ABSTRACT
This chapter1 will present annotated translations of the texts and contexts that constitute the evidence for Heraclides’ most celebrated legacy-the theory2 that the Earth rotates daily on its axis from west to east. Its movement was inferred from the observable motions of the fixed stars, with these being explained as the apparent motions of an immobile celestial sphere. (Evidence for Heraclides’ special theories of the motions of Mercury and Venus will be discussed in the next two chapters: first by Alan C. Bowen and Robert B. Todd, and then by Paul Keyser.) The passages translated here (T1-6) go well beyond the brief reports found in the relevant “fragments” of modern editions (65C, 66-9, and 71 in volume XIV = 104-8 and 110 W). These fragments, drawn from secondary reports, consist only of the immediate context of passages in which Heraclides is named, in line with a practice prob-
ably best known from Edelstein’s and Kidd’s edition of Posidonius’ fragments. But such limited parcels of evidence (enclosed in our translations by //…//) cannot indicate why Heraclides was mentioned within larger expositions.3 To be sure, such collections of source material are useful, but they have to be selective for pragmatic reasons and therefore also need to be complemented by the sort of project undertaken here, particularly where the focus is on one of antiquity’s most famous anticipations of modern cosmology, and where the contexts for the earliest references to it reveal the historical and theoretical framework within which it was received. To the authors in question Heraclides may have been just a footnote, but the texts to which his theory was attached amply repay careful study.
