The
stadion (; ), formerly also
anglicized as
stade,
was an
ancient Greek unit of
length, based on the length of a typical sports
stadium of the time. According to
Herodotus, one stadion was equal to 600
Greek feet (
pous). 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. Various hypothetical equivalent lengths have been proposed, and some have been named. Among them are:
An
empirical determination of the length of the stadion was made by Lev Vasilevich Firsov, who compared 81 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