Page:The Gradual Acceptance of the Copernican Theory of the Universe.djvu/21

 feet and that each morning the sun swept from the east to set at night in the west. Sometimes it rose more to the north or to the south than at other times. How could that be explained if the sun were stationary?

Study of the stars was valuable for navigators and for surveyors, perhaps, but such disturbing theories should not be propounded by philosophers. Cleanthes, according to Plutarch, "advised that the Greeks ought to have prosecuted Aristarchus the Samian for blasphemy against religion, as shaking the very foundations of the world, because this man endeavoring to save appearances, supposed that the heavens remained immovable and that the earth moved through an oblique circle, at the same time turning about its own axis." Few would care to face their fellows as blasphemers and impious thinkers on behalf of an unsupported theory. Eighteen hundred years later Galileo would not do so, even though in his day the theory was by no means unsupported by observation.

Furthermore, one of the weaknesses of the Greek civilization militated strongly against the acceptance of this hypothesis so contrary to the evidence of the senses. Experimentation and the development of applied science was practically an impossibility where the existence of slaves made manual labor degrading and shameful. Men might reason indefinitely; but few, if any, were willing to try to improve the instruments of observation or to test their observations by experiments.

At the same time another astronomical theory was developing which was an adequate explanation for the phenomena observed up to that time. This theory of epicycles and eccentrics worked out by Apollonius of Perga (c. 225 B. C.) and by Hipparchus (c. 160 B. C.) and crystallized for posterity in Ptolemy's great treatise on astronomy, the Almagest, (c. 140 A. D.) became the fundamental principle of the science until within the last three hundred years. The theory of the eccentric was based on the idea that heavenly bodies following circular orbits revolved

13