Something New Under the Sun in Anaximenes’ Astronomy?

Abstract Anaximenes famously taught that the sun and other ‘stars’ do not move under the flat earth but around it and explained the night thereby. What he had in mind remains conjectural; the testifying fragments are ambiguous and apparently contradictory. The past 200-odd years have seen a plethora of dissenting interpretations. The bulk of these are here categorised into three groups: that the sun circles at a fixed height above sea level; that it follows the familiar inclined path by day and clings to the northern horizon by night; and that it revolves in a circular orbit inclined relative to the earth. The first two scenarios are repudiated, while the third is fortified with several suggestions. It is argued that Anaximenes’ terms for ‘above’, ‘below’ and ‘around’ did not differentiate the altitudes of celestial bodies relative to the horizon, but the sizes of their orbits – as indicated by their projections on the earth’s plane. The point would have been that bodies in space are far enough from the earth to stay away from anyone’s zenith or nadir – perhaps with exceptions, following pseudo-Plutarch. This approach reconciles the variant readings in the fragments and obviates the need for emendations. The sun would still move through the north at night, but in an arc below the horizon – not horizontally over the Ocean or behind mountains, as some had it. Thus, Anaximenes would have enhanced Anaximander’s discovery that space facilitates inclined circular orbits by surrounding the earth on all sides. Awareness of the far-northern midnight twilight and the aurora borealis may have fed into all of these worldviews, the former legitimately and the latter fallaciously.