Praeparatio Evangelica (The Preparation of the Gospel)

[PLUTARCH] 'ANAXIMANDER: that there is a circle twenty-eight times as large as the Earth, having its circumference like a chariot-wheel, hollow, and full of fire, and partly showing the fire through an opening, as through a bellows-pipe: and this is the Sun.

'Xenophanes: it is formed from the sparks which are seen to be collected from watery vapour, and which compose the Sun out of burning clouds.

'The Stoics: a flame out of the sea, endowed with intelligence.

'Plato: out of an immense fire.

'Anaxagoras, Democritus, Metrodorus: a fiery mass of metal or stone.

'Aristotle: a globe of the fifth corporeal element.

'Philolaus the Pythagorean: a disk as of glass, which receives the reflected radiance of the fire in the cosmos, and transmits the light to us; so that the Sun's fiery appearance in the heaven is like the light which comes to us dispersed by reflexion from the mirror: for this light also we call the Sun, being as it were an image of an image.

'Empedocles: there are two Suns; the one archetypal, a fire in the other hemisphere of the cosmos, which, has filled that hemisphere, being always opposite to its own reflected light; and the other which we see is the reflected light in this other hemisphere which is filled with air mixed with heat, formed by reflexion from the spherical surface of the Earth and failing upon the crystalline Sun, and carried round with the motion of the fiery Sun: but to express it more shortly, the Sun is the reflexion of the fire that surrounds the Earth.

'Epicurus: a compact mass of earth, resembling pumice or sponge in its pores, and kindled by the fire.'