Thomas L. Heath: Aristarchus of Samos. The Ancient Copernicus

"Heath's history of Greek astronomy from Homer and Hesiod to Aristarchus serves to increase the wonder at Aristarchus' simple, radical reversal of perspective and the meagre, almost casual references to it, all second hand; it makes clear why Cleanthes "thought it was the duty of Greeks to indict Aristarchus of Samos on the charge of impiety for putting in motion the Hearth of the Universe ..." and shows that, although the theory "saved the phenomena," it was doomed as a geometer's idle whim that failed to fit observed facts. Heath's history quotes numerous thinkers, compilers and scholiasts from Thales and Anaximander through Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle and Heraclides; Heath was a mathematician as well as classical scholar and comments throughout on Greek mathematics, noting that Aristarchus' treatise "is the first extant specimen of pure geometry used with a trigonometrical object. . . ." This book reviews Aristarchus' claim to immortality, and disperses the mist obscuring his neglected but certain genius."