ARISTARCO DA SAMO

ARISTARCHUS OF SAMOS. — Greek mathematician and astronomer, who lived between the years 310 and 230 B.C. He had the great merit of enunciating and defending the same hypotheses that form the basis of the system rediscovered 18 centuries later by Copernicus, namely that the fixed stars and the sun are motionless and that the earth rotates on its axis and moreover describes a circle of which the sun is the centre. It follows that the sun is much more distant from the earth than the moon, and that the fixed stars are at a very great distance from the sun and the earth. This theory, already intuited by Heracleides of Pontus, made the cosmogonic conceptions of the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians and Greeks appear paltry. The astrologers, says Schiaparelli, «sought with all their might to suppress a theory that was bound to overthrow all their fabrications». Plutarch (De Facie in Orbe Lunae) relates that Cleanthes had accused A. of impiety. Archimedes described A.’s theories in his Sand-Reckoner. Seneca (Nat. Quaest., VII, 2) reported them as: *digna res est contemplatione ut sciamus in quo rerum status*.