"Of the two mathematicians Aristarchus of Samos and Seleucus of Babylon, whose systems came most nearly to his own, he Copernicus] mentions only the first, making no reference to the second. It has often been asserted that he was not acquainted with the views of Aristarchus of Samos regarding the central sun and the condition of the earth as a planet, because the Arenarius, and all the other works of Archimedes, appeared only one year after his death, and a whole century after the invention of the art of printing; but it is forgotten that Copernicus, in his dedication to Pope Paul III., quotes a long passage on Philolaüs, Ecphantus, and Heraclides of Pontus, from Plutarch's work on The Opinions of Philosophers (III., 13), and therefore that he might have read in the same work (II., 24) that Aristarchus of Samos regards the sun as one of the fixed stars."
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Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe (1850) Vol. 2
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Aristarchus of Samos
Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310 – c. 230 BC) was an ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician who devised the first known model envisioning the Earth in motion, orbiting around the Sun, or "central fire," at the center of the universe. He was influenced by Philolaus, and argued, like Anaxagoras before him, that the stars were entities similar to the sun. His astronomical ideas were in large rejected in favor the prevailing geocentric models of Aristotle and Ptolemy, until De revolutionibus orbium
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