Note 257 — BOOK II. AN ACCOUNT OF THE WORLD AND THE ELEMENTS.

Marcus remarks upon the inconsistency between the account here given of Pythagoras’s opinion, and what is generally supposed to have been his theory of the planetary system, according to which the sun, and not the earth, is placed in the centre; Enfield’s Philosophy, i. 288, 289. Yet we find that Plato, and many others among the ancients, give us the same account of Pythagoras’s doctrine of the respective distances of the heavenly bodies; Ajasson, ii. 374. Plato in his Timæus, 9. p. 312-315, details the complicated arrangement which he supposes to constitute the proportionate distances of the planetary bodies.