Horse's Mouth

I am at that customer's house again, loafing after doing a bit of yard work, and picked up Newton's Principia again.  Here is yet another quote from the pen of a revered philosopher of nature that contradicts the thousands of authoritive declarations in modern science literature indicating that the ancients thought the Sun went around Earth.

Someone is mistaken in their history of so called science, and since I have read Plato's Timeaus I am inclined to take Newton's word over the multitude of modern authorities.

"THE SYSTEM OF THE WORLD
The matter of the heavens is fluid.

It was the ancient opinion of not a few, in the earliest ages of philosophy, that the fixed stars stood inmovable in the highest parts of the world; that under the fixed stars the planets were carried about the sun; that the earth, as one of the planets, drscribed an annual course about the sun, while by a diurnal motion it was in the meantime revolved about its own axis; and that the sun as the common fire which served to warm the whole, was fixed at the center of the universe.

This was the philosophy taught of old by Philolaus, Aristarchus of Samos, Plato in his riper years, and the whole set of the Pythagoreans; and this was the judgment of Anaximander, more ancient still..."

Oh, it is beautiful passage.  His remarks about the Greeks, Chaldeans and Egyptians are not to be missed.  The difference (to me) is staggering, between what the old philosophers wrote and what authoritative sources repeat about them.