Note 29 — FIRST PART. The Story of Astronomy from Primitive Times until the Age of Dante. (continued 2)

See Heath’s Aristarchus of Samos, pp. 187-189 and 251, 252. I very much regret that as Mr. Heath’s book was only published this year, I have been unable to make use of it while writing of early Greek astronomy. I can now only advise any readers who may be interested in my brief sketch of this period to read Mr. Heath’s history, where they will find the opinions of modern writers summarized and discussed, and also the full text (in English) of the most ancient and reliable sources of information. It is a great encouragement to find that my statements are in agreement with his in nearly all essential points, but readers will mark the following important differences:—

1. Anaximander’s heavens are said to have been spherical, not hemispherical, and this seems to be clearly proved by the evidence quoted from ancient writers.

2. Anaxagoras, not Thales, is said to have been the first to explain correctly the cause of solar eclipses and of the moon’s phases, viz. that the moon is an opaque body, shining only by reflected sunlight, and periodically hiding the sun from us when she passes in front of it. Mr. Heath regards the authorship of Anaxagoras as conclusively proved: readers will be able to judge of this from his quotations. Personally they seem to me to prove no more than that Anaxagoras agreed with others on this point, and was the first to express it clearly in writing. It is difficult to see why Mr. Heath denies that Parmenides held the same views before Anaxagoras: Parmenides’ own words seem to prove it, and his theory that the moon was composed of air and fire mingled is rather in favour of it than otherwise. He surely meant that the moon was not wholly bright, like the sun; yet that she had some light of her own must have seemed evident from the faint illumination we see during total lunar eclipses and on the part of her surface not lighted by the sun. (See Dante’s views, p. 402 of this book.)

The connection between her phases and her distance from the sun in the sky is so extremely obvious that I can hardly think the Greeks drew no inference from it until the fifth century b.c., and I cannot see why we should refuse to credit Thales with the discovery attributed to him that her light came in some way from the sun. Gruppe acutely observes that the reason why Thales’ pupil Anaximander did not accept the true explanation of lunar phases and solar eclipses may have been because he felt it necessary to have a theory which would apply equally well to eclipses of the moon; and as he believed in a flat earth he could not advocate the true explanation here. This was why he invented a new theory (viz. that both sun and moon were fire shining through holes in hollow rings, and that the occasional stopping up of these holes caused both lunar and solar eclipses, and also the lunar phases).

But Parmenides had learned the Pythagorean doctrine of Earth’s spherical form, hence he was able to accept the older theory that the moon obtains her light from the sun, and sometimes eclipses the sun by her opaque spherical body, for he could have added that the moon is eclipsed in like manner by the opaque spherical body of the earth.