Note 118 — Chapter I · INTRODUCTION

Sir Thomas Heath, Aristarchus of Samos, the Ancient Copernicus: a history of Greek astronomy to Aristarchus together with Aristarchus’s treatise, “On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon,” a new Greek text with translation and notes, Oxford, 1913, admits that “our treatise does not contain any suggestion of any but the geocentric view of the universe, whereas Archimedes tells us that Aristarchus wrote a book of hypotheses, one of which was that the sun and the fixed stars remain unmoved and that the earth revolves round the sun in the circumference of a circle.” Such evidence seems scarcely to warrant applying the title of “The Ancient Copernicus” to Aristarchus. And Heath thinks that Schiaparelli (I precursori di Copernico nell’antichità, and other papers) went too far in ascribing the Copernican hypothesis to Heraclides of Pontus. On Aristotle’s answer to Pythagoreans who denied the geocentric theory see Orr (1913), pp. 100-2.