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Hipparchus of Rhodes

5 stories mention Hipparchus of Rhodes on DeadlyCurious.

The Footnote June 25, 2026 · Amaseia, Pontus

The Greek Geographer Who Preserved Most of What We Know About Eratosthenes by Citing Him to Disagree With Him

Strabo of Amaseia wrote the seventeen-book *Geographika* between approximately 20 BC and 23 AD. The work was substantially the last great Hellenistic geographical synthesis. Strabo disagreed with most of Eratosthenes's specific positions on geographical method, but cited him so extensively in the process of disagreeing that Strabo is now the principal surviving source for Eratosthenes's lost work.

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The Cabinet June 24, 2026 · Samos, Ionian Greece

The Greek Astronomer Who Proposed That the Earth Orbits the Sun Eighteen Centuries Before Copernicus

Aristarchus of Samos was a 3rd-century BC Greek astronomer who calculated that the Sun was many times larger than the Earth, that the Earth probably orbited the Sun, and that the apparent fixity of the stars meant they were much further away than anyone had previously thought. [Hipparchus](/articles/hipparchus-of-rhodes) rejected the proposal. The Copernican rediscovery came about 1,800 years later.

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The Cabinet June 24, 2026 · Samos, Aegean Sea

The Greek Astronomer Who Proposed the Heliocentric Model Eighteen Centuries Before Copernicus

Aristarchus of Samos proposed around 270 BC that the Earth orbits the Sun, not the other way around. The classical and late-antique Greek astronomical mainstream — including Hipparchus and Ptolemy — rejected the proposal on empirical grounds. The work survives only through a single passage in Archimedes.

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The Cabinet June 24, 2026 · Alexandria

The Astronomy Book That Synthesised Three Centuries of Greek Observation and Ruled Europe for Fourteen Centuries

Claudius Ptolemy's *Mathēmatikē Syntaxis* — known to Europe as the *Almagest* through its 9th-century Arabic translation — was the single dominant astronomical reference work of the Western world from approximately 150 AD to 1543. Most of its observational content was inherited from Hipparchus of Rhodes three centuries earlier.

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The Footnote June 18, 2026 · Rhodes, ancient Greece

The Greek Who Counted the Stars and Found the New One

Hipparchus of Rhodes catalogued a thousand stars, invented trigonometry, discovered the precession of the equinoxes, and may have built the original of the Antikythera mechanism. Almost none of his writing survives.

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