The heliocentric hypothesis is here stated in language which leaves no room for doubt about its meaning. The sun, like the fixed stars, remains unmoved and forms the centre of a circular orbit in which the earth moves round it; the sphere of the fixed stars has its centre at the centre of the sun.
We have further evidence in a passage of Plutarch’s tract, _On the face in the moon’s orb_: “Only do not, my dear fellow, enter an action for impiety against me in the style of Cleanthes, who thought it was the duty of Greeks to indict Aristarchus on the charge of impiety for putting in motion the Hearth of the Universe, this being the effect of his attempt to save the phenomena by supposing the heaven to remain at rest and the earth to revolve in an oblique circle, while it rotates, at the same time, about its own axis”.
Here we have the additional detail that Aristarchus followed Heraclides in attributing to the earth the daily rotation about its axis; Archimedes does not state this in so many words, but it is clearly involved by his remark that Aristarchus supposed the fixed stars as well as the sun to remain unmoved in space. A tract “Against Aristarchus” is mentioned by Diogenes Laertius among Cleanthes’s works; and it was evidently published during Aristarchus’s lifetime (Cleanthes died about 232 B.C.).
We learn from another passage of Plutarch that the hypothesis of Aristarchus was adopted, about a century later, by Seleucus, of Seleucia on the Tigris, a Chaldæan or Babylonian, who also wrote on the subject of the tides about 150 B.C. The passage is interesting because it also alludes to the doubt about Plato’s final views. “Did Plato put the earth in motion as he did the sun, the moon and the five planets which he called the ‘instruments of time’ on account of their turnings, and was it necessary to conceive that the earth ‘which is globed about the axis stretched from pole to pole through the whole universe’ was not represented as being (merely) held together and at rest but as turning and revolving, as Aristarchus and Seleucus afterwards maintained that it did, the former of whom stated this as only a hypothesis, the latter as a definite opinion?”
No one after Seleucus is mentioned by name as having accepted the doctrine of Aristarchus and, if other Greek astronomers refer to it, they do so only to denounce it. Hipparchus, himself a contemporary of Seleucus, definitely reverted to the geocentric system, and it was doubtless his authority which sealed the fate of the heliocentric hypothesis for so many centuries.