 91 days). His appearance
in two comedies in 414 BCE, as a cloudy architect and geometer in Aristophane ̄s, The
Birds, and as a well-maintainer in Phrunikhos, The Recluse (Schol. Aristoph. Birds 997), probably
has more to do with his attempts to avoid military service in Sicily the previous year than
to his work as a mathematician (P, Alkibiade ̄s 17.5, Nikias 13.6; A, VH
13.12).
METO ̄N OF ATHENS