Greek evidence for the Earth's shape and spin

A round Earth
Pythagoras' pupils, if not the great man himself, knew that the Earth is round. Traveller's tales of
ships disappearing over the horizon and the Pole Star shifting to a higher position in the sky as one
journeyed north suggested a curved Earth.

Aristotle (about 340 BC), two centuries later, supported the idea of
a spherical Earth, Moon and planets because:

 the sphere is a perfect solid and the heavens are a region of

perfection
 the Earth's component pieces, falling naturally towards the
centre, would press into a round form
 in an eclipse of the Moon, the Earth's shadow is always circular:
a flat disc would cast an oval shadow
 even in short travels northwards the Pole Star is higher in the
sky.
This mixture of dogmatic reasons and experimental common
sense was typical of him and he did much to set science on its
feet.

"Save the Appearances"

When Plato speaks of "saving the appearances" he means to understand our perceptions of reality by
somehow transforming it into what we know to be true without violating any known principles. What
we know to be true has been discovered by the Socratic method. So the job of the philosopher is to save
the appearances by logically connecting reality with truth.

This is easy for the case of the rabbit shadow because we have to know how its done before we can do
it. Unlike shadow figures, as far as the physical universe is concerned, we are seeing the shadow first
and trying to figure out what it really is a shadow of. Keep in mind, in the case of the rabbit shadow,
there might be many different objects which could cast a shadow which looks like a rabbit.

It does seem like magic, doesn't it. A good magic trick is an illusion which is impossible to figure out but
reasonably simple to perform. The reality is what we observe to happen, the truth is the way the trick is
performed