...rather different from what we might expect. One astronomer who tackled the subject is Aristarchus. His treatise On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon is the one complete work of his that is extant. It is a fascinating document that raises many thorny...

...of the Earth on its axis. None of his writings on this subject have survived. (We do have, however, his treatise On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon, which is discussed in sec. 1.17.) As we have seen, there were a handful of thinkers in antiquity who...

...measurements performed by the Alexandrian astronomers, such as those described by Aristarchos of Samos in his treatise "On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon" or the famous determination of the Earth's circumference by Eratosthenes of Cyrene. Eratosthenes's...