ARISTARCHOS OF SAMOS

Aristarchos (c. 310-230 BC) was born in Samos and attended the Peripatetic School of Athens. Vitruvius includes him among those rare polymaths who were equally versed in geometry, astronomy, music and other arts. Aristarchos is credited with the invention of an improved sundial and also wrote on vision, light, and colours. His only extant work is On the sizes and distances of the sun and the moon, in which he has not yet challenged the earth-centred model. In a treatise that has not survived, he was the first to put forward the heliocentric theory. According to Archimedes, “His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved, and that the earth revolves around the sun in the circumference of a circle with the sun at the centre”. Accused of impiety for his revolutionary theory, he left for Alexandria, and his work was ignored. It took almost two thousand years for the heliocentric theory to be revived by Copernicus, who did mention the theory of Aristarchos in a passage that he afterwards omitted from the published version of his On the revolutions of the heavenly orbs.