1. Plato.
That the cosmos itself goes through a series
of changes is clearly
stated by Plato in the Statesman
(269D). During one
period, he says, God accompanies
the course of the world but
“when the periods have
run the measure of time allotted to it by
him, he leaves
it, and automatically it moves in the opposite
direction,
for it is a living creature endowed with thought by
him who
constituted it in the beginning.” As in the
Timaeus, God organized the world; He did not create
it. Its history has two periods, one in which God is
its guide and one in
which it changes its course and
moves under its own power. The reason for
the reversal
is its corporeal nature. Only the incorporeal has the
power of remaining unchanged. Hence when the world
is left to itself, it
can only reverse its direction and
this happens “through myriads
of times.” The change
of direction entails a “very
great destruction of all
animals,” and only a few humans are
left alive. After
this, history is just the reverse of what we are used
to.
The living grow younger and finally disappear and a
new race is
born of the earth. All this is related by
Plato in the form of a myth, but
it was a myth more
or less harmonious with Greek folklore, and the
birth
of the postdiluvian race from stones. The occurrence
of
catastrophes in the past which annihilated almost
all life was not an
uncommon belief. One finds a similar
story in Ovid's account of the Deluge in his
Metamor-
phoses
(Book I).
Plato's account of such catastrophes is given in
Timaeus (22C) where he tells the story of Solon's
meeting with an Egyptian priest who says: “There have
been and
will be many and diverse destructions of men.
The greatest by fire and
water, and the lesser by thou-
sands of other
means.” When a flood occurs, only those
who live on mountain
tops are saved, but those who
live in cities are borne into the sea by the
rushing
waters. Happily Egypt is preserved for it has no high
mountains from which torrents can descend; its waters
well up from below.
But in other parts of the world
the celestial waters pour down and drown
all but the
“illiterate and uncultured,” who
naturally have no
memory of what has transpired in ancient times. That
is why the Greeks speak of one flood, whereas there
have been several. A
similar account of cataclysms is
given in Critias
(111B) and in The Laws (677). The
latter version
also includes the story of man's progress
after the Deluge. The main
difference between this
version and that given in the Statesman is that the race
whose history begins the new period is
not earth-born
but descends from those few shepherds who lived on
the
hills.
The details of these stories are fanciful but it is likely
that the
principal fact of multiple cataclysms was taken
seriously by Plato. For he
had no conception of the
“infinite perfectibility of
mankind,” such as was enter-
tained by Condorcet and others in the eighteenth cen-
tury. He knew that any change this side of Heaven
must come to an end. But since there was no logically
deducible end for
human affairs, and since they could
not continue unchanged forever, the
best way to ex-
plain their cessation was by a
conflagration, a deluge,
or a plague. Such catastrophes could in turn be
ex-
plained by a myth and that myth we
have seen in our
previous reference to the Statesman. Put in its barest
terms, Plato's view is that all history
is advance and
retrogression. These occur in cycles. But only the most
prominent features of them are repeated, not the de-
tails; and, if we are to believe Solon's Egyptian priest,
the
calamity varies in its severity, Egypt being specially
favored. It is clear
that none of this anticipates the
notion of the Great Year.
