For further references to similar efforts of imagination the reader is
referred to Sir George Cornwall Lewis's _Historical Survey of the
Astronomy of the Ancients_; London, 1862. His list of authorities
is very complete, but some of his conclusions are doubtful. At p. 113
of that work he records the real opinions of Socrates as set forth by
Xenophon; and the reader will, perhaps, sympathise with Socrates in
his views on contemporary astronomy:--

With regard to astronomy he [Socrates] considered a knowledge of it
desirable to the extent of determining the day of the year or month,
and the hour of the night, ... but as to learning the courses of the
stars, to be occupied with the planets, and to inquire about their
distances from the earth, and their orbits, and the causes of their
motions, he strongly objected to such a waste of valuable time. He
dwelt on the contradictions and conflicting opinions of the physical
philosophers, ... and, in fine, he held that the speculators on the
universe and on the laws of the heavenly bodies were no better than
madmen (_Xen. Mem_, i. 1, 11-15).

Plato (born 429 B.C.), the pupil of Socrates, the fellow-student of
Euclid, and a follower of Pythagoras, studied science in his travels
in Egypt and elsewhere. He was held in so great reverence by all
learned men that a problem which he set to the astronomers was the
keynote to all astronomical investigation from this date till the time
of Kepler in the sixteenth century. He proposed to astronomers _the
problem of representing the courses of the planets by circular and
uniform motions_.

Systematic observation among the Greeks began with the rise of the