North vs. South: Alternative Models for the Diurnal Solar Movement in Early Greece

The paper discusses the testimonies for the diurnal solar movement in various early Greek texts, focusing especially on its nocturnal segment. Alongside the instantiations of myths containing references to the daily course of the sun in poetic and mythographical texts, the pertinent opinions of selected natural philosophers are also studied. Several speculative models were constructed by the early Greeks in order to account for this natural phenomenon. Two of the most widespread models involve the northerly or southerly horizontal course of the sun(-god) after setting, with the non-personalistic accounts preferring the former and the personalistic accounts favouring the latter. The southerly course during night as a rule involved the sun-god travelling in a boat over the circumambient Ocean. Another model utilized the concept of cosmic nadir, located deep in Tartarus at the underside of the earth, as a key feature in the phenomenon of the daylight/night exchange. Sometimes these models interacted, but more often were used separately by different authors. In the wake of the development of spherical geometry they were supplanted by the model derived from this scientific discipline, although their resonances can be observed in the Antiochene exegetical school of late antiquity.