It’s even wilder than that: Prevailing understanding of optics was that light emanated from one’s eye to the object being seen.
You wanna blow your mind? Try reading of Nicolas Cardinal di Cusa, whose notions he tried to assert as doctrinal. Galileo made a straw man out of Aristotelian physics and the Pope took the bait; the reality was Galileo set astronomy back about 4 centuries; he was more correct than the straw man he created, but he falsely presumed the universe was small, spherical and helio-centric. Di Cusa had it correct that it was staggeringly immense, diffuse, and centered on wherever the observer is.
Galileo’s problem was that he was convinced by Copernicus that the planets revolved around the sun, but trapped by over-simplification, he simply ignored the absence of parallax view.
My instincts told me this wasn’t ancient. Should have listened to my instincts.
How do these myths get started? Who could have though someone could have written that 1800 years ago?