infinite space (a belief he shared with others, like De ̄mokritos and some Pythagoreans).
Moreover, he carefully described the movements of Venus and Mercury as both morning
and evening stars endowed with a maximum elongation from the Sun (50 ̊ for Venus, less
for Mercury). But there is no reason to believe that he had these two planets rotating
around the Sun rather than around the Earth. Furthermore, there is no proof that he
thought the Earth circulated around the Sun (as A S was later to
suggest), and no hint at all that he attributed such a revolution to the superior planets (Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn).
Ed.: Wehrli v. 7 (1953); this will be soon superseded by W.W. Fortenbaugh and E. Schütrumpf, edd.,
Heraclides of Pontus = RUSCH 14 (forthcoming 2008), with a collection of essays (on He ̄rakleidean
astronomy, see especially those by A.C. Bowen and R.B. Todd, and by P.T. Keyser; on physics, R.W.
Sharples).
RE S.11 (1968) 675–686, F. Wehrli; H.B. Gottschalk, Heraclides of Pontus (1980); DPA 3 (2000) 563–568,
J.-P. Schneider.
Silvia FazzoHe ̄rakleide ̄s of He ̄rakleia Pontike ̄, Junior (1st c. CE)
Author of a Musical Introduction (Mousike ̄ eisago ̄ge ̄), from which a fragment on acoustics is
preserved by P in his commentary on P’s Harmonics (30.1–31.21
Düring). It is possible that he is to be identified with the famous 4th c. BCE H
H P, but more probably Porphurios is quoting from the 1st c. CE
author of the same name, who studied under Didumos of Alexandria (“Khalkenteros”) and
later lived in Rome during the reigns of Claudius and Nero. This He ̄rakleide ̄s may have
been the father of D “ ,” whose work is also quoted by
Porphurios.
The fragment of He ̄rakleide ̄s is concerned with the physical causes of pitched sound. It
begins with a quotation from X about P’ discovery of the numer-
ical basis of musical intervals, and briefly discusses his investigations of concord and dis-
cord, in which sound was linked to movement, movement to quantity, and thus quantity to
sound.
He ̄rakleide ̄s’ main argument, similar in many respects to the acoustic theories of the
E S C and the A C O S, stops short
of making the anticipated link between speed of movement and pitch of note. Musical
notes are made up of discrete impacts, each of which has no duration in time, but which are
perceived in succession as a single pitch because of the weakness of our hearing, just as a
single dot of white on a spinning cone appears to the eye as a solid line.
He ̄rakleide ̄s demonstrates his theory with the example of a stretched string. (He makes no
appeal to wind instruments as A does, and thus avoids the complications which
such instruments introduce.) The backward and forward movement of the string produces
discrete impacts on the air; between the impacts are silences, which are so brief as to be
imperceptible to the ear. The impacts thus give the appearance (phantasia) of a single con-
tinuous sound. One difficulty is that He ̄rakleide ̄s considers the individual impacts as “notes”
(phthongoi); his theory does not apparently deal with the inevitable question of how the
impacts themselves acquire their pitch. The theory is therefore not in the strictest sense a
kind of acoustic atomism.
HE ̄RAKLEIDE ̄S OF HE ̄RAKLEIA PONTIKE ̄, JUNIOR