Dicaearchus

He was the son of one Pheidias, and born at Messana in Sicily,[3] Magna Graecia, though he passed part of his life in Greece, and especially in Athens and the Peloponnesus.

He was a disciple of Aristotle[5] and a friend of Aristoxenus (a letter written to him is attested in Cicero[6]).

Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century scholarship often considered him a friend of Theophrastus as well, but this is based on the reference to a man named Theophrastus in the spurious Description of Greece, which is transmitted under Dicaearchus's name but actually consists of excerpts from a geographic poem written by Dionysius, son of Calliphon, and from a prose periegesis of Greece, written by Heraclides Criticus.

According to Pliny,[7] Dicaearchus measured mountains "with the support of the kings" (cura regum).

[8] Dicaearchus was highly esteemed by the ancients as a philosopher and as a man of most extensive and learned information upon a great variety of things.