Aristarchus of Samos
In 310 BCE, Aristarchus of Samos was born. He is one of the last of the Ionian scientists; known for his book On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon in which he estimated the volume of the Sun as three hundred times that of the Earth. Wrong as he was, it would have astonished Anaxagoras! Aristarchus also measured the Moon's diameter as one third of Earth's (an error of only eight percent). He is most famous, perhaps, for Heliocentrism (which Archimedes attributes to him), but whatever book he wrote this in didn't survive. There are mentions of him being accused of “putting the Hearth of the Universe” (i.e., the earth) ”in motion.” Nonetheless, he hesitated—like Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and many others—because he couldn’t reconcile this idea of heliocentrism on the pretext that the orbits must be perfectly circular. Apparently the only one in the ancient world who ever considered the imperfection of elliptical orbits came a hundred years after Aristarchus; his name was Hipparchus of Nicaea. He is known as one of the most patient observers of the ancient world. Had he further pursued this “eccentricity” of the elliptical orbits, he would have also been known as one of the best theorists of the age.
Source: Durant, Will, 1885-1981, The Life of Greece: A history of Greek government, industry, manners, morals, religion, philosophy, science, literature and art from the earliest times to the Roman conquest. Simon and Schuster, 1939.
License CC BY-SA 4.0
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Full disclosure, I may occasionally borrow a sentence from Will Durant's Story of Civilization. I absolutely love that collection!