Book excerpt: Of all the giants on whose shoulders we stand, Aristarchos of Samos, the ancient Greek all-rounder, has proved to be especially tall: no one else (not even Einstein, to mention an iconic figure) has ever discovered anything (of like importance) that took so long to dawn on the rest of humanity. His achievement was extraordinary: with nothing more than the naked eye and the mind of a genius, he got to know the Sun's distance better than anyone else before, and he put the Earth in motion around the Sun for the first time in human awareness. The present book examines what history has spared of him and invites the reader to relive astronomy's finest hour.