The Idea Of Progress | Page 7

possible.
[Footnote: Politics, ii. 5.] This prejudice against change excluded the
apprehension of civilisation as a progressive movement. It did not
occur to Plato or any one else that a perfect order might be attainable
by a long series of changes and adaptations. Such an order, being an
embodiment of reason, could be created only by a deliberate and
immediate act of a planning mind. It might be devised by the wisdom
of a philosopher or revealed by the Deity. Hence the salvation of a
community must lie in preserving intact, so far as possible, the
institutions imposed by the enlightened lawgiver, since change meant
corruption and disaster. These a priori principles account for the
admiration of the Spartan state entertained by many Greek philosophers,
because it was supposed to have preserved unchanged for an unusually
long period a system established by an inspired legislator.
2.
Thus time was regarded as the enemy of humanity. Horace's verse,
Damnosa quid non imminuit dies?
"time depreciates the value of the world," expresses the pessimistic
axiom accepted in most systems of ancient thought.
The theory of world-cycles was so widely current that it may almost be
described as the orthodox theory of cosmic time among the Greeks, and
it passed from them to the Romans.
[Footnote: Plato's world-cycle. I have omitted details not essential; e.g.
that in the first period men were born from the earth and only in the
second propagated themselves. The period of 36,000 years, known as
the Great Platonic Year, was probably a Babylonian astronomical
period, and was in any case based on the Babylonian sexagesimal
system and connected with the solar year conceived as consisting of
360 days. Heraclitus seems to have accepted it as the duration of the
world between his periodic universal conflagrations. Plato derived the
number from predecessors, but based it on operations with the numbers
3, 4, 5, the length of the sides of the Pythagorean right-angled triangle.

The Great Year of the Pythagorean Philolaus seems to have been
different, and that of the Stoics was much longer (6,570,000 years).
I may refer here to Tacitus, Dialogus c. 16, as an appreciation of
historical perspective unusual in ancient writers: "The four hundred
years which separate us from the ancients are almost a vanishing
quantity if you compare them with the duration of the ages." See the
whole passage, where the Magnus Annus of 12,954 years is referred
to.]
According to some of the Pythagoreans [Footnote: See Simplicius,
Phys. 732, 26.] each cycle repeated to the minutest particular the course
and events of the preceding. If the universe dissolves into the original
chaos, there appeared to them to be no reason why the second chaos
should produce a world differing in the least respect from its
predecessor. The nth cycle would be indeed numerically distinct from
the first, but otherwise would be identical with it, and no man could
possibly discover the number of the cycle in which he was living. As
no end seems to have been assigned to the whole process, the course of
the world's history would contain an endless number of Trojan Wars,
for instance; an endless number of Platos would write an endless
number of Republics. Virgil uses this idea in his Fourth Eclogue, where
he meditates a return of the Golden Age:
Alter erit tum Tiphys, et altera quae uehat Argo Delectos heroas; erunt
etiam altera bella, Atque iterum ad Troiam magnus mittetur Achilles.
The periodic theory might be held in forms in which this uncanny
doctrine of absolute identity was avoided; but at the best it meant an
endless monotonous iteration, which was singularly unlikely to
stimulate speculative interest in the future. It must be remembered that
no thinker had any means of knowing how near to the end of his cycle
the present hour might be. The most influential school of the later
Greek age, the Stoics, adopted the theory of cycles, and the natural
psychological effect of the theory is vividly reflected in Marcus
Aurelius, who frequently dwells on it in his Meditations. "The rational
soul," he says, "wanders round the whole world and through the
encompassing void, and gazes into infinite time, and considers the
periodic destructions and rebirths of the universe, and reflects that our
posterity will see nothing new, and that our ancestors saw nothing
greater than we have seen. A man of forty years, possessing the most

moderate intelligence, may be said to have seen all that is past and all
that is to come; so uniform is the world." [Footnote: xi. I. The cyclical
theory was curiously revived in the nineteenth; century by Nietzsche,
and it is interesting to note his avowal that it took him a long time to
overcome the feeling of pessimism which the doctrine inspired.]
3.
And yet one