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