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These are the ancient testimonies about Ecphantus of Syracuse, a Pythagorean philosopher of uncertain date, probably of the fourth century BC. No writing of his survives and little is known of his life; the evidence consists of brief reports in Hippolytus' Refutation of All Heresies and in the doxography of Aetius. They credit him with doubts about the possibility of true knowledge, a theory of indivisible bodies moved by a divine power he called mind and soul, and the view that the earth turns about its own centre.
Ecphantus is remembered chiefly for two ideas. He is said to have been the first to treat the Pythagorean units as bodies, bringing Pythagorean number theory close to atomism, and he is one of the earliest thinkers reported to have made the earth rotate on its axis, a view also credited to Heraclides of Pontus. These short notices are nearly all the evidence we have for him.
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