The heliocentric system, thus regarding the sun as the central orb, degraded the earth to a very subordinate rank, making her only one of a company of six revolving bodies.
But this is not the only contribution conferred on astronomy by Aristarchus, for, considering that the movement of the earth does not sensibly affect the apparent position of the stars, he inferred that they are incomparably more distant from us than the sun.

He, therefore, of all the ancients, as Laplace remarks, had the most correct ideas of the grandeur of the universe.

He saw that the earth is of absolutely insignificant size, when compared with the stellar distances.

He saw, too, that there is nothing above us but space and stars.
But the views of Aristarchus, as respects the emplacement of the planetary bodies, were not accepted by antiquity; the system proposed by Ptolemy, and incorporated in his "Syntaxis," was universally preferred.
The physical philosophy of those times was very imperfect--one of Ptolemy's objections to the Pythagorean system being that, if the earth were in motion, it would leave the air and other light bodies behind it.
He therefore placed the earth in the central position, and in succession revolved round her the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn; beyond the orbit of Saturn came the firmament of the fixed stars.

As to the solid crystalline spheres, one moving from east to west, the other from north to south, these were a fancy of Eudoxus, to which Ptolemy does not allude.
The Ptolemaic system is, therefore, essentially a geocentric system.