Heraclides Ponticus c. 387 BC – c. 312 BC

Heraclides Ponticus was a Greek philosopher of the early Academy, born at Heraclea on the Pontus and trained at Athens under Plato. A polymath of extraordinary range, he wrote on physics, astronomy, rhetoric, music, history, and the soul, and was credited in antiquity with the doctrine that the Earth rotates daily on its own axis while the heavens stand still, and with the proposal that the inner planets orbit the Sun rather than the Earth. He developed an atomistic-corpuscular natural philosophy distinct from that of Democritus and wrote vivid philosophical dialogues, only fragments of which survive.