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