Pre-Newtonian Ideas of the Nature of Light

The question of the nature of light is not new, but goes back to antiquity. Today most general physics texts, if they make any attempt to deal with the historical aspect of the question, devote at most a few sentences to the classical Newtonian-Huygens controversy regarding the corpuscular versus the wave nature of light. A few texts add a statement to the effect that some of the ancients considered light to be something emitted by the eye, and drop the matter there. Here we shall fill in more details about these ideas.