Did Copernicus Owe a Debt to Aristarchus?

The famous passage in the Sand-reckoner reads: “But Aristarchus brought out a book consisting of certain hypotheses, wherein it appears, as a consequence of the assumptions made, that the universe is many times greater than the universe just mentioned. His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the Sun remain unmoved, that the Earth revolves about the Sun in the circumference of a circle, the Sun lying in the middle of the orbit, and that the sphere of the fixed stars, situated about the same centre as the Sun, is so great that the circle in which he supposes the Earth to revolve bears such a proportion to the distance of the fixed stars as the centre of the sphere bears to its surface.” The translation is from Sir Thomas Heath, Aristarchus of Samos (Oxford, 1913), 302.

These are the three observations of Mercury by Bernard Walther, not published until 1544.

Even though Valla failed to mention the Sand-reckoner, he did in fact own the oldest and most complete manuscript of Archimedes, namely Greek manuscript A, which is the source for our text of the Sand-reckoner. Furthermore, Valla had seen a translation made by Jacobus Cremonensis around 1450; Jacobus's own copy of the translation went to the Marciana in Venice in 1468, where it remains today (Marciana f.a.327). A copy of this translation was sent to Nicholas of Cusa, and Regiomontanus made another copy around 1462 which was the basis for the printed Basel edition of 1544. I am indebted to Marshall Clagett for these details, found in his Archimedes in the Middle Ages, iii, part III, The medieval Archimedes in the Renaissance, 1450–1565 (Philadelphia, 1978), chap. 2.

This is established with a complete word-in-context index prepared by Heribert Nobis at the Copernicus Forschungsstelle in Munich, and with the index and notes in Edward Rosen's translation, Nicholas Copernicus, On the revolutions (Warsaw-Cracow, 1978). The references are found in Book III, chaps. 2, 6, and 13.

See Swerdlow N. M. and Neugebauer O. , Mathematical astronomy in Copernicus' De revolutionibus (New York, 1984), n. 11 on p. 133.

Probably taken from Censorinus , De die natali liber, chap. 19; this small work appeared in at least eight collections printed during Copernicus's lifetime.

Based on the translation on p. 513 in Gingerich Owen , “From Copernicus to Kepler: Heliocentrism as model and reality”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, cxvii (1973), 513–22.

This task is rendered much easier by the article and notes of Rosen cited in refs 4 and 15, and by the review by Wall Emerson Byron , “Anatomy of a precurser, The historiography of Aristarchos of Samos”, Studies in the history and philosophy of science, vi (1975), 201–28.

I feel that it is unfortunate that the two most recent English translators of Copernicus's book, Duncan A. M. (1976) and Rosen Edward (1978), have disregarded his decision and have inserted the cancelled “Letter from Lysis” directly into the text rather than into an appendix.

Amidenus Aetius [Pseudo-Plutarch], De placitis philosophorum III.13; Diels Hermann , Doxographi Graeci (Stuttgart, 1929); translation from Rosen , On the revolutions, 5.

De motione terrae, f. 20v, De philosophorum placitis (Strassburg, 1516); I am indebted to Jerzy Dobrzycki for access to a microfilm of the Uppsala copy of this rare edition — see below, ref. 17.

Ibid. f. 14, Aristarchus solem haerentibus stellis annumerat terram vero circulum solis orbem versat itaque eius inclinationibus obumbrari solem voluit. The Greek text (from Diels , Doxographi Graeci, 355) is: .

Cherniss Harold (trans.), Plutarch's Moralia, xiii (Loeb Library, Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 77, 79.

Based on Cherniss Harold , and Helmbold William C. (trans.), Plutarch's Moralia, xii (Loeb Library, Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 55.

Rosen Edward , “Aristarchus of Samos and Copernicus”, Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists, xv (1978), 85–93, esp. pp. 89–90.

Rosen translation, On the revolutions, 4.

This collection of short works is still found in the Uppsala University Library — see item 42, p. 380, in Czartoryski Pawel , “The library of Copernicus”, pp. 355–96 in Science and history: Studies in honor of Edward Rosen (Studia Copernicana, xvi) (Wroclaw, 1978).

See Swerdlow Noel M. , “The derivation and first draft of Copernicus's Planetary theory”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, cxvii (1973), 423–512.

After I presented this paper in Samos in 1980, Prof. L. Biermann pointed out Eugen Brachvogel's “Nikolaus Koppernikus und Aristarch von Samos”, Zeitschrift für die Geschichte und Altertumskunde Ermlands, xxv (1935), 703–67. Brachvogel's conclusions, more philosophically based, are similar: “Kein Faden, nichts, führt da von Aristarch zu Koppernikus. Was dieser an der Weite des Himmels erschaute, hat er für sich allein erspäht.”