Terrestrial and celestial globes; their history and ... - 24grammata.com

Terrestrial and Celestial Globes.
the heavens) was spoken of, and he was, by chance, at the
house of Marcellus, who had been consul with him, he
described a globe among the spoils of that opulent and
magnificent city of Syracuse, when captured, as the only
thing among all the spoils which he ordered to be carried
to his own house ; about which globe I have often heard, on
account of the fame of Archimedes, although the work
itself was not very remarkable, for there was another far
more beautiful and more honored by the common people,
made by the same Archimedes, and placed in the Temple of
Virtue by the same Marcellus. But afterward when Gallus
began to explain scientifically the object of the machine, I
thought there was more ingenuity
in that Sicilian than
human nature was capable of. For Gallus informed me that
there was another ancient invention of a solid and elabo-
rately formed globe which was made by Thales, the
Milesian, to revolve. And afterward the same was, by
Eudoxus of Cnidos, the disciple of Plato, adorned with the
fixed stars of heaven, and with every ornament and embel-
lishment, as described by Eudoxus, and was many years
afterward celebrated by Aratus, not exactly in the scientific
language of astronomy, but with the graces of poetry. This
species of globe indeed, in which the sun and moon were
made to revolve, and five of those stars which have been
called travelers, and as it were wanderers, could not possibly
be exhibited on that solid sphere. And more especially was
that invention of Archimedes to be admired, for he had so
contrived that one revolution of the machine served somehow
to produce unequal and varied movements through
their different paths. For when Gallus set the globe in
motion, the moon succeeded the sun by as many turns of
the brass wheel of the machine as days in the heavens, so
that the globe represented in the heavens the same eclipse
of the sun, when the moon arrived at a certain place or
point, as the shadow of the earth did when the sun shone
from the opposite region."^
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