 As indicated in section 1 above, there is considerable controversy as to whether and to what extent Alcmaeon was a typical Presocratic cosmologist. Certainly the evidence for his cosmology is meager. There are three references to his astronomical theory (DK, A4). He is reported to have recognized that the planets have a motion from west to east opposite to the motion of the fixed stars. Some doubt that such knowledge was available at the beginning of the fifth century (Dicks 1970, 75). Others suggest that Anaximenes, in the second half of the sixth century, had already distinguished between the fixed stars, which are nailed to the ice-like vault of the sky, and planets which float on the air like leaves (DK13A7; Burkert 1972, 311). Alcmaeon’s belief that the sun is flat is another possible connection to Anaximenes, who said that the sun was flat like a leaf (DK13A15). Finally, another similarity to Ionian astronomy is found in Alcmaeon’s agreement with Heraclitus that lunar eclipses were to be explained by the turning of a bowl-shaped moon. One might have expected, however, that the moon would be flat like the sun (West 1971, 175).