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