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Updated: June 2, 2025
We come now to the time of Plato, and here the great names are Archytas, Theodoras of Cyrene, Theaetetus, and Eudoxus. He is said to have been the first to write a treatise on mechanics based on mathematical principles; on the practical side he invented a mechanical dove which would fly.
But we find ourselves in one and the same ecstasy with Eudoxus, Archimedes, and Hipparchus; and we readily give assent to Plato when he saith of the mathematics, that while ignorance and unskilledness make men despise them, they still thrive notwithstanding by reason of their charmingness, in despite of contempt.
Eudoxus, too, who, like the others, lived in Asia Minor in the fourth century B.C., was held to have made special studies of the heavenly spheres and perhaps to have taught that the earth moves. So, too, Nicetas must be named among those whom rumor credited with having taught that the world is in motion.
This makes me often think on a Story I have heard of two Friends, which I shall give my Reader at large, under feigned Names. The Moral of it may, I hope, be useful, though there are some Circumstances which make it rather appear like a Novel, than a true Story. Eudoxus and Leontine began the World with small Estates. They were both of them Men of good Sense and great Virtue.
The idea of such an explanation did not originate with Hipparchus. The germs of the thought were as old as the Pythagorean doctrine that the earth revolves about a centre that we cannot see. Eudoxus gave the conception greater tangibility, and may be considered as the father of this doctrine of wheels epicycles, as they came to be called.
They prosecuted their studies together in their earliest years, and entered into such a friendship as lasted to the end of their lives. Eudoxus, at his first setting out in the world, threw himself into a court, where, by his natural endowments and his acquired abilities, he made his way from one post to another, till at length he had raised a very considerable fortune.
He was more especially worshipped at Heliopolis. Plato, Eudoxus, and probably Pythagoras also, profited by the teaching of his priests. The obelisks, serving also as memorial monuments on which the names and deeds of great kings were recorded, were sacred to him, and Pliny remarks of them that they represented the rays of the sun. "On perceiving it, they fell down to worship.
How far he took these vessels we do not know, but after having had communication with some natives, whom he thought were Ethiopians, he returned to Mauritania. Thence he went to Tiberia, and made preparations for another attempt to circumnavigate Africa, but whether he ever set out upon this voyage is not known; in fact some learned men are even inclined to consider Eudoxus an impostor.
Eudoxus, in the fifth century before Christ, contributed to science by making a descriptive map of the heavens, which was used as a manual of sidereal astronomy to the sixth century of our era. The error of only one hundred and ninety days in the periodic time of Saturn shows that there had been for a long time close observations.
Eudoxus relates that the Egyptian priests affirm that, when it is summer to us who dwell under the northern tropic, it is winter with them that inhabit under the southern tropic; by this means there is a various contrariety and opposition of the seasons in the year, which cause such showers to fall as make the water to overflow the banks of the Nile and diffuse itself throughout all Egypt.
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