HERACLEA was also the name of one of the Sporades, between Naxos and Ios, which is still called Raklia, and bears traces of a Greek township with temples to Tyche and Zeus Lophites.
Greek philosopher, born at Heracleia in Pontus, flourished in the 4th century B.C. He was a pupil of Plato. According to Suidas, Plato, on his departure for Sicily, left his school in charge of Heracleides. Fantastic stories about him are told in Diogenes Laertius, v. c. 6. He is said to have written brilliant works on a wide range of subjects, ethical, grammatical, musical, rhetorical, historical, as well as geometri cal and dialectical treatises. He is famous in the history of astron omy for having been the first to maintain that the apparent daily rotation of the heavens is accounted for, not by the motion of the stars round the earth, but by the rotation of the earth itself about its own axis ; he also took a notable step towards the Copernican hypothesis by declaring that the planets Mercury and Venus revolve in circles round the sun as centre like satellites.
see Otto Voss, De Heraclidis Pontici vita et scriptis (1896) . (T. L. H.) .
