So I'm reading Nicomachean Ethics and there is a wonderful passage where Aristotle essentially says that stones fall because it's their essence, using this as a presupposition to prove that habit cannot overrule nature. Was this truly the depth of the ancients' understanding of gravity, or were there any slightly more advanced theories developed prior to Newtonian physics?
Follow-Up question: I know that there were no major advances concerning gravity before Hooke/Newton (Copernicus said that all planets have the same form of gravity that earth has in the Aristotelian sense, Galilei observed acceleration, which stood in contrast to Aristotelian theory, but as far as I know neither observation lead to the development of a new theory), so the only theory that seems to be substantially different is the vortex theory developed (among others) by Descartes. But, unfortunately, I never really understood it. Could someone explain it to me? Especially how it relates to the Aristotelian paradigm?