Of course, he seemed to also think that you could walk on the sun, but can't blame him for extending the logic and not knowing that the sun's composition wasn't great for walking.
> Of course, he seemed to also think that you could walk on the sun, but can't blame him for extending the logic and not knowing that the sun's composition wasn't great for walking.
William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus, also speculated that the Sun might be populated. It wasn't until the 19th century that the surface temperature of the Sun was estimated.
Greek was also the lingua franca of philosophy, mathematics, etc. in the Eastern Mediterranean for several centuries. If we are talking about astronomy, it is also e.g. common to call Ptolemy a “Greek” astronomer, even though he lived in the Roman province of Egypt.
When I hear "Ancient Greece" I generally think of Greece through the Hellenistic period. Though now that I've said that, Lucian would have lived through the Roman annexation of Greece.
Really, my point was Lucian lived at the more recent end of antiquity. Humanity's knowledge of the world around them was quite a bit different then than 500 years prior.
I also feel the need to point out how hilariously pedantic this conversation is, and how much I enjoy that.
According to Wikipedia, it is speculated that Lucian’s native language may have been Syriac (Aramaic). But then all of his writing was done in Greek, mostly while he was living in Athens (after a lawyer/philosophy professor career traveling around the Roman empire). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucian
The only celestial bodies that you can't do that with are the ones that are point sources to the naked eye, like the planets. Those take lenses and telescopes.
The page documents how this then filtered into Roman and early Muslim astronomical traditions. Granted, since only a small percentage of people in these societies were literate, it was probably true that most people in, say, the Roman or Sasanian empires thought the earth was flat. But given what we know about the ways that premodern books were read (often in public, sometimes to a large groups of people) it seems to me like an open question.
There's also this very interesting aside about the possibility that the Phoenicians also knew the earth was round, perhaps even predating the Greeks: "In The Histories, written 431–425 BC, Herodotus cast doubt on a report of the Sun observed shining from the north. He stated that the phenomenon was observed during a circumnavigation of Africa undertaken by Phoenician explorers employed by Egyptian pharaoh Necho II c. 610–595 BC (The Histories, 4.42) who claimed to have had the Sun on their right when circumnavigating in a clockwise direction. To modern historians, these details confirm the truth of the Phoenicians' report and even open the possibility that the Phoenicians knew about the spherical model. However, nothing certain about their knowledge of geography and navigation has survived."
Even before Christ, they used to just hold globes. It's the same image as that "evil megacorporation controlling the world" hand-holding-Earth image we've all seen before.
My point is that they seem to have known continuously since ancient times that the Earth was a sphere. They were using globus crucigers the whole time. Even in the Dark Ages, the Byzantine Emperor had coins made with his image holding such a globe, around 700AD.
It seems more like they'd know the Earth was round but really have no reason to care or spend any time thinking about it, the same way we don't spend time talking about the microwave background radiation from the big bang or the structure of our local galactic supercluster. These people didn't even have a standard unit to measure bags of grain from one village to the next. Assuming they had any grain to measure at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globus_cruciger
(Incidentally the ritual orb which Elsa must take in Frozen is a politically correct de-Christianized version of this).
Don't forget that the literacy rate for pre-modern societies was 10% and probably much lower on average. There were some extreme exceptions, I think the Hebrews had much higher rates, but as a whole, the world's population couldn't even write their own name.
As for illiteracy - it's not always necessary to be literate in order to know something. In our modern world there's a great many things 'everybody' knows, without necessarily ever having read about it. True things as well as false things, obviously.
But then there's the group of consumers of course, which is worrying.
I went to Egypt a couple of weeks ago. Around half-moon, my wife noted that the moon was looking strangely to her eyes. I realized that being more south, the terminator on the moon has a much shallower angle than more up in the north where I live. This indicates that the angle of observation has changed and hints also to a spherical earth.