to take place in the Great Year. The period of 36,000 years was Babylonian, and 18,000 years is just half that period, a fact which may be connected with Herakleitos's way of dividing all cycles into an "upward and downward path." The Stoics, or some of them, held that the Great Year was the period between one world-conflagration and the next. They were careful, however, to make it a good deal longer than Herakleitos did, and, in any case, we are not entitled without more ado to credit him with the theory of a general conflagration.[1] We must try first to interpret the Great Year on the analogy of the shorter periods discussed already.
Now we have seen that a generation is the shortest time in which a man can become a grandfather, it is the period of the upward or downward path of the soul, and the most natural interpretation of the longer period would surely be that it represents the time taken by a "measure" of the fire in the world to travel on the downward path to earth or return to fire once more by the upward path. Plato implies that such a parallelism between the periods of man and the world was recognised,[2] and this receives a curious confirmation from a passage in Aristotle, which is usually supposed to refer to the doctrine of a periodic conflagration. He is discussing the question whether the "heavens," that is to say, what he calls the "first heaven," is eternal or not, and naturally enough, from his own point of view, he identifies this with the Fire of Herakleitos. He quotes him along with Empedokles as holding that the "heavens" are alternately as they are now and in some other state, one of passing away; and he goes on to point out that this is not
- ↑ For the Stoic doctrine, cf. Nemesios, De nat. hom. 38 (R.P. 503). Adam (Republic, vol. ii. p. 303) allowed that no destruction of the world or conflagration marked the end of Plato's year, but he declined to draw what seems to me the natural inference that the connexion between the two things belongs to a later age, and should not, therefore, be ascribed to Herakleitos in the absence of any evidence that he did so connect them.
- ↑ This is certainly the general sense of the parallelism between the periods of the ἀνθρώπειον and the θεῖον γεννητον, however we may understand the details. See Adam, Republic, vol. ii. pp. 288 sqq.
