On the astronomy of the early Greek philosophers much information is given by Aristotle (especially in the De Caelo); for Aristotle was fortunately in the habit of stating the views of earlier thinkers as a preliminary to enunciating his own. Apart from what we learn from Aristotle, we are mainly dependent on the fragmentary accounts of the opinions of philosophers which were collected in the Doxographi Graeci of Hermann Diels (Berlin, 1879), to which must be added, for the period before Socrates, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker by the same editor (2nd edition, with index, 1906–10, 3rd edition, 1912). The doxographic data and the fragments for the period from Thales to Empedocles were translated and explained by Paul Tannery in Pour l’histoire de la Science HellÈne (Paris, 1887). A History of Astronomy was written by Eudemus of Rhodes, a pupil of Aristotle; this is lost, but a fair number of fragments are preserved by later writers. Of the theory of concentric spheres we have a short account in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, but a more elaborate and detailed description is contained in Simplicius’s commentary on the De Caelo; Simplicius quotes largely from Sosigenes the Peripatetic (second century A.D.) who drew upon Eudemus.

There are a number of valuable histories of Greek astronomy. In German we have Schaubach, Geschichte der griechischen Astronomie bis auf Eratosthenes, 1809; R. Wolf, Geschichte der Astronomie, 1877; and two admirable epitomes (1) by Siegmund GÜnther in Windelband’s Geschichte der alten Philosophie (Iwan von MÜller’s Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, Vol. V, Pt. 1), 2nd edition, 1894, and (2) by Friedrich Hultsch in Pauly-Wissowa’s Real-EncyclopÄdie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Art. Astronomie in Vol. II, 2, 1896). In French, besides the great work of Delambre, Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne, 1817, we have the valuable studies of Paul Tannery in Recherches sur l’histoire de l’astronomie ancienne, 1893, and Pierre Duhem, Le SystÈme du Monde, Vol. I, 1913.

In English, reference may be made to Sir G. Cornewall Lewis, An Historical Survey of the Astronomy of the Ancients, 1863; J.L.E. Dreyer, History of the Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler, Cambridge, 1906; and the historical portion of Sir Thomas Heath’s Aristarchus of Samos, the ancient Copernicus, Oxford, 1913.

Aristarchus’s treatise On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon first appeared in a Latin translation by George Valla in 1488 and 1498, and next in a Latin translation by Commandinus (1572). The editio princeps of the Greek text was brought out by John Wallis, Oxford, 1688, and was reprinted in Johannis Wallis Opera Mathematica, 1693–1699, Vol. III, in both cases along with Commandinus’s translation. In 1810 there appeared an edition by the Comte de Fortia d’Urban, Histoire d’Aristarque de Samos ... including the Greek text and Commandinus’s translation but without figures; a French translation by Fortia d’Urban followed in 1823. The treatise was translated into German by A. Nokk in 1854. Finally, Sir Thomas Heath’s work above cited contains a new Greek text with English translation and notes.