ARISTARCHUS OF SAMOS. - Greek mathematician and astronomer, who lived between 310 and 230 B.C. He had the great merit of stating and defending the same hypotheses that underlie 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 furthermore describes a circle of which the sun is the center. It follows that the sun is much farther from the earth than the moon, and that the fixed stars are at a very great distance from the sun and from the earth. This theory, already intuited by Heraclides 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 throw all their trickeries into confusion." Plutarch (De Facie in Orbe Lunae) reports that Cleanthes had accused A. of impiety.

Archimedes described A.'s theories in his Arenarius. Seneca (Nat. Quaest., VII, 2) reported it as: digna res est contemplatione ut sciamus in quo rerum statu simus.

Bibliography3 works

BIBL.: Th. Heath, A. of Samos, the ancient Copernicus, Oxford 1913; id., A History of Greek Mathematics, Oxford 1921; A. Schiaparelli, Storia dell'Astronomia antica, Bologna 1925.

Giovanni Vacca

@incollection{ec1_aristarco_da_samo, author = {Vacca, Giovanni}, title = {Aristarco da Samo}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {I}, pages = {1905--1906}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1948}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/aristarco-da-samo} }

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Aristarchus of Samos

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