The Socratics and beyond: A Geocentric System

[Prokomenos]

The Socratics and beyond: A Geocentric System

The atomists Leucippus and Democritus in the generation preceding Socrates refined the various pre-Pythagorean views of space: there is a drum-shaped earth (in Leucippus), condensation is the falling-together of atoms, and centrifugal force helps keep the earth and bodies of fire in place (Diog, Laert. 9.30ff). Leucippus was probably from Miletus, and Democritus from Abdera; their development of atomic theory was a refinement of two centuries of Ionian scholarship.


After them, however, Socrates' pupil Plato and Plato's pupil Aristotle would espouse Pythagorean harmony and spheres and a geocentric system. Their many works analyze, refute, discuss, and expand on their successors; two of the passages representative of their views on astronomy are found in Plato's Timaeus 37dff and Aristotle's De Caelo 2,289a 11-291b 23. In keeping with these theories now becoming prevelant, the early fourth century mathematician Eudoxis of Knidos mathematically described the idea of concentric spheres (Aristot. Met. 1073b 17-1074 a 15), anticipated by the "wreaths" and "zones" of many earlier scientists and probably assumed by the Pythagoreans.
Having discovered a theory of the solar, or rather, geo- system which accounted for all visible phenomenon (and was, moreover, aesthetically pleasing), subsequent astronomers and philosophers fine-tuned the idea for their particular fields. The philosophers dwelt on harmony, cycle, and a new scheme of the divine; the mathematicians, a description of heaven in the marvellous language of geometry which was nowhere else in the physical world more eloquently expressed. Sophisticated three-dimensional moving systems were worked out by various geometers to account for observed inconsistencies in their basic theory. It would take many centuries before anyone had accurate enough observations to realize that the theory could not account for all data. By then, people would have even more difficulty letting go of their clockwork, geocentric, "divinely subsidized" universe than the Greeks, who had placed their version of a Bible, the Homeric and Hesiodic myth-cycle, into the realm of metaphor after executing only one gadfly of a philosopher.