The Origins of the Earth

Flat-earth cosmologies were held by almost all Greek philosophers in the 6th and 5th centuries BC. Parmenides first mentioned a spherical earth in his work Decayla or on the heavens. By 300s BC, Plato accepted it as something commonly understood. Epicurean flat-earthers persisted well into the Roman era but they were a tiny minority. The acceptance of the earth as a sphere was well established long before Christianity rose. And that's how things remained: Christians inherited the conception of the world as round - and overwhelmingly accepted it. Many Greek works were lost to early medieval scholars in the west,. But a great deal of ancient learning survived in Latin summaries