This last discovery may really belong to a later age, but there is no doubt that Anaximander conceived (and almost certainly constructed) a spherical model for the heavens, in the center of which was placed Earth, as a disk or cylinder whose height was one-third its diameter. The ratio 1:3 seems also to have been used in the spacing of the celestial circles or rings assigned to stars, moon, and sun: The conjectural sizes for these rings are 9, 18, and 27 Earth diameters, respectively. (His strange error in assigning the lowest circle to the stars is unexplained. There is, unfortunately, no evidence to support J. Burnet's attractive suggestion that this circle corresponds not to the fixed stars but to bright planets such as Venus. If we could accept this, the fixed stars might then be assigned to their natural place at the periphery of the celestial sphere.)
Anaximander is thus the author of the first geometrical model of the universe, a model characterized not by vagueness and mystery but by visual clarity and rational proportion, and hence radically different in kind from all known "cosmologies" of earlier literature and myth.
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